Climate reality

Physicist who became a climate truth teller


HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR


Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis”, in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth. Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department.

Koonin argues not against climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the US National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing”. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence”.

In 2017 the US government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records”. On closer inspection, that’s because there has been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Then there was 2018’s US Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revolt continues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” Koonin says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as — all right, I’ll use the word — propaganda.”

Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist. He taught at the California Institute of Technology for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions. In 2004 he joined BP as chief scientist. Using $US500m of BP’s money, Koonin created the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, which is still going strong. He found his interest in climate science growing, “first of all because it’s wonderful science. It’s the most multidisciplinary thing I know. It goes from the isotopic composition of microfossils in the sea floor all the way through to the regulation of power plants.”

From deeply examining the world’s energy system, he also became convinced the real climate crisis was a crisis of political and scientific candour. He went to his boss and said, “John, the world isn’t going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference.”

His thoughts seem to be governed by an all-embracing realism. Hence his book coming out next month, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science. His rigorous parsing of the evidence will have you questioning the political class’s compulsion to manufacture certainty where certainty doesn’t exist. You will come to doubt the usefulness of century-long forecasts claiming to know how 1 per cent shifts in variables will affect a global climate that we don’t understand with anything resembling 1 per cent precision.

His book lands at a crucial moment. In its first new assessment of climate science in eight years, the UN climate panel will rule anew next year on a conundrum that has not advanced in 40 years: how much warming should we expect from a slightly enhanced greenhouse effect?

The panel is expected to consult 40-plus climate computer simulations — testament to its inability to pick out a single trusted one. Worse, the models have been diverging, not coming together as you might hope. Without tweaking, they don’t even agree on current simulated global average surface temperature — varying by 3C, three times the observed change during the past century. (If you wonder why the IPCC expresses itself in terms of a temperature “anomaly” above a baseline, it’s because the models produce different baselines.)

Says Koonin: “There are situations where models do a wonderful job. Nuclear weapons, when we model them because we don’t test them any more. And when Boeing builds an aeroplane, they will model the heck out of it before they bend any metal.

“But these are much more controlled, engineered situations,” he adds, “whereas the climate is a natural phenomenon. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. And it’s hard to observe.

“You need long, precise observations to understand its natural variability and how it responds to external influences.”

Yet these models supply most of our insight into how the weather might change when emissions raise the atmosphere’s CO2 component from 0.028 per cent in preindustrial times to 0.056 per cent later in this century.

“I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” Koonin says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to”.

Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”

All this you can hear from climate modellers themselves, and from scientists nearer the “consensus” than Koonin is. Yet the caveats seem to fall away when plans to spend trillions of dollars are bruited. For the record, he agrees that the world has warmed by 1C since 1900 and will warm by another 1C this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus.

Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity. He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon-free baseload power.

He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. There are other advantages: local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.”

But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.”

The public now believes CO2 is something that can be turned up and down, but about 40 per cent of the CO2 emitted a century ago remains in the atmosphere. Any warming it causes emerges slowly, so any benefit of reducing emissions would be small and distant. Everything Koonin and others see in the science suggests a slow, modest effect, not a runaway warming. If they’re wrong, we don’t have tools to apply yet anyway. Decades from now, we might have carbon capture — removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere at a manageable cost.

Koonin wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands. Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities.

Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate tsar, recently admitted that Biden’s net-zero climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so). Koonin hopes “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.”

This is a view widely shared and little expressed. First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.

He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


‘(Climate models) are not to the standard you would trust your life to’
STEVEN KOONIN
THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

The slippery slope of public welfare

The Australian


To be righteous is one thing, to be right another altogether


HENRY ERGAS


The Liberal staffers who videoed themselves masturbating in Parliament House are morons, not monsters. And if we gasp at Andrew Laming’s conduct, it is less because it was manifestly unethical than because it shows, all too clearly, that while you are only young once, you can be immature forever.

That such things occur is hardly surprising. As Carlo Cipolla, a great historian, concluded in his marvellous book on The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, there is in every human subpopulation — be they philosophers or pole dancers, members of parliament or members of criminal gangs — a constant proportion who are idiots. And precisely because they are and act like idiots, the sole aspect of their behaviour that is utterly predictable is that it will astonish those who are not.

