Australia and China. A Joint Report on the Bilateral Relationship

Организация: Australian Centre on China in the World, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations

Издательство: ANU, CICIR

ISBN: 978-0-646-57376-2

In April 2010, Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd presented the annual George E Morrison Lecture at The Australian National University.

The Morrison Lectures have been held at ANU since 1948. Chinese residents in Australia founded the series in 1932 to “honour for all time the great Australian who rendered valuable service to China”, the writer, journalist and adventurer George Morrison (1862-1920). They also hoped that the lectures would contribute to cultural relations and mutual understanding at a time of heightened international tension and suspicion.

The year immediately preceding Kevin Rudd’s Morrison Lecture, “Australia and China in the World”, there had again been moments of tension in Australia’s relationship with the People’s Republic. Some were due in no small part to the inevitable disconnect between mutual positions over a range of issues; others related to the realm of public opinion and different responses to the same events.

For those immediately concerned with Australia’s place in Asia and the Pacific, the country’s bilateral relationship with China, and our interconnectedness with the broader Chinese world, it was evident that the closer our two countries became the more we would experience the particular discomforts of propinquity and intimacy.

We thus feel that it is more pressing than ever before for concerned bodies and inpiduals to promote higher levels of mutual Australia and China literacy, an engagement that is not just utilitarian but in-depth and unequivocal. This, I believe, requires not merely a grounded realism but also a long-term, multifaceted understanding that builds on the past but can see beyond the present.

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