Transcript: Australia, China, and the Economics-Security Nexus with Amy King of ANU

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Just after the American presidential election, I was asked to speak to a group of Australian government folks on a Zoom call to talk about the implications of a second Trump term for U.S.-China relations and about China’s likely response at various levels to Trump’s return to the White House. The other speaker on that call was Amy King, Associate Professor in the Strategic and Defense Study Center at the Australian National University, ANU, and Deputy Director for Research. Her remarks were just brilliant, full of what I thought were profound insights, just drawing on the body of her work. She was so smart, so succinct, and on point that once the call was done, I immediately reached out to ask her if she’d join me on Sinica to talk about her work and about Australia-China relations, and I am delighted that we were able to make it work. Amy is the author of China-Japan Relations After World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949–1971 from Cambridge University Press, 2016, which I confess I haven’t read yet, but fully intend to, though I have read some of her papers, and they are just terrific. And we’ll talk about some of them today. Amy King, a very warm welcome to Sinica.

Amy King: Terrific to be with you, Kaiser. Thanks.

Kaiser: I know you aren’t a specialist in Australia-China relations, but I’m sure you know much more about it certainly than I do, and most of our listeners do. So, maybe I could start off by asking you to walk us through some of the key phases of Australia-China relations over the past… let’s look just like the last 15 years. I’m particularly interested in the sort of period transitioning out of the golden years under Howard and Rudd, the deterioration that perhaps began in the late 2000s, around the time of the Stern Hu-Rio Tinto case, and accelerated really a decade later during the COVID pandemic.

Amy: Yeah. So, look, as you foreshadowed, I’m not an expert on the Australia-China relationship, or even on Australian foreign policy. So with full disclaimer there, and apologies to my many colleagues here in Australia who are, but what I appreciate about your framing of this question, actually, is that it takes a longer one. It starts us back actually to those Howard years because I think that’s actually helpful for thinking about the last 10 or 15 years in this relationship and what we’ve sort of lived through more recently, because there's, of course, always that tendency to think about just the most recent four or five years. Of course, 2007, Australia sees China become its largest trading partner, replacing Japan, which had been, since the late 1960s, that major trading partner for Australia. And the relationship really takes off economically from 2009, the single largest export market for Australia.

But what is remarkable, I think, about that 2009 sort of turning point is, on the one hand, this huge boom in the economic half of that relationship, coinciding, as you know, with all of a sudden a very profound set of political questions and concerns about not only the Chinese domestic political situation and implications for Australia with individuals like Stern Hu, but also what a more powerful, more rising China might mean for the order more generally that Australia inhabits. And that sort of that bifurcation of the economic half of our thinking and the sort of political and security half of our thinking is not new for Australia. We can go back to look at the post-World War II years when Australia confronted pretty similar bifurcation in its thinking about Japan, right? A very similar story.