But those obvious facts didn’t stop the leaks from provoking howls of outrage, as if they proved that the Morrison government had plunged from the thunderbolts of Sinai to the insensate debauchery of the Cities of the Plain. In an already overheated atmosphere, the opposition was able to raise the temperature to boiling point, further eroding the government’s standing.

To some extent, the pressures, which have intensified steadily since Brittany Higgins’s allegations emerged, reflect factors that were apparent in the response to the bushfires of 18 months ago.

Convinced a new age was about to dawn, large sections of the left, and its allies in the media, never accepted their election defeat, accumulating reserves of rancour that the COVID crisis suppressed but hardly diminished. As that crisis ebbed, the claims of pervasive misogyny allowed the rancour to explode in righteous anger.

But to be righteous is one thing, to be right another. In reality, far from deteriorating, the core indicators of gender equality have improved, in many cases spectacularly, under the Coalition.

For example, the gender pay gap soared during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years from 15 to nearly 19 per cent, as Labor’s splurge on pink batts and school halls compounded the mining boom’s boost to earnings in male-dominated occupations; but since the Coalition took office, the earnings differential between men and women has shrunk to an unprecedented low of 13.4 per cent.

And just as women’s relative earnings have risen towards those of their male counterparts, female labour force participation has reached record highs, aided by policy changes that make working more worthwhile.

None of that implies that the problems have disappeared. But the contrast between the progress and the protests underscores Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of nearly two centuries ago that revolutions are triggered not by dashed hopes but by mounting expectations.

Noting that the devastating famines of 1693-94 and 1709-10 had caused barely a murmur, Tocqueville argued that the measures the French monarchy adopted in 1730 to ensure relief was widely available meant that it came to be viewed as being responsible for food supplies, setting the scene for the uprisings that occurred in the wake of the much milder shortages of 1788-89.

In other words, the government’s expanding role, instead of assuaging expectations, boosted them, creating a vicious spiral in which outcomes could never keep up with what public opinion believed it had been promised.

Compounding the tensions, the economic and social progress that followed the monarchy’s successive reforms had instilled an entirely new sense of limitless possibility. The eternal “tomorrow” of utopian political visions suddenly seemed to move closer, fuelling the belief that — come the revolution — injustice, superstition and poverty could all be eradicated in the next glorious hour.

The Revolution was therefore the progeny of the ancien regime’s achievements rather than the symptom of its failings. But while the revolutionaries stormed to power under the banner of freedom, they delivered the exact opposite. That, said Tocqueville, was no accident.

Inevitably, those who want to drastically reshape social arrangements find themselves strengthening the apparatus of repression, as if “liberty, like a child, had to go through a stage of tears and weeping in order to reach maturity”.

And equally inevitably, so as to justify the greater coercion, they adopt a “grotesquely distorted account of reality” in which they portray themselves as “wholly good”, while attributing “demonic power to the adversary”.

Ignoring “the ineluctable imperfections of human existence”, they come to hold others to moral standards they could never live up to themselves, thereby preparing the ground for those excesses of rage and frenzy that, in Edmund Burke’s words, “pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years”.

To say that is not to suggest that the guillotine beckons, although there is a distinct whiff of burning in the air. It would, however, be a mistake to think the mechanisms Tocqueville identified have lost any of their relevance. On the contrary, today’s upheavals have all the hallmarks of those that preceded them: the reluctance to acknowledge how much has already been achieved; the relentless demonisation of real or imagined adversaries; the thirst for what Yeats grimly called “the blood-dimmed tide”.

And even if they are not as deadly, they are no less vitriolic, insisting, as did the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and the Maoists, that any alleged perpetrators (or their presumed accomplices in the government) must be in bad faith, with the only way of proving good faith being for the “enemies of the people” to concede what their assailants seek — that is, abdication or self-annihilation.

The changes that have occurred in our culture only aggravate those dynamics. As the traditional Australian virtues of stoicism, and a laconic, somewhat disabused, realism, have given way to the glorification of uninhibited emotions, the nation’s capacity to distinguish tantrums from traumas seems to have completely disappeared.

