The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an emerging superpower is posing a range of new challenges to countries like Australia. When compared to the Soviet Union era, there is an entirely new and interactive terrain that is far more complicated to negotiate. While the PRC retains some of the behavioral patterns of the 20th century’s authoritarian regimes — paranoia, hyper-sensitivity, obsessive control — unlike the Soviet Union it has the global economic reach to be able to shift behaviors in other countries without direct or even indirect force. While internal coercion remains a prominent tool of control for Beijing, external coercion is becoming unnecessary for the regime as organizations are beginning to predict the PRC’s sensitivities and preemptively
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