 A strategic partnership between China and Australia has been hailed a foreign policy high point for Prime Minister Julia Gillard, but A&U Professor Hugh White from the Strategic and Defence Study Centre is not so sure. He believes China agreed to the arrangement not necessarily because of a high regard for Australia, but rather to serve its own interests. Well, I think China was concerned at the way in which over the last few years and particularly in the wake of the Obama visit to Australia in November 2011 and the marines in Darwin, Australia had appeared to be swinging towards America in America's increasingly sort of assertive position in Asia that pivoted and all of that. And I think what the US, what China was trying to do was to find a way to pull Australia back. And so to ask the question I think to ask about what happened in Beijing during Gillard's visit was why did China do this? And I think China did it very much as a ploy in moving Australia back from its close along with the United States closer towards China. I don't think China will ever be the kind of ally to Australia that the United States has been. And I don't think it would be a mistake to imagine the future of the Chinese relationship in those terms. I think the challenge for us though is that we in Australia have grown up thinking of the US alliance, the US relationship as kind of a natural model for a strong relationship with a strong power. But that's not going to be the case anymore. China is a different kind of power. And we in Australia have never dealt with a country as strong as China is today, as important as China is today to Australia, which is not an ally, which is not a country we've appeared to trust our security to, which is what we've done with America, what we've done with the UK for that. So I think when we think about what the relationship with China is going to look like, we need to clear our mind of all of our past experience and think of something completely different. The thing is with the term and the shape of Australia's future relationship with China more than anything else is how China's relationship with the United States evolves. And if the US-China relationship evolves peacefully in a stable and cooperative way, they'll always be competitors of course, but if they manage their competition down and they manage their cooperation up, then there's no reason why Australia shouldn't develop a relationship with China, which just keeps, which looks a bit like the way the relationship's developed over the last few years, but just keeps on getting bigger as China gets bigger. But if the US-China relationship becomes more competitive, if it becomes more a relationship with a strategic rival, then Australia is going to find it increasingly difficult to develop the kind of relationship we've now been dealing with China and maintain the kind of a United States. And so we're going to be forced to make some choices about how those relationships unfold. Now, the problem frustrating the phone is that we're pretending that's not happening. But in reality, the trend in the US-China relationship is much more like the second scenario I sketched than what we're seeing as a very steady, a very significant, very worrying increase in strategic rivalries, the foundation for the US-China relationship. And that's why I think when I look at what happened during the Chinese-China visit to Beijing, I don't ask myself, what does this mean in the bilateral Australia-China sense? It's how does this play into the triangular Canberra, Beijing, Washington situation? And in that case, I think this is Australia being pulled China's way. I think the question to ask is, what do they think in Washington? They don't like it precisely because Barack Obama came to Canberra. He gave his big speech about China in Canberra, precisely because to the Americans, it has become very important that Australia strongly support their position in the Western Pacific as the dominant power. They've noticed how over the last decade our relationship with China was growing. They're worried that that's meant that Australia has started to swing China's way. They see the relationship with China as an American country and they've wanted to pull Australia back. But if we just keep going to Beijing and saying, nice things to Beijing at the Washington and saying nice things to Washington, we're just going to end up being bounced back with support and pleasing neither of them will damage both relationships. So I think this is a way too naive a way of approaching this terribly challenging diplomatic task that Australia faces. I mean, at one level, I kind of sympathize with Gillard's predicament. She's dealing with a problem, the complexity of which no Australian Prime Minister has ever had to deal with before because we've never dealt with a country as powerful as China before in Asia. China is more powerful, relative to Australia, relative to the United States, relative to the rest of the world than any Asian power has ever been since Europeans out of Australia. We haven't dealt with a country like this before. It's more powerful relative to the United States than any country has been since the United States took over as the world's biggest economy in the 1880s. America's never dealt with a country like China. So this is all new territory for us and new territory for her, but I don't think she got it right so far.