And with it has vanished the capacity to distinguish sanctimonious grandstanding from serious consideration of the difficult questions — including those related to sexual assault and to our political culture — that do need to be addressed.

Unfortunately, simply understanding the processes at work doesn’t make them much more tractable: merely to cry, as Dostoevsky famously did in The Possessed, that “the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses” does not quell the flames, any more than psychosis can be relieved purely by being diagnosed. And with no shortage of stupidity left to surface, the hysteria isn’t about to abate.

But the worst response would be to cave in. Rather, we remember our Kipling: keep your head when all others about you are losing theirs. And as the crowds swirl and the howls mount, make sure you hold it tight.

A Little Chinese History

Quadrant Magazine


All Under Heaven: China Reconstructs its History

30th March 2021


Daryl McCann

Frequent contributor



In October 2018, I wrote an article for the Australian titled “Kowtowing to China Will Only Lead Us to Hong Kong”. Since then, of course, not only has the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong been extinguished, along with the safeguards of an independent judiciary system, but Beijing has made its move on Australia. This has taken many forms, although the so-called shadow trade war which followed the Morrison government’s call for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 looms largest in our minds. None of this has prevented Kevin Rudd criticising Scott Morrison for being “hairy chested” in his attitude to Xi Jinping. If only the Coalition government got “the balance right”—or spoke to Beijing with “respect” as New Zealand’s Trade Minister Damien O’Connor advises—Australia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could return to an era of strategic partnership. Bill Hayton’s The Invention of China (2020) is a very good place to start in any serious response to the likes of Rudd and O’Connor.

While the organising principle of the Chines Communist Party (CCP) in the post-Mao era has remained Leninist, the ideology of the Party has undergone a dramatic transformation. The dogma that brutally bound the PRC together during the era of Mao (1949 to 1976) was egalitarian collectivism. One of the many cruel features of Maoism was the officially sanctioned outbreaks of millennialist psychosis, including the 1949 to 1953 Land Reform Movement (estimated between 2 and 3 million killed), the 1958 to 1962 Great Leap Forward (estimated 40 to 45 million) and the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution (estimated 20 million). Maoism, though obviously harrowingly homicidal, nevertheless possessed a centripetal force that required the people of the PRC to direct themselves inwards towards the centre of all things—the Great Helmsman. Afterwards, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist-Leninism might have been a welcome respite from Maoist madness, and yet the new market reforms could not be counted upon to bind the population together as one standardised body in fealty to the CCP. What, then, would be the ideological glue to hold the PRC together if not Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought?

The most valuable aspect of Hayton’s The Invention of China is that it provides us with insight into how the Party has, over the past forty years, progressively stitched together a new totalitarian ideology. We could call it imperialist-Leninism. This despotic worldview binds the people of the PRC together in a racialist form of nationalism that, once again, directs them towards the centre of all things—in this case, General Secretary Xi Jinping, elevated to the status of “Helmsman” by the CCP’s Central Committee as recently as last October.

The latter-day CCP ideologues have discarded some of their old Marxist standbys and borrowed heavily from the canards of reformers and revolutionaries living in the final decades of the Qing Great-State. These intellectual rebels devised racialist and Social Darwinist myths about a long, uninterrupted history of “Chinese culture” that has no connection to reality. The great conceptual innovation of the Party in the post-Mao era, according to Hayton, has been to build on these century-old fabrications to create a racialist nationalism that conveniently intertwines notions of “China”, “the people”, “the government”, “the nation-state” and “the Party”. Or as Xi Jinping put it in the closing speech of the 2018 National People’s Congress: “The Communist Party will always be the backbone of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.” This worldview has become so persuasive and pervasive in the PRC that slating the Party is now tantamount to betraying the Chinese people. Joseph Goebbels, if he were still amongst us, would be impressed. In the most pointed passage in The Invention of China, Hayton has this to say:

