1304th OGM and Open Lecture

“This is going to be different:
Learning to live with Chinese Power”

Professor Hugh White AO FASSA

Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies, Australian National University

Date: Wednesday, 6 July 2022, 6.30 pm AEST 
Venue: Gallery Room, State Library of NSW, Shakespeare Place, Sydney
Video recording: YouTube video
All are welcome

Summary:  China's rise drives the most consequential shift in Australia's international environment since European settlement. So far we are in denial about this, hoping that a reassertion of American supremacy will contain China's power and preserve the old US-led regional order which has served us so well. But what are the chances of those hopes being realised, and what can we do if they are dashed? How does Australia make its way in an Asia no longer dominated by our Great and Powerful Friends? How we answer that question will do much to define us as a nation.

Hugh White is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. He spent much of his career in the Australian Government, including as International Relations Advisor to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Department of Defence. He was the founding Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and from 2004 to 2011 he was Head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. His major publications include Power Shift: Australia’s future between Washington and Beijing, [2010], The China Choice: Why America should share power, [2012], Without America: Australia’s future in the New Asia [2017], and How to defend Australia [2019]. In the 1970s he studied philosophy at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford.