iscover
Beijing’s recent victory parade to commemorate the end of the Second World War is no cause for alarm according to a former Australian ambassador to Beijing. But is it a case of idealism trumping reality or something more sinister?
It is an indisputable reality that over the past four decades, the world has undergone a number of epochal and monumental shifts in the global balance of power and international relations.
Beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the misguided, naive belief in the “End of History” in 1990, the world saw the consolidation and rapid assertion of the Pax Americana and undisputed emergence of the “rules-based, liberal world order” led by the United States and empowered by its dominance of multilateral institutions and norms.
This would come to be challenged by the September 11, 2001 attacks which saw the “End of History” paradigm championed by Francis Fukuyama, give rise to the “Clash of Civilisations” paradigm of Samuel Huntington, which predicted the clashes of the 21st century would be dominated by ethno-religious conflicts, with both agreeing (at least in large part) that the era of “great power competition” had gone the way of the dodo.
While all of this was occurring in the limelight, the world’s other major powers, namely Russia and the People’s Republic of China, quietly bid their time. As America and its allies got increasingly bogged down in costly conflicts in the Middle East and central Asia, they quietly built their economic competitiveness, military capability and positions in global power dynamics.
Russia has, in large part, squandered a lot of its post-Cold War momentum, particularly in recent years following the disastrous invasion of Ukraine in early-2022, marking itself as a global pariah state. China, under successive leaders, has moved to subtly both ingratiate and subvert the multilateral institutions, all while embarking on the largest peacetime military build-up since the 1930s.
Periodically, the mask has slipped with flashpoints in the South China Sea, during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the Himalayas and the rise of grey zone warfare, debt-trap diplomacy, particularly in south-east Asia and the Pacific, all revealing the true intent, scale and extent of Beijing’s ambitions across the Indo-Pacific.
This has been further clarified in recent weeks following Beijing’s 2025 “Victory Day” parade, which served as a potent reminder of the rising superpower’s military, industrial and national prowess and its connectivity across the once formerly developing world and what is becoming termed as the “parallel” global order made up of member nations from multilateral organisations like the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Now that the initial shock has worn off for strategic commentators and analysts across the West, Australia included, some have called for cooler heads to prevail, particularly in Australia, with former Australian ambassador to Beijing Geoff Raby in a piece for The Australian Financial Review, titled China’s giant military parade didn’t just surprise the West, which called for nations across the Indo-Pacific to be more “open” to greater Chinese hegemony in the region.
(Don’t fear) the dragon
I must confess, upon reading Raby’s opinion piece, I immediately thought of Blue Oyster Cult’s classic (Don’t fear) The Reaper, in which the band tries to convince the listener not to fear death. In the case of Raby’s piece, I found it to be an attempt at apologia for Beijing and its efforts to rewrite the post-war order, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.
Some would argue that former Australian ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, has offered a measured but quietly challenging reflection on Beijing’s recent military parade and what it signals for Australia’s foreign policy. His analysis places less weight on the shock of China’s capabilities than on the subtle shifts in how both Chinese leaders and seasoned diplomats are framing power, pride and diplomacy in the region.
Central to Raby’s piece is the intervention of Fu Ying, a veteran diplomat who once represented China in Canberra and London. At the Financial Review Asia Summit, Fu admitted that even she had been caught off guard by the scale of China’s military progress.
She “had not realised how far China’s military capacity had advanced,” she said, before adding that she “really felt very proud for my country. I think such a … transparent display of strength is a strong signal to the world about the country’s determination and growing capability to prevent the return of the humiliation of the past.”
That remark is telling. As Raby observed, Fu is not part of the hard-edged “Wolf Warrior” camp but rather belongs to the “less abrasively nationalistic strand” of China’s foreign policy establishment. She draws on the Deng Xiaoping tradition of building capacity and biding time rather than picking unnecessary fights.
It was in this spirit that she sought to calm regional fears about China’s show of force, stressing that the country’s leaders are still focused primarily on domestic challenges: sluggish economic growth, youth unemployment, spiralling local government debt, decarbonisation and the delicate unwinding of the property bubble.
For Raby, this acknowledgement is significant. While the military parade was designed to impress international observers, “the domestic audience was an even more important one”. Such displays are not only about external signalling but also about consolidating the leader’s authority at home. Xi Jinping, who is simultaneously president, Communist Party general secretary, and chairman of the Central Military Commission, could take personal responsibility for the “dazzling display of China’s might”.
In doing so, he reinforced his control after weeks of speculation about his political position. The rumour-mongering about Xi’s supposed demise, Raby argued, was exposed as “vacuous” in the face of a leader who hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit one week and then oversaw a vast parade the next. Even the recent spate of sackings of senior generals – officially for corruption – does not suggest Xi’s grip is slipping.
