Australia’s icy relationship with Beijing is not black and white, but Hartcher’s Red Zone paints China as the bad guy, with no nuance.
Peter Hartcher dedicates his new book, Red Zone, “to Australia, a life raft of liberty in a rising tide of tyranny”.
Dedications tend to be saccharine and indulgent. But Hartcher’s teases at a broader issue that plagues an otherwise excellent, often riveting tale of the Chinese Communist Party’s mendacity in a volatile world.
A wise foreign policy head once told me that international relations is fundamentally amoral. Red Zone is eager to depict the broken relationship between Canberra and Beijing as a morality play, a battle of freedom against repression, an approach that obliterates nuance and shades of grey.
Keep reading as Kishor Napier-Raman goes deep into Peter Hartcher’s new book…
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