Author: Richard Rigby, ANU

Challenge is a word that carries a heavy burden of nuance: it can convey a sense of threat, it can be an inspiration, it poses questions – often difficult ones – and it can also be double-edged, in that the challenge frequently applies as much to the alleged challenger as it does to those on the receiving end. Where China is concerned, the word is appropriate in every sense; but an important part of the challenge is precisely to decide which aspect is of the greatest importance. Only having done this can we attempt to frame policies, or at least provide the best possible advice to the policymakers, which will enable us to meet the challenge that today’s — and tomorrow’s — China poses to us, and to itself.

If there is a single word that should be applied to China, whether speaking of its international impact or its domestic situation, it should be ‘complexity’. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Richard Rigby, ANU China Institute

There are many ways in which a relationship can be mutually beneficial – diplomatically, politically, commercially, educationally, economically. As someone who’s been involved in the Australia-China relationship in one way or another since the beginning of the 1970s, I’m struck by how one can now tick more and more items off, and add new one’s to the list.

The decision to establish relations in late 1972 with the election of the Whitlam government was clearly mutually beneficial, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it.

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Author: Richard Rigby, Head of the China Institute, ANU

As one whose task it was – together with some excellent colleagues – to report and try to make sense of events as they unfolded in China from 1988 to their tragic denouement on the night of 3-4 June 1989, Zhao’s account comes as very welcome confirmation that, basically, we got it right.

Against a background of growing popular concern over corruption and inflation, the broad outlines were clear enough: Zhao’s intensifying struggle with his more conservative opponents, the way his efforts to defuse an increasingly tense situation following the death of Hu Yaobang on 15 April were systematically sabotaged, the cutting off of Zhao’s direct access to Deng Xiaoping, the subsequent monopolisation of information going to Deng by ‘a small handful’ (to use the phraseology of the time) of Zhao’s enemies, Deng’s final loss of confidence in Zhao, Zhao’s loss of power, martial law, the massacre and its aftermath.

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