HMAS Toowoomba
AFP via Getty Images
In the latest of a string of dangerous and almost warlike provocations, a People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) destroyer closed on a disabled Australian frigate and used active sonar to harass divers conducting underwater repairs. The provocation occurred in international waters.
Australian sailors were injured in the incident, which caught Anthony Albanese, Australia’s pro-China Prime Minster, right in the midst of a high-profile diplomatic push for rapprochement with China. Rather than deal directly with the crisis, the Australian government buried the news, leaving Albanese to emerge from his otherwise fruitful international junket looking dangerously weak and out of touch.
An Australian government statement, describing the November 14 attack, strongly suggests the incident was no accident. It is common knowledge that, for divers, active military-grade sonars are extremely dangerous, capable of inducing hearing loss, internal bleeding, and death.
The harassed Australian ship, HMAS Toowoomba (FFH 156), is an Anzac-class frigate. At the time, it was “stopped to conduct diving operations in order to clear fishing nets that had become entangled around its propellers.” The frigate, operating in international waters in the Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone, “communicated its intention to conduct diving operations” via normal maritime channels and employed internationally recognized signals.
A nearby PLA-N Type 956EM destroyer, the Ningbo (DDG-139), then closed on HMAS Toowoomba. The Chinese vessel acknowledged the frigate’s warnings but continued to approach. According to the Australian government, “Soon after, it was detected operating its hull-mounted sonar in a manner that posed a risk to the safety of the Australian divers.” The Australian divers left the water and were subsequently treated for ear injuries, presumably from the sonar-driven bursts of underwater sound.
HMAS Toowoomba was, at the time, “enroute to commence a scheduled port visit” and had been working to enforce UN sanctions on North Korea. In early November, the frigate had participated in a series of multinational exercises off South Korea’s southeast coast, working to improve cooperative boarding, anti-submarine and anti-air missions. There has been no public indication that the Australian ship had done anything to provoke or otherwise merit harassment from Chinese military forces.
Chinese Provocation May Threaten Australia/China Détente
The Australian government took care to reduce news coverage of the incident. The Friday night statement (Saturday morning Australia time) suggests this latest maritime incident is serious enough that it may well threaten Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s China-friendly government, derailing China’s year-long effort to repair stormy relations with Australia.
Australian critics were swift to note the Albanese government failed to promptly respond, suggesting the Labor Government put economic and diplomatic interests over the fate of Australian sailors.
The optics certainly aren’t great.
A day after the incident occurred, Australian officials were busy telling the press they were confident that a 2020 trade war, sparked after Australia called for an international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, was winding down, and that China would lift all remaining trade blocks by 2024.
The Australian Prime Minister didn’t let the incident derail—or even influence—pro-China diplomacy. A day before news of China’s maritime provocation broke, the Australian Prime Minister compounded his potential exposure to an enraged Australian public, hailing improving relations with China and announcing he had invited China’s Premier, Li Qiang, to visit.
Australia’s apparent forbearance—if not appeasement—in the face of such an overt and dangerous provocation is rather stunning. On November 17, days after the unprecedented provocation, the Australian Prime Minister was enjoying an amicable visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Pacific Rim summit in San Francisco, telling the press he had an opportunity to thank President Xi “for the welcome and the discussions that we had in my visit to China recently.” Albanese continued, saying “that the signal that the impediments to trade between our two nations were reducing or being removed, was received positively in Australia.”
In the face of press queries, Australian government officials refuse to say if Albanese even mentioned the provocation during his discussions with the Chinese President.
Gird For Perilous Times In The Pacific:
This incident is the latest in a string of hostile and dangerous Chinese confrontations involving American, Canadian and other forces operating throughout Asia. China is sparking far too many of these near-warlike incidents dismiss the latest confrontations as just a symptom of poor Chinese command-and-control capabilities. China’s actions are extremely dangerous, and a failure to respond will only provoke more—and potentially more serious—attacks.
There are simply too many incidents to dismiss them as the consequence of over-eager competition. Sonar-pinging divers is a particularly egregious violation of the unwritten respect for mariners in peril at sea. But it is part of a larger pattern. In the past month, China has ramped up the pressure, ramming vessels, harassing bombers and helicopters, and, in this latest incident, it has injured Australian sailors. And, through it all, China’s forces have acted with relative impunity. Rather than respond with force, affected countries are taking ever-kinder and ever-more-gentler approaches—and, in Australia’s case, even meeting with China’s President and angling for better trade terms.
If a shift in Chinese maritime behavior doesn’t happen soon, Australia’s friendly path towards some sort of strange détente with Beijing will prove an unsustainable mistake. Failing to respond in the face of continued Chinese harassment seems only to earn the Pacific’s ever-optimistic democratic stakeholders nothing but more trouble—and an endless string of dangerous—and increasingly warlike—provocations.
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