The US must share power with China
August 7, 2012
Paul Keating
· Asian stability cannot be directed by American military force.
I BELIEVE the reason Hugh White asked me to launch his book, The China Choice, was not that he wanted a former prime minister to do it, but at least one who regarded his subject as central to Australia's security and prosperity.
White reminds us that the United States has never dealt with a country which is as rich and as powerful as China, instancing that the Soviet Union was never its economic match. He asks why the US never saw it coming; how did it not see the challenge to its primacy in the Pacific developing? And he answers his own question by nominating September 11, 2001：the time when the US, at the height of its unipolar moment, decided to lay off its strategic bets in the Middle East, leaving the Chinese to the vagaries of their struggle with poverty.
The failure to understand the dispersal of global power at the end of the Cold War, of the post-colonial blossoming, of the availability of capital and technology, saw the US miss the chance to create a new and more representative world order.
But not all of us missed it. For two decades, I have been making the point in public speeches that the industrial revolution broke the nexus between population and GDP. That once the productivity-inducing inputs of capital and technology became ubiquitous, it was only a matter of time before the great states by way of population once again became the great states by way of GDP. Hugh White has long been making the same point.
This is the principal reason behind China's restoration to the economic primacy it enjoyed before 1800. It is the same reason the Indian economy will be larger than that of the US by mid-century.
When we Australians were running around North Asia in the early 1990s setting up the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum and the APEC Leaders' Meeting, we were doing it because we saw it all coming. The rising might of the former colonial states thawing from their Cold War status, the productivity equilibration, the prospect of open regionalism and the chance to see the US engaged at high policy and at presidential level with the leaders of China and Japan were all drivers of our foreign policy initiatives.
Why it took the US until 2011 to make the so-called ''pivot'' back to Asia; to acknowledge the centrality of Asia in the new strategic settings is a matter of wonderment.
White tells us China's instincts are ''ultimately about matters of status and identity''. He says China will not relinquish its claim to status as a great power, even if this leads to conflict. And he goes on to argue that should the US try ''to preserve the status quo and avoid fundamental change in the relationship, it will be choosing to accept China as a strategic rival''.
He concludes that ''only together can they make the mutual concessions needed to pull back towards cooperation''.
White sees this boiling down to three options：for the US to stay as now and preserve the status quo, to calculate the odds and withdraw, or to shift policy and share power in the region with China and other states.
He argues the third option is ''the one that best serves American interests''. More than that, he claims reconciliation can arrive ''through a new order in which China's authority and influence grows enough to satisfy the Chinese, and America's role remains large enough to ensure that China's power is not misused''.
And he concedes the really hard part in building an order of this kind is in the negotiation of ''mutually acceptable limits''.
I have long held the view that the future of Asian stability cannot be cast by a non-Asian power - especially by the application of US military force.
We need a structure which encourages China to participate in the region rather than seek to dominate it. Indeed, the development of such a structure can provide a region that allows China to participate but not dominate.
Which brings me to Australia. There is every reason to try and face America up to its changed economic and strategic circumstances, rather than traffic in the pretence that the rise of a state potentially larger than itself will have little strategic consequence for either it or us.
All of us in the debate in Australia believe Asia will be a safer and better place with the continued engagement of the US in the region. And with our trade preponderantly in North Asia and the greater part of that with China, there is every reason to support the development of a cooperative structure between the US and China in the Pacific. And this must mean recognising China's prerogatives as a great power and the legitimacy of its government.
If we are pressed into the notion only democratic governments are legitimate, our future is limited to action within some confederation of democracies.
Critics of China are quick to invoke human rights and values as though the human condition had not improved dramatically across the Chinese landscape. The seemingly perpetual invocation of this mantra attributes no moral value to the scale and quality of the Chinese achievement.
And on the question of values, as White eloquently remarks, ''peace is a value too'', arguing that that value weighs a moral obligation to minimise the risk of war if at all possible.
Paul Keating was prime minister from 1991 to 1996. This is an edited version of his speech at the launch yesterday of Hugh White's book, The China Choice：Why America Should Share Power.
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