<i>Illustration: John Shakespeare.</i>
Illustration: John Shakespeare.
The sight of two hulking jets of the People's Liberation Army Air Force landing on an Australian airstrip is a striking one.
In times past, the arrival of military aircraft from Communist China might have been troubling.
But the ultimate guardians of the revolution are in Australia at the invitation of a conservative government to help with the search for the missing flight MH370.
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It's not the first time Chinese military planes have touched down in Australia - they have previously transported Chinese officials on visits. But it is rare, nonetheless. And Prime Minister Tony Abbott was shrewd to have invited China to send its planes and ships to join the effort with the US, New Zealand, Britain, France and Japan.
An international tragedy has become an opportunity for countries to co-operate.
''You know the old saying - never let a crisis go to waste,'' Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings says. ''It's a clever piece of diplomacy on Tony Abbott's part, especially with his visit to China coming up next month.''
Just because China is a dictatorship doesn't mean that its government is immune to public opinion.
One of the reasons that China's ruling party is the world's most successful autocracy is that it cares deeply about impressing and indoctrinating its people.
Two-thirds of the people on the missing plane were Chinese citizens and there is intense media interest in the story.
''One of the lessons of this event is that we see a China that's not content to just sit on the end of the phone and hear how other countries are dealing with situations where they have a significant interest,'' Jennings says. ''It will deal itself in quickly and with military assets.''
He also cites Beijing's fast and successful evacuations of its own people from emergencies in Libya and the Solomon Islands.
''The way it's done this does point to a Chinese desire to do these things in a high-profile and flashy kind of way and it's to Tony Abbott's credit to see that the smart way to respond is to facilitate it,'' he says.
Another Australian expert on strategic affairs, Hugh White, of the Australian National University, puts it the other way around. It was smart, he agrees, but not really a discretionary act: ''It would have been very serious for Tony Abbott not to have invited China to participate … In all the circumstances, and with the big role China has played in other search areas, any attempt by Abbott to keep China out would have been very pointed and very difficult.''
White says ''he gets points'' not for particular wisdom but ''for not making mistakes''.
As for China, White says that it has learnt a lesson too.
''We see further evidence that China is acting more and more like a great power, playing a bigger role in wider regional affairs,'' he says.
''And I think they did learn a lesson from their parsimonious response to the typhoon in the Philippines last year. It was a bad look and it was criticised in China for being a bad look.''
Beijing was accused of bearing a grudge against the Philippines' government for daring to stand up to China's territorial claims.
And it was accused of taking it out on the Filipino people when typhoon Yolanda struck in November. The typhoon displaced or otherwise harmed up to 5 million children, according to UNICEF.
''The human drama of the situation with MH370 does help drive countries closer together,'' White says.
So is the world seeing the emergence of a more enlightened, more co-operative, more altruistic China? Jennings doesn't think so.
''It's not necessarily about international co-operation - it's about Chinese moves to assist themselves in an international situation,'' he says. ''Abbott has allowed China to do this in a way that is co-operative. It's also a pretty narrow definition of Chinese interest - their motivation here is the 153 Chinese nationals on the flight.
''Their foreign policy is driven by a very sharp link to their domestic political base.''
And if you look at a couple of other instances of Beijing's recent foreign policy, you would be hard-pressed to argue that it looks like anything other than the hardest, narrowest definition of the national interest.
Exhibit one is Russia's armed takeover of Crimea. China loves to sermonise on the inviolable principles of national sovereignty and the United Nations-based system of international order.
For instance, Beijing's ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, gave a speech last month insisting that: "The international community must challenge any moves to change the post-World War II international order.
''The international community should work to uphold the principles and purpose of the UN charter. Only these principles can guarantee the stability of Asia and maintain world peace.''
Liu was taking aim at Japan, accusing it of destabilising assertiveness, and he warned against any other nations that might ''connive with Japan's rising militarism''.
But the moment a Chinese ally displays rising militarism, China is only too happy to connive. When the UN Security Council debated a motion condemning Russia's invasion of Crimea, China was strangely silent, its principles forgotten. It abstained on the vote.
Exhibit two is the UN commission on North Korea's record of human rights abuses. When the chairman, former Australian High Court judge Michael Kirby, accused Pyongyang of ''crimes against humanity'' and demanded China stop the forced repatriation of North Koreans who manage to escape its gulags, who was the first to defend North Korea? Its great ally, China.
When the acid tests are applied to its principles, China is shown to have only one - narrow self-interest.