Asian Studies

There Goes the Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia by Michael Wesley

Item: There Goes the Neighbourhood
Author: Hugh White

by Hugh White •

July–August 2011, no. 333

New South, $32.95 pb, 202 pp

Asian Studies

There Goes the Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia by Michael Wesley

by Hugh White •

July–August 2011, no. 333

Sometime around 1820, forty years after its Industrial Revolution began, Britain overtook China to become the world’s richest country. Sometime between now and 2020, forty years after China’s own Industrial Revolution was launched by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China is set to overtake the United States and regain its place at the top of the world’s economy.

Hugh White

Hugh White is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He studies Australian strategic and defence policy, and the regional and global security issues that most directly affect Australia. He has worked on Australian strategic, defence and foreign-policy issues for thirty years in a number of capacities inside and outside government, including the Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Department of Defence 1995–2000, an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and to Kim Beazley. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. His recent publications include How to Defend Australia (2019, Black Inc.) and Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing, published in Quarterly Essay 39 (2010). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.