The Lowy Institute blogger has taken me to task in rather severe terms for my off the cuff remarks so I had bettter elaborate.
I don’t think the proposition of probable threat from China’s emergence is well-established at all.
Hugh White asserts that because China will become the world’s largest economy that this will lead automatically and fairly soon (20 to 30 years) to a fundamental change in Asia with America declining and China rising and that this will lead to strategic competition, instability, and possible (military) threats for Australia.
The need for far greater expenditure on defence is premised on the rise of China’s economy. But that rise is not an independent variable. The GFC has shown very clearly that China’s growth is dependent, to a very significant extent, on the US, as well as the rest of the world (including a continued flow of resources from Australia). That dependence has probably been revealed to be greater than even the Chinese realised.
To consider defence strategy in the absence of a deep understanding of international economics is to operate in a parallel universe in my estimation. The Chinese GDP growth rate should not just be used as a naive justification for huge increases in defence expenditure.
Why would China provoke the sort of high-level militarty conflict that would render its economy a basketcase, result in internal unrest and undermine the authority of the CCCP?
Hugh White, himself, admits that China isn’t, and won’t, pursue a Stalinist policy. It’s foreign policy has been about accomodation, and it is in China’s interests to press its claims as it grows but not at the expense of damaging disruption to the international system that underpins its remarkable growth. It’s OK to respond that the future may not look like the past, and to point to the possibility of discontinuities, but that is not strategic thinking. It is difficult to engage in a debate where the proponents can argue from any scenario they like. We do better to argue from the basis of estabilished possibilities and probabilities.
Further, it is disingenuous to compare China and the US as if they were the only two economies on the block. Hugh White dismisses India because it is behind China. But so what, it is still the case that India will become increasingly significant over the next few decades as well. Japan is still a major economy and will remain so. Other countries in the region are also growing. China faces a much more complex world than just some major power competition with the US as if no one else matters. This complexitiy is a major constraint on China and therefore a major reason why we should discount the idea of China’s rise destabilising the Asian region.
If you look at China’s growth, and the economic development of the Asian region in recent decades, the forces seem to be towards greater economic integration and interdependence not towards disintegration and conflict. There’s no reason not to think this pattern won’t continue. Certainly not in Hugh White’s paper.
The most likely ‘discontinuity’ (if such a phrase makes any sense) is that economic concerns trump military objectives making a repeat of ‘the great Asian power invades Darwin scenario’ very, very unlikely indeed. China will using its growing influence to aid its development not destroy it. Our defence planning should reflect these economic realities, not lessons drawn from great power struggles of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe.
