What does China want, and what can it get?

hwhiteCentre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Melbourne

Asia’s New Strategic Order: What does China want, and what can it get?
Professor Hugh White

5.30pm – 7.00pm, Thursday, September 18, 2014
Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room, Level 1, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, University of Melbourne MAP

There is a lot of talk about growing strategic rivalry in Asia today. How seriously should we take it? That depends mainly on whether China is really serious about challenging America’s regional leadership, and whether it is strong enough to do so. In this seminar I will explore these questions. I will try to explain why China is acting as it is in Asia today, what it hopes to achieve, and how likely it is to succeed. I will then offer some thoughts about how the rest of us in Asia should respond.

Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. He has worked on Australian strategic, defense and foreign policy issues since 1980. He has been a journalist, a ministerial adviser and a senior official in the Defense Department. His recent publications include Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing published as a Quarterly Essay in September 2010, and The China Choice: Why America should share power, published in Australia in 2012 and subsequently in the US, China and Japan. In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.

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