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‘Fear and Greed’? Australia Relations with China

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Australian Foreign Policy in Asia

Part of the book series: Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific ((CSAP))

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the roots of Australia’s relationship with China can be found in the hostility directed at Chinese on the Australian gold fields in the 1850s. After the gold rush ended, some Chinese remained in Australia, frequently the object of racist marginalization. The 1901 White Australia policy saw the exclusion of Chinese settlers from the Australian continent. With the success of Mao Zedong’s communist forces on the Chinese mainland in 1949, a ‘fear of China’ governed the Cold War foreign policies of successive Australian governments where the security concerns of the United States were seen by Australia’s leaders as the lodestar guiding Australian foreign policy making. Over the last two decades China has emerged as Australia’s biggest resources export market. Hence Australia is confronted with a policy dilemma. In the event of conflict between the USA and China, which way will Australia turn?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This was part of a private conversation that appears to have been overheard by a journalist. Its authenticity has not been officially denied or confirmed. In a subsequent report the journalist restated his claim: ‘Prime Minister Tony Abbott earned himself an honesty prize after the G20 summit in November, when Germany’s Angela Merkel asked what drove his China policies. “Fear and greed,” Abbott said’ (Garnaut 2015b, p. 18). The journalist later noted that ‘Abbott’s comment to Merkel, incidentally, had been delivered ironically, with self-deprecating good humour’ (Garnaut 2015c, p. 18; see also 2015d, p. 18).

  2. 2.

    Jasper Becker writes: ‘If we look at Mao’s famine as a deliberate act of inhumanity, then his record can also be measured against that of Hitler and Stalin. Some 12 million died in the Nazi concentration camps and a further 30 million were killed during the Second World War. Stalin is thought to have allowed 20 million to die in the gulags and overall he is believed to have been responsible for between 30 and 40 million deaths. However, an investigation into Mao’s record […] suggests that [he] exceeded even these ghastly totals’ (1996, p. 274).

  3. 3.

    Although the thinking of leading officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time was in marked contrast to what purported to be thinking among the conservative politicians and right wing commentators.

  4. 4.

    Deng never accepted a formal title in government. As Henry Kissinger notes: ‘Deng held no major office; he refused all honorific titles; he almost never appeared on television; and practiced politics almost entirely behind the scenes. He ruled not like and emperor but as the principal mandarin’ (2011, p. 334).

  5. 5.

    The policy, known as the National Asian Languages in Schools Strategy (NALSAS), was sidelined after the Howard Government came to power in 1996 (Henderson 2007).

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  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Allan Patience

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Patience, A. (2018). ‘Fear and Greed’? Australia Relations with China. In: Australian Foreign Policy in Asia . Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69347-7_6

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