Australia Australia is in a Cold War with China, experts warn

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Western nations are locked in a cold war with China and should brace for cyber and terror attacks, a leading commentator warned on Wednesday.

Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre, said Australia should be ready for increased tension between the West and China if Donald Trump wins next week's presidential election.

His grim prophecy comes after Australia-China relations rapidly deteriorated following Prime Minister Scott Morrison's call for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus, which was identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

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© Provided by Daily Mail Western nations are locked in a cold war with China, a leading commentator warned on Wednesday. Pictured: Chinese military police officers in Beijing on October 23

© Provided by Daily Mail Australia should be ready for increased tension between the West and China, said Bruce Wolpe. Pictured: Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017

Since April, China has slapped an 80 per cent tariff on Australian barley, suspended beef imports and told students and tourists not to travel Down Under in an apparent attempt to damage the Australian economy.

Tensions between China and the US, Australia's most important ally, have also increased as presidential candidates Trump and Joe Biden vow to take a tough stance against the communist superpower.

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China's ambition to retake Taiwan - possibly by force - could become a major flashpoint with the US.The temperature was raised further last on 13 October when China's President Xi Jinping visited a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corp base in southern Guangdong province and told the marines there to "prepare for war".

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, after World War II.

China is the largest trading partner for dozens of countries across the world, including major US allies like Australia , Japan and New Zealand. "During the Cold War we weren't dealing with an interdependent global economy but essentially two major blocs that were more or less self-dependent

The rivalry has been compared to the Cold War between the West and Russia from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The two sides bitterly opposed each other but avoided direct armed clashes.

Referencing British wartime leader Winston Churchill's depiction of a 'iron curtain' separating the West and Russia, Mr Wolpe, who used to work for ex-prime minister Julia Gillard, said a new cold war with China is largely born out online.

'We have a cold war now with China... there is a silicon curtain descending of the Asia-Pacific. We have two social media platforms, two world wide webs, and there are cyber and terror capabilities. And this is what we are facing,' he told the National Pres Club in Canberra on Wednesday.

'Australia is going to have to think long and hard about the consequences if these fears are realised, and they have to think long and hard about them anyway. That is the direction,' he added.

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Before the pandemic, there was no shortage of experts warning of emergent fault lines between the United States and China . That sense of a looming “When Chinese government officials criticize what they explicitly call a ‘ Cold War mentality’ in the U.S.,” wrote Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Axios, “they

In June Mr Morrison said Australia was under cyber-attack from a foreign state which government sources said was China. The attack had been targeting industry, schools, hospitals and government officials.

Mr Wolpe said tensions are likely to be worse if the US election is won by Trump, who has repeatedly blamed China for the coronavirus pandemic.

'Trump believes that it was deliberate regarding COVID-19 and that China destroyed my economy and almost my presidency.

'And I think he will launch vengeance on China to balance what almost happened to him,' he said.

© Provided by Daily Mail Australia-China relations rapidly deteriorated following Prime Minister Scott Morrison's call for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus. Pictured: Military vehicles in Beijing last year

© Provided by Daily Mail Tensions between China and the US, Australia's most important ally, have also increased. Pictured: Troops in Beijing last year

Tom Switzer, head of Sydney-based think-tank the Centre for Independent Studies, also said tensions between the West and China will only increase.

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US- China tariffs are a key flashpoint for 2019. Analysts say a longer-term concern is Chinese aspirations of global dominance. Concerns of a " Cold War confrontation" are brewing, according to Jie Chen, a Chinese international politics expert from the University of Western Australia .

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'The cold, hard reality is that as China rises as a great power, its national interests will grow, and it is already seeing a sphere of influence in areas in which its future prosperity and security are dependent,' he said.

'I think whoever wins next week, that security competition between China and America will still intensify.'

Mr Switzer said Australia faces the 'very difficult diplomatic task' of staying close to the US, its main defence ally, and maintaining relations with China, its biggest trading partner.

In August, Mr Morrison warned that war between the US and China is possible as tensions grow.

Mr Morrison was responding to an article by former leader Kevin Rudd who wrote that a 'hot war' between the superpowers could break out for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

In an interview with US think tank the Aspen Institute, the prime minister said he would not use the phrase 'hot war' but admitted that armed conflict is possible.

© Provided by Daily Mail Chinese soldiers march with the national flag at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on October 1, 2019

'Our defence update expresses it differently and certainly not as dramatically, as Kevin has,' he said.

'But we have acknowledged that what was previously inconceivable and not considered even possible or likely in terms of those types of outcomes, is not considered in those contexts anymore.

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"Should anyone dare to stir up a conflict on the sea, the Chinese side will fight back resolutely to safeguard its national sovereignty and security interests," Chinese Senior Colonel Wu Qian warned.The Pentagon announced Thursday that representatives from the U.S. Defense Secretary's Office, the Joint Staff and the Indo-Pacific Command met virtually with members of China's Central Military Commission's Office for International Military Cooperation, its Joint Staff Department and the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command to convene the first-ever Crisis Communications Working Group, a two-day event that began Wednesday.

'So there has been a change, there has obviously been a change and I don't think that's terribly remarkable.'

Mr Rudd warned that 'a dangerous political and strategic cocktail' threatened peace as Donald Trump and Joe Biden criticise China to win votes and Beijing asserts itself in the Indo-Pacific.