What should we call this new political ideology, one that features a single “core” leader, insistent demands for natural homogeneity, intolerance of difference, rule by party not by law, corporativist economic policies, a focus on discipline and an ideology based on tactical exceptionalism—all backed up by a massive surveillance state? China’s Communist Party has long talked of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Xi Jinping now seems more interested in building “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Hayton does not claim to have written a book of original scholarship, but The Invention of China is nevertheless a powerful work of synthesis, brilliantly drawing on the latest historiography of “New Qing History” and “Critical Han Studies”. Both these schools of thought, Hayton points out, are not “addressed with candour inside the People’s Republic itself” but are pursued, if they are pursued at all, at universities in North America, Australia, Europe and Japan. The Chinese State Council (China’s ostensible government) does not sanction these relatively new and contrarian ways of viewing the history of their country. That is hardly surprising given that the findings of New Qing History and Critical Han Studies undermine the CCP’s mantra that its claims to exceptionalism are underwritten by an unassailable patriotic spirit built on the superiority of 5000 years of unbroken Chinese civilisation.

So much we think we know about China, including its very name, was fabricated by reformers and revolutionaries during the latter stages of the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) or, as Hayton refers to it, the Qing Great-State. He calls it the Qing Great-State because the subjects of Qing emperors, like the subjects of the Ming emperors and every other dynastic ruler before them, had no concept of loyalty beyond “allegiance to the ruler”. It is a challenging idea to grasp for someone raised on the notion of a nation-state, but no less difficult to grasp than the idea of a nation-state for those identifying themselves in terms of loyalty to a dynastic ruler. Zhang Deyi, an emissary for the Qing Great-State in Europe and North America, wrote this in his diary in 1871:

After decades of East-West diplomatic and commercial interactions, [they] know very well that my country is called Da Qing Gua [Qing Great-State] or the Zhong Hua [Central Efflorescence] but insist on calling it “China”, Zhaina, Qina, Shiyin, Zhina, Qita, etc … Zhong Guo has not been called by such a name over four thousand years of history … I do not know on what basis Westerners call it by these names!

The reason why Westerners wanted to call it by those names, maintains Hayton, is because they understood a specified country in terms of “a piece of land” whereas Zhang Deyi made sense of his own country only when he “invoked its ruling dynasty”.

In other words, the Qing Great-State, like the Ming Great-State before it (1368 to 1644), was not a nation-state in the European sense. There was a fuzziness about territorial boundaries on the part of the Qing Great-State when it came to negotiating with rival empires. This was not a matter of being flexible or benevolent—quite the opposite, in fact. The rulers of the Qing Great-State believed they governed “all under heaven” (tianxia) and all who dwelled beyond their realm were more-or-less uncivilised. Thus, there was a reluctance to demarcate boundaries with the emissaries of the encroaching Russian empire for two reasons. First, the very act of state-to-state negotiations (as in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk) implicitly conferred on Russia a status inappropriate for “barbarians”. Second, being overly specific about boundaries had never been necessary because all of the Qing Great-State’s neighbours paid an annual tribute in order to secure important trading privileges and, of course, to avoid invasion by the armed forces of the regional behemoth. The number of tributary states, thirteen in 1796 and still extensive even in the latter stages of the Qing Great-State, is testament to its imperial ambitions in Central Asia. They were no less than Russia’s from the north and Britain’s from the south (that is, India). In summary, the Qing rulers, like the Russians and the British, also played the Great Game.

Hayton exposes the fraudulence of the CCP’s Hundred Years of Humiliation formulation in a number of other ways, the following anecdote included. Back in March 2014, when Chancellor Merkel was hosting President Xi in Berlin, the Germans decided that a Prussian reproduction of a copy of a French map presented to Qing Dynasty Kangxi Emperor in 1718 might be the ideal gift for the General Secretary of the CCP who had everything. They were not to know that the PRC delegation would be horrified by their map. Why? It omitted the states and territories that later added to the Ming-era empire, encompassing Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang and Taiwan. Beijing’s state-run media rescued the situation in their own totalitarian way by reporting Merkel’s gift-giving gesture while surreptitiously replacing the 1718 French drawing with an 1844 British version which incorporated Xinjiang and Tibet within the Qing empire’s frontiers. The Qing rulers might have been on the defensive over the last half-century of their rule, but at their height they were as avaricious as any other imperialist power of the time. The salient point here is that the imperialist-Leninists in Beijing continue to rule over what were previously five separate realms.

