The rise of China - Implications for New Zealand and Australia

Date: 1 August 2013

The New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre, the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs and the Victoria University Centre for Strategic Studies cordially invite you to a public lecture by Professor Hugh White of Australian National University, made possible with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian High Commission.

Professor White shares his thoughts in this lecture on the political and strategic implications of China’s rise for New Zealand and Australia. Some people hope and expect that the stable Asian order of the last few decades will last indefinitely, with China using its growing power to support the status quo rather than challenge it. If so then China’s rise means little for New Zealand’s and Australia’s political and strategic situation. Professor White is more pessimistic and argues that China has the both ambition and the capacity to reshape the old order in some fundamental ways. What that means for our countries depends on exactly China wants, and on how we respond. Whatever happens, we face the biggest shift in our strategic circumstances in our short histories.

About the speaker

Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. He has worked on Australian strategic, defence and foreign policy issues since 1980 in several different roles including intelligence analyst, journalist, ministerial adviser, departmental official, think tanker and academic. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. His recent publications include Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing, published as a Quarterly Essay in September 2010, and The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power, published by Black Inc. in August 2012. In the 1970s, he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.