China will have an impact on Australia 10 times greater than that of Japan 40 years ago, the Future Summit in Melbourne was told.
Jonathan West, an Australian who is associate professor of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business Administration, said Australians believed China would buy Australia’s products – food, commodities, energy, raw materials – and Australia would buy China’s labour-intensive manufactures.
“I think that story is dangerously wrong,” he said in a keynote address yesterday. “Yes, there are great opportunities to sell to China. But China is also emerging as a strong competitor in the things we want to sell to the world.”