From The Age:
There may be hidden costs to Australia’s steadily increasing economic dependency on China.
East Asia should “have a role in global governance commensurate with its economic and strategic weight”, said Treasurer Peter Costello in Sydney last month. For “East Asia” read China and – to a lesser degree – Japan and South Korea. For an Australian political leader, let alone a conservative one, to make such a statement a generation ago would have been unthinkable. China, for all its economic liberation since the late 1970s, is still a country under communist rule; a place where political dissent is brutally repressed and human rights continue to be confused with basic economic ones of food and shelter. But such essential contradictions have seldom stood in the way of business.
