Throughout 2020, as our relationship with China collapsed and our economic opportunities evaporated, Canberra has clung to a homely analogy. Beijing is just a schoolyard bully, and if we stand up to them they will soon slink away.
That makes it all look easy, but the analogy is dangerously misleading. This is not a schoolyard, China is not a schoolboy, it hasn’t slunk away, and nothing about our predicament is as easy as the government would like us to believe.
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Hugh White is the author of The China Choice and How To Defend Australia, and the Quarterly Essays Power Shift, Hard New World, Without America and Sleepwalk to War. He is an emeritus professor of strategic studies at ANU.