From this foundation, Raby pivoted to the regional implications. “Arguably, China already enjoys regional hegemony,” he said, pointing to projected economic growth of around 5 per cent a year. The question is not whether China will dominate, but how. Unlike the European colonial powers or the more interventionist United States, Beijing may exercise influence with a lighter touch, using multilateral forums and the United Nations as vehicles to entrench its authority.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides a sobering lesson: if Moscow struggled across a land border, Beijing would be even less likely to risk a costly amphibious assault on Taiwan. The parade, then, was less about imminent aggression and more about consolidating China’s standing as a regional and global power.
This context, Raby stressed, leaves Australia facing a familiar but intensifying dilemma. “The message being sent to Australian policymakers is that they must learn to live with a stronger and more confident China and manage things in the best way they can to advance their interests.”
Yet complicating this is uncertainty in Washington. Reports that senior Pentagon officials are beginning to prioritise homeland defence and the western hemisphere over confronting China suggest that Australia may not be able to rely on the United States to the same extent.
Fu Ying herself made a pointed observation about the fragility of trust. “Some Australians gave the Chinese the feeling that they would shake hands with China on the table and kick China under the table,” she said. For Raby, this captured “the heart of Australia’s foreign policy dilemma”: the growing tension between commercial interests and security anxieties.
Nonetheless, he credited Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with having “skilfully corrected Australia’s China policy and put the relationship back on track”. By shelving megaphone diplomacy and focusing on discipline and consistency, the Albanese government has restored a sense of normalcy. But Raby argued that stabilisation is not enough.
“It is now imperative that Foreign Minister Penny Wong has the page of her talking points retyped by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to do away with the rhetoric of ‘stabilisation’.” Instead, Australia must recover its agency – taking the initiative with “ambitious, forward-looking” policies that advance shared interests.
Fu suggested health, medical science and artificial intelligence as areas for cooperation, but Raby pushed further. Energy transition, decarbonisation, regional security and new approaches to trade liberalisation all present opportunities for bilateral and regional collaboration. These initiatives, he noted, need not be exclusively bilateral. But engaging directly with “the major power of the region” would be an essential starting point.
There is, he reminded readers, historical precedent. Australia once had the confidence to lead regional initiatives: helping to create APEC, shaping the Cambodian peace settlement and establishing the Bali Process on people smuggling.
What is needed now is a return to that ambition. Rather than approaching the relationship with timidity or a defensive mindset, Australia should see the new security environment as “full of opportunity rather than risks”.
Raby’s conclusion was both pragmatic and optimistic. China’s rise is a reality; its display of power is not going away. But Australia retains agency – if it chooses to use it. The task for Canberra is to abandon narrow rhetoric, acknowledge the shift in power, and rediscover the confidence to set an agenda that balances its interests while engaging constructively with Beijing.
Final thoughts
Raby’s prescription that China’s rise is inevitable in many ways echoed the beliefs of the controversial former Australian foreign minister and noted sinophile, Bob Carr and others, including Paul Keating and Gareth Evans.
At the core of their beliefs is that Australia has merely traded one imperial capital for another, with Canberra too dependent on Washington and its foreign policy establishments which run the risk of leaving the nation at the whims of its strategic benefactor, which has, they believe an interest in containing and if necessary, confronting the rising power over issues that do not concern us.
Equally, it would appear that these learned and experienced foreign policy professionals continue to subscribe to the “golden arches” theory of foreign affairs in which no two nations with a McDonald’s will go to war with one, in much the same way as traditional economic game theory once predicted that Britain and Germany wouldn’t go to war with one another because they were each other’s largest trading partners.
The reality is that the truth lays somewhere in between, Australia has undoubtedly become immeasurably wealthy off the back of China’s economic transformation since the mid to late 1970s, to the point of utter economic dependence, leaving us dangerously exposed to the whims of a nation that has publicly declared its revolutionary intent.
That being said, Beijing has repeatedly demonstrated that if a nation does not surrender to the perspective of the larger nation or is perceived to have “embarrassed” it or its leaders in anyway, all measures are on the table in order to kow the “upstart” nation.
One needs to look no further than events in the South China Sea since the early 2010s, in the Himalayas and as was directed at Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Accordingly, Australia needs to be prepared and clear-eyed about the challenges it faces both at home and abroad. This means no longer taking the benevolence of the preceding 80 years for granted or assuming the protection of a “great power”.
Rather this means greater agency, responsibility and sovereignty in our policy making and our capacity to back it up with actions.
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch at
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
