To balance or to bandwagon? Adjusting to China's rise during Australia's Rudd–Gillard era

Abstract

This article examines Australian grand strategy in the context of China's rise during the period of Labor governments between 2007 and 2013. Australia's grand-strategic posture is treated as the dependent variable, plotted along a balancing-to-bandwagoning continuum. Australia remained within the hedging zone throughout, although there were discernible shifts in posture during the period. While momentum was building towards a more overt balancing posture during the Kevin Rudd era, the various balancing and bandwagoning ‘signals’ were more contradictory after Julia Gillard unseated Rudd 2010; in short, she stabilised Australia's grand-strategic posture, meaning it remains best characterized as ‘dominance denial’.

Keywords:

• Australia
• grand strategy
• China's rise
• balancing and bandwagoning

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Alan Dupont, William Clapton, Shirley Scott and You Ji for their comments on early drafts of this article, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the original version submitted to the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Rudd returned as leader for 14 weeks after polls suggested Gillard would lead Labor to a catastrophic defeat.

2. Australia depends on the US for defence against a nuclear attack or invasion by a hostile great power, and for intelligence and weapons procurement.

3. Either: the Chinese people felt the Olympics signalled their country had ‘arrived’ as a great power, and pressured Beijing to ‘act tough’; or, China's ‘coming out party’ was ‘rained on’ by human rights criticism, feeding conspiracy theorising about Western attempts to ‘cut it down to size’.

4. Compare to: US 101 per cent; Greece 156 per cent; Japan 211 per cent.

5. In other areas she struggled, most notably in dealing with the thorny problem of asylum seekers.