How to describe Australia’s relationship with China is something that has vexed many of Australia’s political leaders. From Kevin Rudd’s offer that Australia might serve as China’s “zhengyou” (honest friend), to Tony Abbott’s description of the relationship as defined by “fear and greed,” to Malcolm Turnbull’s quip that China represented a “frenemy” of Australia, the labels used by these three prime ministers symbolise the difficulty we have faced in recent years in Australia in thinking about how to frame our multifaceted relationship with China.

This framing was much less difficult in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because China itself was operating under Deng Xiaoping’s strategic maxim of taoguang yanghui, but also because the Australian security and economic policy communities had converged in recasting Australia’s security interests in predominantly economic terms. The 1989 Garnaut Report and the 1993 Defence Strategic Review both explicitly recognised that Australia’s future lay in the Asia-Pacific region, in large part because of the economic opportunities occasioned first by the rise of Japan and then China, and because Australia could enjoy the fruits of China’s economic prosperity without having to be overly concerned about the strategic implications of China’s rise.

But cracks began to show in the 2010s as these economic and security pathways diverged. We saw the pessimism of Australia’s 2009 Defence White Paper with its warnings of great power conflict and changes to regional order prompted by China’s economic rise, standing at odds with the optimism of the 2012 Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, which emphasised that Australia’s combined trade with Japan and China represented half of Australia’s total trade. In 2013, then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Trade Minister Andrew Robb parted company with Attorney-General George Brandis and Australia’s wider national security community over the role that Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei would play in the Australian National Broadband Network. This episode signalled a growing awareness that Australia did not have the policy and institutional frameworks needed to pursue an integrated approach to defence, economic, and foreign policy, so as to simultaneously realise security and economic prosperity.

This all seems like ancient history. The last ten years have of course seen a radical recasting of that relationship between economics and security in Australia, in response both to the perceived challenge from China as well as the major shift in how the United States recast its own view of the economic and national security challenges posed by China. Here in Australia we have seen a vast securitisation of economic issues, and a proliferation of institutional settings designed to deal with the threat of the coercive uses of economic instruments: the ways in which foreign aid, trade, and investment might be “weaponised” by China as it seeks to enhance its own power and national security.

To see this cross-pollination of economists thinking about security issues, and strategists talking in the language of “geoeconomics,” is in some ways a welcome development. But it is also profoundly worrisome because the way that Australia has begun to think about the nexus between economics and security is out of step with how the economics-security nexus is understood and practiced in Asia.

For all the flurry of attention that has been paid to economic sanctions, statecraft, and “geoeconomics” over the past decade, we ignore the fact that in Asia, countries have long made deliberate choices to engage economically with their adversaries. In China, Japan, and across Southeast Asia, security has been understood in much more comprehensive terms for decades, and more than a century in some cases. Rather than endlessly debating whether to favour economic prosperity or national security, as if it were some dichotomous choice, our regional neighbours have long viewed economic issues as deeply entwined with, and as the foundation of, their national security. While this may sound like a fairly simple statement to make, it has led to some policy choices among our neighbours that look very surprising in the Australian context.

Take Japan for instance. This is a country which has understood the deep economic foundations of national security since facing the crisis of Western imperial encroachment in East Asia in the mid-19th century. That crisis initially led Japan to pursue a national grand strategy of state-led economic and military modernisation—a form of fascist economic planning—with disastrous consequences for its East Asian neighbours. Japan’s defeat in WWII did not bring an end to Japan’s understanding of the vital relationship between its’s national security and secure supplies of raw materials, indigenous development of advanced technology and industry, and guaranteed export markets; instead, Japan’s ongoing awareness of the security imperatives of these economic questions led it to pursue a strategy of “comprehensive security” (sogo anzen hosho) and to double down on economic openness, and regional and global forms of multilateralism, as a way to secure these economic resources and Japan’s prosperity in an uncertain and challenging world. An understanding that Japan could only be secure in an open economic world led Japan to spearhead regional initiatives that might enmesh both China and the United States, and to remain open economically to China, even as it led the world in seeking to diversify its economy away from over-dependence on China, and to protect Japanese IP and technology from being hollowed out by China.

