What impact might WikiLeaks have on our own business and contacts? Is it damaging the connections between Australia and China?

This website was set up by Australian Julian Assange in 2007. It made few waves until April this year, when it posted video footage allegedly showing US air crew launching an air strike in Baghdad on civilians, killing a dozen people including two Iraqis working for Reuter’s news agency.

Then the site struck gold. The publicity that spun out of the Baghdad footage, helped convince Bradley Manning, an American soldier who in December turned 23, to make available to WikiLeaks, the vast amounts of confidential material he had hoarded illegally while working at the State Department.

This is not top-secret, but in the next category down. In the light of the 9/11 tragedy, the new president Barack Obama demanded that intelligence and analysis be more broadly shared, so that professionals across the board in the foreign affairs and intelligence and security worlds might more readily spot connections, and link the dotted lines – which failed to happen in the past, when rival sections of such organisations held their information tightly to their chests.

Manning, and through him WikiLeaks, have been major beneficiaries of this broadening of access.

Most of the material published so far, has comprised cables sent by American diplomats back to head office following meetings with foreigners whose views or information are deemed significant – or simply assessments made by those diplomats, based on their own broad readings of the circumstances of the countries to which they have been posted – including data and analyses garnered from the local media.

Virtually everything published by WikiLeaks so far, has come from the US. There have been no leaks from the Australian or British governments, let alone from the Chinese or North Korean administrations.

And they present a picture of a world – one constructed by American diplomats – that is not surprising in itself to anyone who follows the media closely, but which is especially interesting because it reflects the assessments of some of the best and brightest of the world’s greatest power.

According to the WikiLeaks revelations – none of which have so far been seriously challenged, in terms of the genuine nature of the sources – the then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, over a 75 minute lunch in Washington in 2008, that he was a “brutal realist on China,” argued that the international community should “prepare to deploy force” against China “if everything goes wrong” with its integration as a responsible global stakeholder, called the Chinese leaders paranoid about Taiwan and Tibet, and revealed that both the Defence White Paper’s focus on naval capability and the Asia Pacific Community concept were devised principally to counter China’s rise.

Through this period and since he has become foreign minister after being replaced by Julia Gillard s prime minister in June, Rudd has continued to promote “the spirit of zhengyou,” of being a “true friend” of China able to speak candidly about successes and shortcomings alike.

It is not clear how far this sense of friendship is reciprocated among the Chinese leadership, however. He Baogang, professor of international relations at Deakin University in Victoria, says: “On a political level, Beijing’s leaders may equate zhengyou with opposition politics, and find it difficult to accept it; on a cultural level Beijing’s leaders are not clear whether zhengyou can truly become a political term that is useful internationally.”

Rudd has claimed the WikiLeaks have made no impact on him – “like water off a duck’s back.” But the Beijing authorities were from earlier days disposed to be guarded about their response to this unique Western

“Zhongguo tong” (China expert) leader, and the leaks will certainly not have encouraged them to relax that guard.

Leaks also showed that Rio Tinto told US representatives that it had informed China’s Public Security Bureau about incriminating evidence it discovered, about staff working in Shanghai. Later, the Shanghai based Australian executive Stern Hu and three other Rio staff working in China were jailed.

And other leaks included federal Treasurer Wayne Swan telling American diplomats that BHP Billiton had lobbied the government intensely to scupper last year’s looming $21 billion deal between Rio and Chinese state owned enterprise Chinalco, as well as then Labour leader and now ambassador in Washington Kim Beazley guaranteeing American officials that Australia would always fight alongside the US if it became embroiled in a war with China.

Whether or not they’re merely stating the obvious or what has been reported earlier, these leaks nevertheless appear to represent frank positions – which are at some variance from views expressed in public, whether by the diplomats conveying them or by the public figures they are citing.

It is too early to tell whether they will trigger a long- term change in the way people communicate at the diplomatic level, but in the short term the leaks will almost certainly lead to more guarded, cautious exchanges at the official level – which will thus be less potentially rewarding.

Beijing has for some time treated Rudd as a special case, and the WikiLeaks will reinforce that position. For all the undoubted excellent work done by officials on businesses’ behalf, the leaks act as a reminder to the private sector that it must remain ultimately responsible for finding its way through China’s official mazes, and that a company’s own reputation, integrity, and breadth of understanding of the Chinese system, remain crucial as political relationships fluctuate. ■

*Rowan Callick is the Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian