Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing (Hugh White, Quarterly Essay, September 2010

These Quarterly Essays are among my favourite reading. The penultimate issue was David Marr’s on ex-PM Kevin Rudd – just before he was axed (or knifed). Marr’s main thesis: ‘Who is the real Kevin Rudd? He is the man you see when the anger vents. He’s a politician with rage as his core, impatient rage’.

This issue has the follow-up letters about all that, from very wise and knowledgeable people.

Sample: *'[Rudd is] a man for whom power is a brittle exercise in control and who has little understanding of the limits of what one person can do, even when he holds the highest office in the land’ (Professor Judith Brett).

In his response to those letters Marr writes: ‘The idea [about Rudd’s anger] certainly grabbed attention. Nothing in the essay had such an impact or was quoted so often as the line: “It’s the juice in the machine”… Rudd saw power as a personal possession. The mistake was fundamental. even if his bond with the Australian people had not frayed so badly, the situation would have become intolerable.’

Former intelligence analyst Hugh White also knows his subject well. He’s a professor of strategic studies at ANU, and was a former senior advisor to Defense Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

His challenge: ‘If we plan to get rich on China’s growth, we had better get used to the idea of it as a very powerful state’. In the spirit of these essays, White is also a master of ‘simplicity the other side of complexity.’ Like: ‘America still has more money and military force on its side. Despite periodic outbreaks of anti-Americanism, it has a lot of soft power, and the admiration and trust of other countries is an important asset. American diplomacy in Asia over the past decade has banked on this, assuming that the stronger China grows, the more nervous other countries in Asia will become and the more eagerly they will welcome American leadership and protection’.

I love his sweeping generalizations/summary-statements. Like this one: ‘The Industrial Revolution transformed the way people worked and how much they produced. Per capita output took off and by the 1820s, 20 million Britons produced more than 380 million Chinese did, and Britain overtook China to become the wealthiest country in the world.’ Or this: ‘China is the first Leninist state to have successfully run a market economy, and therefore the first to enjoy the legitimacy conferred by sustained economic growth’. And this: ‘In half a lifetime the Chinese Communist Party has presided over the biggest increase in human welfare in history. For half a billion people, they have indeed “made poverty history”.’

The foreign policy of Asian nations – including Australia – over the coming decades will have one major consideration at its core: America must get used to treating China as an equal.

Rowland Croucher

jmm.aaa.net.au

October 2010