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Handling China "correctly"

However you view the country, it can't be ignored. China has already made an impact on the economies of many nations around the globe and will increasingly do so.

James Fallow spent 3 years as The Atlantic's resident correspondent in China. He was interviewed in Beijing by Anthony Anderton for a piece "Modern China: Handle with Care" in the new Sydney Ideas Quarterly [well worth accessing and reading incidentally!].

Anderton writes:

"Getting China right has never been more important for Australia. We are now acutely aware of China’s critical role in our economic prosperity. Yet there is considerable uncertainty about the rise of China and what this means for Australia and our region. How, for example, should we interpret and respond to China’s growing military and strategic influence in our region? What about Chinese ownership of our resource assets?

In debating these issues, China is often depicted in one-dimensional caricatures: China the boundless economic opportunity, China the brutal dictatorship, China the strategic threat, even China the saviour of the global financial crisis. Such images make headlines and fuel a lively public debate, but they also mask China’s diversity, complexity and contradictions.

One the most insightful commentators on contemporary China, The Atlantic’s James Fallows, suggests we need to accept the complexity and the contradictions inherent in the modern Chinese condition.

Fallows observes the tendency for simplistic explanations among Western observers. “People have to fit [China] into a very simple plot line. Either China is good and is helping us become rich, or China is bad and is destroying the world and an argument which says yes, both those things are true plus a thousand other things–that is a hard thing for people to want to take the time to absorb.”"

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