Diplomatic relations between Australia and China have deteriorated to their lowest ebb in many decades and Zhao said that was entirely Australia’s fault.
Zhao,who enraged Morrison in November by tweeting a faked image of an Australian soldier killing an Afghan child,delivered a broadside as other nations in the region digested the huge strategic development.
Wang Yiwei,a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing,said the presence of the submarines in Australia should be a concern for south-east Asian countries as well and was “not good for regional stability”.
Morrison said he had called outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and India’s Narendra Modi about the enhanced security pact and was ringing Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Thursday.
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Most foreign ministries across ASEAN countries and in Japan and South Korea did not immediately react publicly to the establishment of AUKUS and Australia’s plans,but Lee said he hoped the alliance would “contribute constructively to the peace and stability of the region and complement the regional architecture”.
Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said only that Foreign Minister Marise Payne had called her Indonesian counterpart Retno Marsudi on Thursday morning “regarding the procurement of nuclear submarines”.
But Evan Laksmana,a political scientist with National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy,revealed there was consternation in Indonesia,Australia’s near neighbour and the largest country in south-east Asia.
“Publicly,officials are unlikely to come out strongly one way or the other. We know we cannot offer a serious alternative to the regional flux. We also know that regional countries are rightly developing non-ASEAN options,” he said.
But he said “more than a few” officials were privately concerned about whether AUKUS would compound regional tension,and about the nuclear trajectory of the developments.
It comes as the strategic competition between the US and China intensifies in the region,with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on a sweep through south-east Asia this week,a month afterUS Vice-President Kamala Harris’ visits to Singapore and Vietnam.
Wang made stops in Cambodia,Vietnam and Singapore,urging Hanoi not to “magnify conflicts through unilateral moves” and calling on it to resist “interference and incitement from regional outsiders”.
Lee welcomed him to Singapore’s presidential palace on Tuesday,saying the city-state “welcomes China’s continued contribution in our part of the world”.