Former prime minister Paul Keating’s intervention that Australia needs to work harder to accommodate China’s rise highlights the importance of having an informed national debate on the issue.

Keating is right to say that any reflexive support for US containment strategies against China should be rejected, but he is wide of the mark in his reading of how Australia should be reacting to China’s rise.

Two key assumptions underpin the accommodationist argument embedded in Keating’s remarks: that China will replace the US as the dominant major power in Asia and that Australia should be adjusting to this inevitable transition now. To put it mildly, both of the assumptions are highly contestable. There is little indication, let alone factual evidence, that the US is in danger of slipping behind China strategically in the region.

Across Asia, China’s trading reach continues to increase, but in the most intimate form of economic interaction, foreign direct investment, the US remains streets ahead. In Australia alone, the proportion of US FDI presently outstrips that of China by a factor of five to one. Militarily, although the People’s Liberation Army’s combat radius grows day by day, no serious analyst maintains that China will have the capability to defeat the US in a war in the foreseeable future. So it’s difficult to see what evidence the accommodationist argument is based on.

Read the full “Tributary deference to China not in our interests” article in The Australian by Andrew O’Neil, professor and dean in the Griffith University Business School.