Don’t pick sides in superpower rivalry, universities warned

Universities must stop “pre-emptively” picking sides between superpowers as Australia confronts the most challenging geopolitical landscape in its history, according to strategist Hugh White.

Professor White said successive Australian governments had pressured universities to side with them in treating China as a menacing competitor to the US-led order.

“The cheer squads for governments have tended to present the choices as…China is not a threat at all and [we] do business with it as we used to – which would be naive and inappropriate – or it’s a country that we simply can’t do business with and have to lock out as much as possible,” Professor White told Times Higher Education.

“I don’t think either of those is a viable model…for us as a country [or] for the university sector. We need to approach our future relations with China – and, for that matter, with India and…other powers – on the expectation that they will end up as significant players in a multipolar global order, and also significant players in what you might call the international academic enterprise.”

Professor White, a former head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, has also worked as a senior defence official and adviser to Australia’s prime minister. He told the Universities Australia conference that the evolving world order featured five superpowers – the US, China, Russia, India and Europe “rediscovering itself as a strategic entity”.

Australia’s region would no longer “be made safe for us” by an English-speaking friend, he said. “For the first time in our national history we face the task of making our way in an Asia which is not dominated by one of our mates. We’re going to live on the margin between a Chinese sphere of influence and an Indian sphere of influence,” he said.

“This is so alien to Australia’s way of thinking about ourselves, because we’re a joiner. We’re an ally; we’re a mate. And countries that sit on boundaries are nobody’s mate. [On education and] research, we want to preserve the principle of as much openness as possible – because you never know who your mates are going to be.”

Professor White said Australian universities had a history of “pre-emptively complying” with anticipated government preferences around dealings with China. “Universities should be very careful about pre-emptively conceding such points,” he told THE. “They should…push back against unthinking government over-regulation.”

They should also speak out more on “how the hell we should be responding to China and India and other rising powers. We need a much more sophisticated, nuanced, detailed and, I might say, courageous contribution to the national debate about how we deal with this fundamental change in our circumstances.”

Neither China nor Russia could be “defeated at a cost that we in the West are willing to pay”, Professor White warned. “It would be a mistake for universities, or for governments in their dealings with the universities, to pretend that we don’t have to be a lot more circumspect with China than we used to be,” he said.

“It’s also a mistake to [expect] a sort of West versus the others approach and we can afford to just lock China out. It won’t work.”

He also warned against viewing India as “a counterweight to China” rather than as a power in its own right. “India…will pursue its interests ahead of ours. That’s what great powers do.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com