Perhaps Pretoria can take a leaf from Canberra’s book. Recognizing the new ‘Winds of Change’, Australia has set its sail to take advantage of China’s rise. In its foreign policy white paper titled Australia in the Asian Century, published in late 2012, Canberra recognized that the twenty-first century will be the Asian century and has set out a comprehensive strategy to take advantage of it - from mandating the study of Asian languages in its schools, to public diplomacy to people-to-people links.

However, Canberra is not putting all its eggs in one basket and has hedged its bet by also aligning with the US by agreeing in 2011 to a symbolic stationing of 250 US marines in Darwin. South Africa should seriously consider copying Australia’s move of both embracing China’s and Asia’s rise and at the same time counter-balancing the Chinese with the US and the EU.

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Written by Steven C.Y. Kuo, a postdoctoral research fellow of the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He is currently working on a book titled: ‘China in Post-Conflict Africa’.

First published on the South African Foreign Policy Initiative website