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China Down Under

Canberra bans Huawei from 5G
Aug 31, 2018 (WiC 422)

Are Australia and China friends again? So it appeared just a few days ago in early August after the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, delivered a speech in praise of the bilateral relationship at a university in Sydney. Outwardly, it seemed ...

Taking its toll

How a chat with a taxi driver hints at tensions in Sino-Australian relations
Jul 27, 2018 (WiC 419)

“What is your country?” my taxi driver in Beijing asked me. “Australia,” I replied. That was all the driver needed. Why is Australia so close to America? Why aren’t you more friendly towards China? And so it went on for about five ...

Huawei’s Aussie problem

National security concerns over new 5G network
Jun 15, 2018 (WiC 413)

The attractiveness of Chinese goods used to lie in the fact that they were cheap, with prices low enough to overcome many concerns about quality. But what if they are both cheap and of high quality? Or in the case of Huawei, China’s leading ...

Do Australians ‘get’ China?

Our columnist responds to a compatriot critic in Hong Kong
Jun 1, 2018 (WiC 411)

An Australian expat based in Hong Kong wrote to me recently after I published a column about diplomatic developments in the Asia-Pacific. The writer’s aim was less to comment on the article’s content than to castigate me for what he ...

How Australians view a trade war

Caught in the middle
Apr 20, 2018 (WiC 405)

The casual observer of global politics might think that Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Chinese trade practices would be winning fans among regional countries which, like the US, fret about Beijing’s rising power. Australia, for example, ...

A new column from the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor on China’s impact on Australia
Mar 16, 2018 (WiC 401)

There are lots of things you notice when returning to live in Australia, as I did in early 2018, after decades away. The wealth, for example, which comes from a quarter century of uninterrupted growth; the good food and the coffee, plus the ...