When the missile is the message: China's patient campaign to make the unacceptable routine

In 1945, in the first free election Hungary had ever held, the communists lost, and badly. The Independent Smallholders' Party took 57 per cent of the vote; the communists barely scraped seventeen. Yet within four years Hungary was a one-party Communist state, and would not vote freely again until 1990.

Communist dictator Mátyás Rákosi is credited with the phrase ‘salami tactics’ to describe the method his party used to seize power. You do not confront your opponent's majority head-on, because that provokes resistance and invites outside attention. You cut it away one thin slice at a time, each too small on its own to justify anyone risking a confrontation to stop it. Add the slices together and the whole is gone.

The same logic is now being applied, patiently and deliberately, to the security order in the Indo-Pacific. The instrument is different; the principle is identical. Never present your neighbours with a single act outrageous enough to unite them against you. Instead, present them with a long series of acts, each only marginally worse than the last, until the outrageous has become ordinary and the ordinary has become your right.

This is the true significance of the ballistic missile the People's Liberation Army Navy fired across the Pacific this week from one of its submarines. One slice at a time, the map of what China may do unchallenged is being redrawn before us.

Consider just some of the slices already cut. In the South China Sea, reefs became artificial islands and artificial islands became military bases bristling with runways and missiles. Each dredger-load of sand was deemed insufficient to warrant a response, until a 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration declaring it all unlawful was simply waved away. In the Taiwan Strait, a median line both sides observed for seventy years has been erased not by any declaration but by the grinding repetition of incursion, until the crossing that once meant crisis barely rates a headline. In the East China Sea, coast guard vessels keep a near-permanent presence near the Senkakus that Japan is expected to treat as the new weather.

To be fair, test-firing a submarine-launched ballistic missile is not, in itself, extraordinary. The Americans, British, Russians and Indians all test theirs, because they need to know they work. Beijing defended their test as  “routine annual training”. Their response betrays their broader strategy.

Look closer. Those other powers discretely test within spaces they control in their own ranges, their own waters and their own impact zones. Their exercises threaten no one. China publicly chose instead to fly a strategic missile clear across the open Pacific, over the exclusive economic zones of Micronesia, Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu, who were given no say, to a splashdown inside a treaty-protected nuclear-free zone, on the very day Australia and Fiji signed the Ocean of Peace agreement, NATO allies were convening in Ankara and RIMPAC exercises were under way in the Pacific. The timing was no coincidence.

China’s test carries two messages. The first is normalisation: do the unprecedented thing once, publicly, in the language of routine, so the second time is harder to protest and the tenth is simply a fact of life. The second is capability: proof that China's nuclear deterrent no longer rests only in silos on land but rides beneath the sea, survivable and mobile, reaching across oceans from waters we cannot easily find. Intimidation and desensitisation, in a single launch.

And here is the irony that ought to give the region pause. The closest precedent for what China did this week is not any American, Russian or Indian test — it is China's own. In September 2024 it fired a land-based DF-31 intercontinental missile out of Hainan, across some eleven thousand kilometres of ocean, to fall near French Polynesia, the first time China had sent an ICBM into the Pacific since 1980. Less than two years later the sea-based version arrives, and we are invited to receive it as routine. The 2024 launch made this one thinkable; this one will make the next unremarkable. Beijing is not testing a missile so much as testing us and measuring how much less we will say than we said the time before.

As Prime Minister, my Government was prepared to call these tactics out, and drew Beijing's ire for it with wolf warrior sledging, illegal trade sanctions and a diplomatic deep freeze. Beijing summarised its grievances in their infamous fourteen-point dossier leaked to this masthead, citing Coalition government decisions to ban Huawei from the 5G network, tighten foreign investment screening, pass new  foreign-interference laws, cancel China’s BRI agreement with Victoria and seek an independent inquiry into the COVID pandemic. More revealing still were its objections to “unfriendly” reporting by our free press and to parliamentarians speaking out on Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It laid bare the price of compliance an emboldened Beijing would expect for favourable relations.

China changed tactics after the 2022 election. The mask went back on.  Less bullying and more charm, but their strategic intent has remained, as these latest actions confirm. It would be unwise to let a new complacency set in. Lowy polling now finds fewer Australians since the 2022 election are worried about the security risk China poses than are drawn to the economic opportunity it represents. This inversion of public sentiment in Australia will be welcome news in Beijing, and should be cause for reflection at home.

So what should we take from this? We must refuse the premise: name the pattern out loud, measure each act not against the one before it but against the settled order it erodes, and make plain that acquiescence is a choice we decline. That means continuing to knit together like-minded partners into an effective deterrent — our US alliance and AUKUS, the Quad and Five Eyes, our partnerships with Japan,  India and ASEAN, and lifting defence spending further to three per cent of GDP by 2030 and 3.5% by 2035 as our allies rightly urge. These are not provocations but insurance; they keep the tension in the cord that enables a true stability to prevail.

Rákosi understood something his opponents grasped too late: the danger is never the single slice you can see, but the habit of not objecting that each slice builds,  until there is nothing left to fight for. We hold advantages the Smallholders never had: allies, oceans, and the freedom to say plainly what is happening. Let us not grow shy of doing so.