Poking the Dragon: Australia-China Relations and a Truculent Fear of the Racialized 'Other'

Abstract

Despite the strength and complementarity of economic ties between Australia and China, the contemporary relationship is paroxysmal at best and is marked from an Australian perspective by an increasing and pervasive level of suspicion and antithesization towards its largest trading partner. Consequently, considerations of the 'Thucydides Trap' - where we imagine ourselves being thrust into a calamitous choice between the United States, as our security guarantor, and China, as our largest economic relationship - have rapidly entered the Overton window to become highly popular subjects of both academic and public discourse alike. It is in this way that this paper aims to interrogate this disjuncture and Australia's increasing animosity towards China, in order to contend that while the two countries undoubtedly share dissimilar socio-political organizations, at the heart of frequently tepid relations lies not a difference of ideology, or even of values, but rather an Australian racialized fear of the Other and stubborn hang over commitment to the Anglosphere. This paper will further attest to Australia's anxious security outlook and its foreign policy-making in respect to China as subliminally molded, if not ontologically underpinned, by the dominant proliferation of entrenched Sinophobic racism within Australian society. As such, the contemporary ‘China choice’ and centuries-old ‘Australian dilemma’ - the irreconcilability of Australia’s geography with its history - are all but synonymous: indeed, Australia is really not facing a new problem at all, as buzzwords like the ‘Thucydides Trap’ may suggest, but in reality is blindly continuing along its same racially-predicated ally versus foe conception that it has done since before Federation. Thus, it will be concluded that only by acknowledging the trauma of invasion and its ongoing deleterious effects, through a process of reconciliation and decolonization, can Australia achieve a mature, independent and sustainable foreign policy. Show more