Hacker News Reader

Comment by CountSessine | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting that even within the context of this agreement, there’s a question as to whether or not China will honour their obligations under the agreement with respect to their bilateral relationship with Australia.

I don’t think that this agreement means very much.

View on HN

This is the key part here.

China has been retaliating recently against Australia since they chose to stand up to them over COVID-19, HK, South China Sea etc.

And they've done this through sneaky but legal means e.g. suspending wine imports by accusing them of dumping, magically finding pests in a range of imports and labelling Australia as a dangerous place to live in order to discourage Chinese students.

So having a FTA in place doesn't necessarily mean much.

In fact China and Australia already had a bilateral FTA between them that came into force in 2015. Pieces of paper are meaningless to the CCP.

From the Chinese side, "standing up to them over COVID-19, HK and South China Sea" looks like "promoting baseless conspiracy theories about CoVID-19, meddling in China's domestic affairs and participating in American attempts to contain China."

Australia's foreign policy has a massive contradiction at its heart: China is Australia's most important trading partner, but Australia's closest military ally, the United States, is pursuing an aggressive strategy to suppress China's rise as a peer-level state. Australia has to figure out how to reconcile these two facts, but it can't have its cake and eat it too. It's not possible to go along with American anti-Chinese initiatives while at the same time expecting the economic gravy train of exports to China to continue.

In this context, the decision to call for an investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, heavily hinting at some sort of nefarious origin, was a completely unnecessary blunder. One wonders what the Australian government thought it would get out of that.

Canadian exports to China were also suspended due to allegations of "pests"

I think people have some misunderstanding of FTA.

FTA doesn't disallow anti-dumping and tariff punishment. Trump admin had slapped huge tariff on Canada/Mexico on automobile/steel/logs, for example, when the NAFTA is still in place.

The other country can choose to slap counter tariff if they see fit, but they can nothing about each other's choice.

That's the trouble. The supposed anti-dumping measures seem to have very little to do with any actual dumping and everything to do with Australian politicians daring to criticise China - but because China is a totalitarian dictatorship with no free press, it's impossible to prove it. So letting countries like China enter into FTAs effectively gives them more economic leverage to force democracies like Australia to fall in line, since the whole point is to increase the amount of trade and economic dependency between the countries.

> So letting countries like China enter into FTAs effectively gives them more economic leverage to force democracies like Australia to fall in line

Force? How? Can you give an example?

Not just with Australia, the question is whether China, or other members, will honour their obligations.

Speaking of China: China joined WTO since 2001, promised to open up its financial and banking sectors to foreign competitions as conditions for joining, still has not done enough.

I agree that this new agreement may not mean much.

What do you think free trade agreements are?

If you said they are a set of rules, regulations and specifications for commerce that make trade processes more uniform and less expensive, unencumbered by tariffs, you'd be right.

If you said they force Country A to buy goods from Country B, you'd be mistaken.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com