China and Australia.

In purchasing power parity, China is now the second-largest economy in the world, having overtaken France in 1984, Russia in 1985, Germany in 1987 and Japan in 1995. . . . China will still . . . in 2015, be a relatively poor country . . . . It . . . lacks the governance framework that capital today requires—the capacity to enforce contracts, a free flow of information, and so on. . . .

In 1989, jolted by the Tiananmen demonstrations, . . . the party’s leadership group decided that it would not go the way of Gorbachev’s USSR . . . . Some perestroika, certainly, but as little glasnost as possible, if any. It drew up an unspoken contract with the Chinese people: we guarantee constantly improving living standards, you let us rule relatively untrammelled. The awkward proviso was, and remains, that the party rules without corruption. But an unaccountable one-party state is by definition corrupt. . . .

. . . Economic growth is the single goal behind which all others line up some way back. But pressure for change, for more accountability and less corruption, continues to build . . . .

. . . [C]apital continues . . . to flood the country . . . . And the people who stand behind that capital, the captains of Western business, today form the constituency that provides the most important succour for the Chinese elite. . . .

. . . [E]conomic growth is perceived as today’s core value . . . . Today there is a coterie in Beijing of business consultants and others, many from the USA, whose position closely mirrors that of the Western fellow travellers who joined in the Long March and remained ever after in drab guesthouses on the fringes of Beijing, Maoists long after most Chinese had come to detest communism and to fear Mao. . . . Microsoft recently blocked the use of . . . its new China-based internet portal.

The leading cadres have long developed a fall-back position, though, in case the current strategy starts to unravel. . . . [T]he leading cadre families will continue to pull economic strings through control of key assets.

* * * *

What of the other major fronts that will affect Australia’s future? . . .

First, trade. We are negotiating a free trade agreement . . . .

* * * *

Second, the strategic world. It is often said that China has no acquisitive ambitions. That may be true. But it is determined to obtain reliable access to the resources and especially the energy it needs to maintain its pace of growth. That’s why it has 4000 troops protecting its oil wells in the Sudan, and why it is building ports in Burma and Pakistan, and why it is agonising over ways to avoid shipping supplies through the perilous, piratical Malacca Strait between Malaysia and Sumatra. And of course that’s also why it likes dealing with Australia, with minimal transport and other risks.

"Australia's Chinese Future." By Rowan Callick, Quadrant Magazine, January 2006 (emphasis added).