The Hundred Years of Humiliation concept began as a call to patriotism for a people or peoples who had never been patriotic. A person’s loyalty was for the existing dynastic ruler, not for a place on the map. Nevertheless, some will argue—as Xi Jinping’s regime does—that what differentiates China from the rest of the world and makes it superior is a 5000-year-old civilisation that originates with the mythical Yellow Emperor. Only this is a fantasy, counters Bill Hayton, in the chapter titled “The Invention of Chinese History”. Take the Yuan Dynasty (1279 to 1368) for instance. The accepted or polite view, especially when speaking with a CCP apologist, is that China’s superior 5000-year-old civilisation survived Pax Mongolica intact because the Mongol rulers were themselves utterly transformed by China’s superior (and uninterrupted) civilisation. Hayton disagrees: “The Mongols named their Chinese administration the ‘Yuan Dynasty’ in order to make it more culturally acceptable, but it was not a ‘Chinese’ state so much as an Inner Asian great-state.” The Mongols left their stamp on this East Asian region in a multitude of ways, including uniting the territory for the first time in four centuries. To put it bluntly, as Hayton does, “China”—as we broadly conceive it—is in no small measure a legacy of the Mongols.

Moreover, “China”—again as we broadly conceive it—is also a legacy of the Qing Great-State, one of the more rapacious empires in history. One of the reasons that Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, to name but three territories, are claimed by today’s imperialist-Leninists in Beijing is only because at an earlier time grasping Qing rulers pinched them. All three territories regained various degrees of independence only after the clout of the Qing Great-State waned. No rationalisation of European or Japanese imperialism is required to make the point that the territorial expansiveness of the PRC profits from the imperial ambitions of the Qing Great-State. Rather than allowing ourselves to be lectured by the likes of President Xi Jinping about the Hundred Years of Humiliation, justice would be better served if we spoke up about the Seventy Years of Humiliation for Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchurians and Uyghurs, along with the Seventy Years of Threats against Taiwan. The PRC is an imperialist state built upon the vestiges of an earlier imperialist state. Thus, when Mao Zedong ordered military forces into Tibet and Xinjiang in 1950 to enforce martial law it was less an act of liberation than occupation. All the brutality that has followed from that time, the ongoing oppression of the Tibetan people and the re-education camps in Xinjiang, has the tint of genocide.

The term “China”, Hayton contends, has no likely etymological connection to the Qin Dynasty (221 to 206 BC) and Qin Shi Huang (of the Terra Cotta Warriors). The country might as well have been dubbed Cathay or some other arbitrary name because, as Zhang Deyi explained, that was not how the people of the Qing Great-State or the Ming Great-State or the Song Great-State (960 to 1279) referred to themselves. Hayton suggests that the words zhong guo, as in Zhongguo, the term used by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong for China, refers to the particular culture of a given dynasty and not, as nationalistic historians in China would argue, “a continuous state across three, or even five, millennia”. Hayton maintains that a better translation of Zhongguo would be centre-of-the-world rather than middle kingdom “since it is really a description of a political hierarchy between ‘us’ on the inside and ‘them’ on the outside”. Here is the etymological origin of Xi Jinping’s imperialist-Leninist vision of a “shared future for mankind”.

This brings us to the subject of Great Han Chauvinism. Sino-nationalism, according to Hayton, began with a small group of influential reformers and revolutionaries in the latter stages of the Qing Great-State. Nationalism was posited as the answer to the indignities meted out to the Qing Great-State by European powers and Imperial Japan, from the Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860) to the Boxer Rebellion (1899 to 1901) and beyond. Unfortunately, the would-be reformers and revolutionaries found their political inspiration in the racialism and ethnic tribalism popular in various European nations and Japan in the late nineteenth century, many of them informed by the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. While it was true that a Manchu elite, the rulers of the Qing Great-State, went to great lengths to distinguish itself (as the qi) from the rest of the population (min), it was not as if the rest of the population were racially, or even linguistically, one people: “But by maintaining their separate and privileged status as qi, the Manchu elite created the conditions for a race-based revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.” China’s turn-of-the-century revolutionaries took the survival-of-the-fittest racialism of Spencer, with its discriminatory generalities about the white race, the yellow race and so on, and re-purposed it for their own chauvinistic awakening.

