Fed: Aust needs strategy to respond to China 'good or bad'
20 Apr 2009 1:07 PM
CANBERRA, April 20 AAP - Australia needs a flexible strategy that can deal with China as both a benign, responsible regime, and an aggressive and authoritarian superpower, a new study says.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyst Rod Lyon says it simply isn't known whether China's growing power would be exercised for good or ill.
"The simplest answer is this: we need a strategy that allows for either possibility," Dr Lyon said in the policy analysis.
"Regardless of whether China goes to the good or to the bad, it will generate important geopolitical shifts in the Asian security environment.
"Australian strategy must be broad enough to cope over time with the possible range of shifts, precisely because we will have to live in whichever new Asian security order emerges."
With the Defence White Paper to be released before the end of the month, a debate has emerged about how Australian defence strategy should be shaped to deal with an emerging Chinese superpower.
In the study - entitled Changing Asia, Rising China, and Australia's Strategic Choices - Dr Lyon said China experts couldn't agree on what sort of regime China was, let alone what it might become.
Some see China as a fragile superpower, vulnerable to domestic weaknesses, while others see it as an emerging challenger intent on changing the existing regional order.
"On one side of the ledger, a relatively persuasive body of evidence suggests China wants to be seen as a responsible stakeholder," he said.
Its growing economy had underpinned growth of a wide range of other regional economies, including Australia.
"On the other hand, China continues to enhance its military capabilities, gradually expanding the bubble of Chinese power outwards from its coastline.
"As it does so, a range of regional countries are becoming more concerned about how Beijing might choose to exercise its increasing range of military options," he said.
Dr Lyon said it was fortunate that Australia's primary strategy had been traditionally double-barrelled, pursuing a blend of order building and hedging.
"For as long as possible we need to maintain a degree of coherence between those strategies, shunning an overt reliance on either order-building alone, lest it leaves us unprepared for a much more challenging regional security environment, or hedging alone, lest it drives others into imitation, and thus arms-racing," he said.