Across Southeast Asia, we also see a range of states that are choosing thoughtfully and carefully about how to navigate economic-security tradeoffs. As Cheng-Chwee Kuik has recently shown, the US-China trade war and US restrictions over Chinese telecommunications technologies forced Southeast Asian states to have to think carefully about how to navigate between these two major powers. While there is variation in their approaches, what is common is that no Southeast Asian state has either completely embraced the US call for a “clean network,” or China’s Digital Silk Road. Instead, states such as Singapore and Vietnam, who are among the most cautious about the security risks posed by China, are still carefully diversifying their partnerships to maintain their own security, and to ensure that they avoid overreliance on a single economic power (and therefore a single point of failure). These states have avoided choosing Huawei for their main 5G networks, but have still allowed Huawei and ZTE in their smaller networks, and have been willing to collaborate with China in other functional areas of the BRI.

And finally China—which, for more than a century—has deliberately chosen economic engagement with Japan, a major adversary, precisely because, and not in spite of, the security threat posed by Japan. During the height of the Cold War, economic engagement with Japan was driven by the recognition that China could not realise its industrial and technological development without engaging with, and learning from, a potentially adversarial Japan. And for China, economic engagement with Japan provided an important way of diversifying the Chinese economy from the risk of over-dependence first on the Soviet Union and later the United States. That determination to avoid over-dependence on any one single economic partner continues to shape the Xi Jinping government’s practice of “self-reliance”: the Xi government has recognised the vital necessity—for national security reasons—of deepening China’s economic engagement with large swathes of the globe.

Across East Asia, perceptions of insecurity have led East Asian states to selectively and strategically choose to engage economically with their adversaries. These countries do so not because they are naive to the risks, or because they have been “bought off,” or out of some belief in the liberal path to peace, but rather out of hard-headed strategic calculations about how best to achieve their prosperity and national security in an uncertain and often constrained world.

For Australia, a country that is far more exposed to foreign trade than our US ally for example, the choices made by our East Asian neighbours offer important lessons about how states have managed the inevitable trade-offs posed by strengthening economic ties with an actual or potential adversary. There is a healthy dose of reality and recognition in the region that these trade-offs cannot be avoided but instead must be managed; a recognition that all countries have to make choices, shaped by their own contexts, histories, identities and economic profiles, about how much foreign economic integration is necessary to achieving national security and autonomy on the world stage.

But in Australia, we still pay far too little attention to how our Asian neighbours are navigating policy challenges such as this one, and many others, and still far too much attention to the grand strategies and economic policies of the United States, the UK, and even Europe.

Under the Albanese government, there has been a very welcome adjustment in Australia’s policy settings and a recognition of the importance of deeper engagement with and understanding of our regional neighbours, including Japan, India, Southeast Asia, and China. But this adjustment is still an early and therefore fragile one. The US election of Donald Trump makes this adjustment all the more fragile because of the temptation for all our policy and media and academic attention to be subsumed by watching, anticipating, and attempting to manage the uncertainty of the second Trump administration.

The adjustment in Australian policy settings is also fragile because it comes in the wake of a period in which it has been exceedingly difficult to develop understanding and expertise on our region, and particularly on China. As a China scholar in Australia, I have directly experienced the chilling effect that the securitisation of Australia’s relationship with China has had on our ability to understand China and maintain the expertise so necessary for underpinning Australian policy settings.

Over the past decade, I have been asked by our security services to justify my visits to China. I have been reported on to our security services when I have been overheard in public talking with Chinese-Australian academics here in Canberra, and I have been invited by the Australian security services to report on the political stance of Chinese international students in my classrooms. As someone who has been working on the sensitive topic of China-Japan relations for two decades now, I am not naive to the risks of working on and in China. But we have conflated a deep understanding of China with a fear that such understanding equates to agreement with, or having been bought off by, China.

I feel like I have been operating from a position of fear in Australia’s China debate, and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want my country to be operating from a position of fear, and we have.

This article has been modified from a speech given by Amy King to the 2024 AIIA National Conference.

Amy King is Associate Professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.