There was at least some attempt by the 1912 revolutionaries to acknowledge that the subjects of the Qing Great-State had not been one indivisible race. Though maintaining the myth about the homogeneity of the Han, at least the republic’s new flag, consisting of five stripes, red for the Han, yellow for Manchu, blue for the Mongols, white for the Hui Muslims and, lastly, black for Tibetans, recognised five ethnic groups/nations (minzu) in the mix. Sun Yat-sen, influenced by both turn-of-the-century European notions of race-based nationalism and America’s “melting pot”, opposed the five-striped flag but lacked the authority to disallow it. He envisaged the new republic melding the ethnicities of what had been the Qing Great-State into one people (Zhonghua Minzu). He died in 1925 but his one-state/one-people dream endured. Once Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang (literally Nation Party) achieved a semblance of countrywide power after capturing Beijing in 1928, the five-striped flag was replaced by Sun Yat-sen’s mythological Blue Sky, White Sun and Wholly Red Earth. The PRC, founded in 1949, accepted many of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek’s conceptual and etymological innovations, including the one about “China” being Zhonghua (People’s Republic of China = Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo).

Mao’s CCP opportunely accepted these fables of the late Qing Great-State reformers and revolutionaries: Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet were, and had always been, integral parts of Greater China. That said, the strictures of Marxist-Leninism meant that Mao’s regime designated “their” Mongolia as Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet as Tibet Autonomous Region and Xinjiang as Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, the quintessential hybrid Maoist/post-Maoist, accepted that Hong Kong be ascribed as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, as long as it was recognised as a part of the People’s Republic of China. Hayton notes that Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, an acolyte of Zhou Enlai and the kind of CCP kingpin one can almost respect if not endorse, believed that the peoples of the “autonomous” regions of the PRC would be better served if Beijing left them, as much as a one-party state can permit, to their own devices. The radical departure of Xi Jinping’s ultra-nationalist belief-system from his own father’s views is telling.

Much of Xi Jinping’s imperialist-Leninist ideology is based on a lie, starting with the legend of the Yellow Emperor. The PRC’s global “United Front” organisations are forever celebrating the Yellow Emperor. Western politicians, including our own, politely (and naively) participate in these ceremonies without understanding that the Yellow Emperor fantasy is a ruse by Beijing to justify its darkest inclinations. Thus, the CCP regime, as the vanguard of a superior and continuous civilisation that has its genesis in 2698 BC, reserves for itself a special exceptionalism on the global stage. The regime, as the standard-bearer of the indissoluble Chinese motherland, also affords itself the right to visit civilisational annihilation upon Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Manchurians and, if given the chance, the Taiwanese. But it goes even further than that. Not only the non-Han minorities suffer at the hands of Beijing’s cultural absolutism. Dissimilar elements of the so-called “Han Race”, as much an invention of late-Qing Great-State revolutionary intellectuals as “China” and the “Chinese language”, are also homogenised or regularised.

The absence of a “Chinese language”—and the consequent need to manufacture one—demon­strates as well as anything that there has never been a unitary “China”. Mandarin, or Putonghua, is nothing more than the Beijing-ese dialect spiffed up to be the official language of the PRC. According to the Chinese linguist Lü Shuxiang, there are 2000 forms of “Chinese” spoken throughout the PRC, some 400 of them mutually unintelligible. The Qing Great-State had no need for a national language, asserts Hayton, because “there was no Qing nation”. The subjects of a Qing ruler, as we have noted, were not loyal to a piece of land but a ruling dynasty, with the latter speaking Manchu and everyone else communicating in the local vernacular. It was the turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who determined that a northern dialect—rather than Esperanto or some other tongue—should serve as the unifying language of a newly minted nation.

Hayton’s chapter “The Invention of the Chinese Language” tells the darkly humorous story of Beijing trying to stymie the Shanghainese’s native tongue: while teaching children to speak the local language is permissible, “teaching them to read it as a written language remains forbidden”. All of this is part of a tyrannical quest to mould the fictitious “Han Race” into one nation and one people with one core leader, reinforced by an unbroken lineage going all the way back to the mythical Yellow Emperor.

