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Opinion | China’s rise: why US advocacy for confrontation leaves Asia cold
- Asian nations recognise that the balance of global order has changed, and China’s rise – backed by both economic and military might – must be accommodated
- In the minds of pragmatic Asians, America’s spin of a fight between good and evil only raises questions about US judgment and motivations
Reading Time:4 minutes
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The times are changing. In Washington recently, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne reiterated that Australia would make its own decisions in its own interests. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd observed that the Australian foreign and defence ministers “probably got the fright of their lives” when they were “fully and comprehensively confronted with” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s thinking.
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In a radio interview this month, Rudd observed that the Australian delegation poured “huge buckets of cold water on Australian participation in various American contingencies” regarding China. This “reality bite”, as Rudd called it, serves as a reminder that we should at times be wary of US judgment and sceptical of its motives.
The balance of the global order has changed – no more so than in Australia’s own geographic region in Asia. Yet Australia has been slower, and probably less percipient, than the rest of East Asia to grasp the significance of the change. It is a truism that “the future is Asian” – a future being led by China.
There is no getting away from the fact that China is the principal engine of the global economy. It is responsible for approximately one-third of global growth; its trade with the Asean nations now exceeds its trade with any other bloc, including the EU and the US; and intra-Asian trade is greater than Asian trade with the rest of the world. One of the defining truths of our times is that the Western share of the global economy is shrinking and will continue to do so.
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Coronavirus backlash further fraying China’s ties to global economy
Coronavirus backlash further fraying China’s ties to global economy
In this “plague” year, while the rest of the world reels from an unwanted pandemic, China’s trade figures for June 2020 exceeded figures from June 2019 – seven months before the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund expects that the economies of almost every country in the world, except China, will experience a contraction in 2020. Its prediction for the US is minus 8 per cent.
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