China’s Rise and Its Implication In Sino-Australia Relations— From the Perspective of Hedging Strategy

Along with the rise of China, bilateral relations between China and Australia are becoming increasingly important and economic cooperation in particular has expanded with significant results achieved in recent years. Assuming that Australia, as a typical middle power, adopts a hedging strategy to respond to the rise of China, this dissertation, first of all, examines how Australia views China’s rise through a careful review of the existing literature. What is more, a theoretical framework is established to disentangle the drivers of a hedging strategy, and it will further analyze why a hedging strategy has been adopted for Canberra to respond to the rise of China in order to better promote its national interests. In this regard, three drivers/variables—hedging capacity, threat perception and strategy preference are selected to explain the hedging strategy. In addition, this dissertation seeks to test the hypothesis of the hedging strategy by analyzing the Australian government's discourses related to China or foreign policy on China in the 2016 Defense White Paper and the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, which are the most recent government documents to date. Under the uncertainty of external environment and unexpected external shocks, it is important to pay more attention to the bilateral relationship between China and Australia within a broader strategic context. It should be emphasized that ‘hedging’ may be one of the important strategic choice towards China. If China tries to understand and address Australia’s security concern and Australia regards China’s rise more as an opportunity rather than as more challenges, and if both sides can make an effort to resolve strategic distrust between them, it is believed that the development of China-Australia relations can be achieved and further advanced