Minyue, Hou

Abstract
The actions successively taken by the Australian government after John Howard had assumed office in March 1996 infuriated Beijing, making it believe that Canberra was changing its approach to China to one which was more pro-US and less friendly to China. Canberra’s more outward-looking defence policy represented by its active involvement in seeking a solution to the East Timor crisis in 1999, its support of the US missile defence systems and Bush’s statement of helping defend Taiwan after the spy plane incident between Beijing and Washington in 2001, followed by Downer’s initiative for a four-nation security dialogue, led Chinese analysts to label the Australian security policy as the “Howard doctrine,” characterised by a ‘new forward defence’ which was seen as the Australian version of American ‘neo-interventionism’. The Beijing-Canberra economic partnership, strengthened by the acceleration of China’s economic modernisation has helped bring about a degree of reconciliation between them, nonetheless, any substantial improvement of mutual trust between them in terms of regional security will be time-consuming and largely affected by Sino-American relations.
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