Australia, China, and Asian regionalism : navigating distant proximity

In the coming decades, the balance of geopolitical power will shift from the West to Asia, especially China.1 Americans, who are used to their country’s global superpower position, are waking up to the impact of a rising China on their lives, since the recent global financial crisis. In Australia, the significance not just of China, but of Asia, has been keenly felt during the past few decades. In 2007, East Asian countries accounted for almost fifty percent of Australia’s total trade in goods and services, 2 outstripping trade relations with North America or Europe. Throughout the 1990s, Australia experienced an economic boom, which was linked to China’s demand for the country’s natural resources such as coal and iron ore. This dependence on China has cushioned the Australian economy from the worst effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. Early in 2008, just before the crisis became global, a leading economist declared in The Australian newspaper: “Australia is fine as long as China is fine, and in 2008 China is fine.”3 By October2008, China’s economic slowdown as a consequence of decreased demand for Chinese products from the United States, prompted Heather Ridout, CEO of the Australian Industry Group, to say: “Australia is in the China lifeboat and there are some concerns that it might be taking water.”4 But by mid-2009 it became clear that the Australian economy had weathered the crisis much better than other developed economies, in part because of continued Chinese demand for Australian commodities.5 For Western sensibilities there must be something ironic about a developed country such as Australia to be so dependent for its prosperity on the economic situation of a non-Western giant such as China. Yet the Australian experience may well be the fate of many Western societies in the years to come. As the Western nation-state located in closest geographical proximity to Asia, Australia provides an excellent site for observing the impact of this process of global transformation. Australia’s complex and ambivalent relationship with Asia can give us insights into the contradictory tensions that are associated with the historical decentering of Western hegemony.6 In this essay, I go beyond the economic dimension of this transformation, which dominates public concern and debate, and focus on the longer-term and complex cultural challenges involved in Australia’s attempts to become integrated with and within Asia, to become—as people say in Australia—“part of Asia.