The worldview of the CCP, in both its Maoist and post-Mao incarnations, appears to have adopted the worst features of European notions of sovereignty and the most problematic qualities of the Qing Great-State. The PRC’s “sovereignty fundamentalism”, as Hayton calls it, invariably results in Beijing denouncing any outside attempt to penetrate the opaqueness of its actions. We have witnessed this in the Politburo’s lingering fury at the Morrison government’s call, in April 2020, for an international inquiry into the genesis of COVID-19. It was more than a year after the outbreak before Beijing reluctantly allowed a small number of scientists associated with the World Health Organisation to visit Wuhan. It is unlikely that the investigative team will be able, at this late stage, to make a genuine assessment of the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in spawning the pandemic. Beijing has no wish to be open and transparent about what it did or did not do. The CCP regime is putting up the same screen of impenetrability that it did during the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962. Back then the outside world was given no opportunity to witness the death of 40 to 45 million people, all victims of Mao Zedong’s millennial madness, in one of the greatest cover-ups of the twentieth century. The PRC is a sovereign state. Foreigners have no business “meddling” in its internal affairs. It is the same story today with the “education camps” in Xinjiang or oppression in Tibet or the origins of COVID-19.

On the other hand, when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world and especially its neighbours, Beijing readily takes a maximalist position. In 1979, for instance, Deng Xiaoping ordered the People’s Liberation Army into Vietnam to “teach it a lesson”. As it happened, 25,000 Chinese soldiers soon died and, after Deng hastily declared victory, the remaining PLA forces fled back over the border. One of the reasons for the invasion, we assume, is that Beijing was annoyed with Hanoi for overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It was perfectly reasonable, of course, for Beijing to intervene in Cambodia by aiding and abetting Pol Pot, but quite another for Vietnam, which had once made tributary payments to the Qing Great-State, to do the same. The PRC, to put it another way, has retained the fuzzy boundaries of the Qing Great-State when dealing with others, and yet the CCP adopts a policy of sovereignty fundamentalism to conceal its darkest deeds from the prying eyes of outsiders. It might have a cyber army of 100,000 spying on the world, not to mention agents interfering in the domestic politics of Australia (and everywhere else).

We can see this combustive mix of Qing Great-State imperialism, European-inspired racialist nationalism and sovereignty fundamentalism at work in Hayton’s chapter “The Invention of a Maritime Claim”. The Qing Great-State never made any actual territorial claim to the South China Sea, but to whatever extent the Qing rulers had any conception of the South China Sea, it was “theirs”; just as Nepal, Tibet, Korea or any other territory under heaven was “theirs”. During the time of the Republic of China (1912 to 1949), a few Chinese cartographers began making claims to atolls and suchlike that did not exist, or did not exist where they claimed they existed, and now President Xi, backed by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, is claiming the entirety of the South China Sea as a sacred and integral part of a continuous and superior civilisation that has its origins in the time of the Yellow Emperor. Add Beijing’s sovereignty fundamentalism to these absurdly ambit claims and we end up with a new law that commands the navy to “take all necessary measures, including the use of weapons, when national sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction” are “illegally infringed upon by foreign organisations and individuals” in the South China Sea.

By the end of The Invention of China, Bill Hayton’s description of Xi Jinping’s ideology as “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics” has become disturbingly credible. Andrew Hastie’s warning of two years ago seems more prescient than ever: “The new next decade will test our democratic values, our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian history.” The Chinese embassy, at the time, deplored Hastie’s depiction of the PRC as an echo of Hitler’s Germany: “History has proven and will continue to prove that China’s peaceful development is an opportunity, not a threat to the world.” Last year’s Sino-Indian skirmish in the Himalayas, the crackdown in Hong Kong, the internment camps in Xinjiang, Beijing’s shadow trade war against Australia and now the threat to open fire on Filipino fishing boats in the South China Sea surely suggests otherwise. Hayton’s book brings us closer to understanding the volatile dynamism of the imperialist-Leninist ideology underpinning Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream”.

Daryl McCann contributed the article “Australia’s Refusal to Kowtow to China” in the January-February issue