What will Chinese power mean for the world?

What will Chinese power mean for the world? Dr Michael Wesley, executive director of the Lowy Institute, treated the audience to an impressive – in scope and perceptivity – speech on China, its role for the Antipodes and the evolving Asian regionalism at a Victoria University public symposium in April 2011.

If we in the West feel unready to respond to China’s rise, China itself is certainly unprepared to have so suddenly come to global prominence – and how China reacts to this new responsibility is what may lead to some uncomfortable choices for all to make. Looking to imperial China for a blueprint of what may motivate modern China’s actions would be a mistake.

As the only great power in history to have been a global power in the past, modern China is struggling with a dichotomy: an ingrained emphasis on global state hierarchy and a keen sense of past injustices inflicted by what China sees as a hostile world order are in discordance with a present reality in which China finds itself no longer a self-contained society, relying more and more heavily on the world’s resources.

China acknowledges the current world order is good for its growth, but it is “viscerally unhappy with this order.” As all great powers before it, China finds itself in a “great power trap”: the more power it acquires, the more vulnerable it begins to feel, which in turn leads it to desire even more power and supremacy. This will lead to a “growing divergence of security commitments and economic partnerships” for many countries in the Asian region.

Dr Wesley argues we are seeing not a transformation of the Asia-Pacific but an emergence of a new, Indo-Pacific peninsula. This is a result of what he sees is the new pyramid pattern of power in Asia: with China at the top, surrounded by secondary powers – Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India – with whom China has traditional rivalries but who are significant enough to be able to counterbalance its power by relying on other allies like the US. The secondary powers are in turn surrounded by tertiary powers, whether in South or Southeast Asia, who are reaching out to China or the US to protect their own interests.

This complex structure of strategic alignments and competition is bringing the epicentre of Asian interaction to Southeast Asia and therefore, closer to Australia and New Zealand.

“Australia and New Zealand need to realise that geopolitically, if not yet emotionally, they are an integral part of the Indo-Pacific peninsula,” said Dr Wesley. “Our choices will matter – and they will have real consequences for both countries. We’d better start getting prepared.”

The public symposium on New Zealand, Australia and China's rise was co-organised by the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand and the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre at Victoria University Wellington, with co-sponsors the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University, the Australian Centre on China in the World and the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

Dr Michael Wesley was in New Zealand during the first week of April as a guest of Asia:NZ and spoke at a number of other high-profile forums including a PricewaterhouseCoopers business leaders gathering, an Asia:NZ research roundtable on Asian business graduates, the Asia:NZ Educating for Asia Summit, the Australia-New Zealand Leadership Forum and the New Zealand Principals' Federation conference.

"There goes the neighbourhood", a book by Dr Wesley  on the significance of Southeast Asia to Australia, comes out in May 2011.

- by Antonia Kokalova-Gray

Related material:

• Download the full text of Dr Michael Wesley's speech to the symposium (PDF).

• New Zealand: better as a friend than family - Dr Wesley writes about his views on the New Zealand-Australia relationship on the Lowy Interpreter blog

• What are the security and domestic dimensions of China's rise? - a brief look at some analyses from the Victoria University public symposium on 7 April 2011.

• New Zealand, Australia and China's rise - opening speech by Hon Murray McCully, Foreign Affairs Minister

• Prosperity or security? When choices become tough - an overview of Dr Wesley's presentation to business leaders in Auckland.

1) (L to R) Dr Michael Wesley, Executive Director, Lowy Institute for International Policy; Professor Robert Ayson, Director, Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand; Professor Hugh White, Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University; Dr Marc Lanteigne, Senior Lecturer, New Zealand China Contemporary Research Centre; Dr Richard Grant, Executive Director of Asia:NZ and Professor Xiaoming Huang, Director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre.

2) Dr Michael Wesley speaking at the Educating for Asia Summit in Wellington, 6 April 2011.