Australia will not bow to Chinese pressure-says PM Morrison

Australia will not bow to pressure from China and would not stop Australia from setting "our own laws and our own rules according to our national interest". Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted on Thursday after Beijing released a  list of complaints about the country. 

A Chinese official gave a dossier to Australian media containing 14 grievances, highlighting the increasingly fractious relationship between the two nations."If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy," a Chinese government official reportedly told three prominent outlets on Wednesday. Among the complaints are Australia's strict foreign interference laws, the country's ban on Huawei's involvement in its 5G network and decisions that blocked Chinese investment projects on "national security grounds". It accused Australia of "siding with the US' anti-China campaign and spreading disinformation" about where the virus originated -- a particularly sore point for Beijing.

Morrison said the "unofficial document" came from the Chinese embassy and would not stop Australia from setting "our own laws and our own rules according to our national interest". "We won't be compromising on the fact that we will set what our foreign investment laws are or how we build our 5G telecommunications networks or how we run our systems of protecting against interference Australia's way we run our country," he told Channel Nine.

Relations between Canberra and Beijing have reached a new low in recent months, leaving Australian government ministers unable to persuade Chinese counterparts to even accept their phone calls. The latest diplomatic salvo comes just days after Morrison reached an in-principle agreement on bolstering defence relations with Japan's leader Yoshihide Suga, a move widely viewed as aimed at countering Chinese influence in the region.