Counting On China? Australia's Strategic Response to Economic Interdependence

Abstract

China’s remarkable economic growth has rendered its neighbours increasingly dependent upon China for their prosperity, even as China’s burgeoning wealth and power raises security concerns around Asia, particularly among states allied or aligned with the United States. The extent to which growing economic dependence upon China is altering Asian states’ diplomatic and security policies is one of the most interesting and important questions in international relations today. Influential theories generate divergent expectations of how middle powers will respond to deepening economic dependence upon a rising power. One set of Realist arguments suggests that negative threat perceptions towards the rising power will exacerbate concerns over economic dependence, encouraging balancing behaviour against the rising power. An alternative political economy argument is that economic dependence upon the rising power encourages closer alignment, or at least accommodation of the rising power’s core interests. To date, scholarship on East Asian responses to China’s rise has failed to fully address this issue, due in part to definitional vagaries on alignment behaviour and a failure to distinguish hypothesised causes from states’ policy choices. This study contributes to this debate by assessing Australia’s strategic response to growing economic dependence upon China since 2000. Australia provides an ideal case study for examining the relative significance of security and economic factors in shaping alignment decisions.