Iron ore sits at the heart of this growth. It has flowed from the abundant mines of Western Australia in vast fleets of ships up to China to build the huge new cities and the infrastructure within and between them. It is estimated that this trade has created 27,000 high-quality jobs in Australia. It is the source of the wealth of billionaires like Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest. Even through the darkest moments of the global financial crisis of 2008, when the rest of the developed world declined through calamitous debt and negative growth, China has kept Australia prosperous. There can be few countries that enjoy such a straightforward relationship with the world’s emerging economic superpower, one that largely works to Australia’s advantage.

Can it really be this simple? Like many other Australian commentators, Charlton seems to yearn for complexity in a world that looks so straightforward. China has been too easy a gift horse, and the predisposition to hunt for a darker underside remains strong. The windfall that Chinese growth has brought Australia, he argues, has made Australia complacent and uncompetitive. Our productivity has fallen, and the country now stands outside the top twenty economies. We have become lazy, and we have just milked the Chinese bonanza, with no real interest in the fundamental unsustainability of what China is doing. ‘Joined together,’ Charlton writes, ‘we will rise or fall as one.’ This gives a messianic tone to what is, in effect, an extended warning. Our dependence on China, on this reading, makes us vulnerable, inured to easy returns from a country that has immense issues and may well go down in flames.

In his exposition of the economic fundamentals that underpin China now, Charlton shows, for an economist, a rare lucidity. His reading of China is simple enough. The state remains overly dominant in the economy, wages for Chinese people are too low, and their returns on bank deposits or other investment vehicles are so minimal that they act as an extra form of tax. Overwhelmingly, China remains addicted to investment rather than consumption. It saves for tomorrow. Sacrifice and hard work belong to the present. Australia is almost the mirror opposite, a country that dislikes investment, and where government is not trusted with citizens’ hard won money. This, more than any other characteristic, makes us different.

Charlton is right to say that Chinese policy-makers know that their citizens are no longer content to make such sacrifices. After all the saving and investment, they now want to have a piece of the good life. Their parents’ and grandparents’ harsh lives hold no appeal. More than a million Chinese have studied abroad in the last two decades, many in Australia. For those who don’t travel, good information about the wider world is readily available. China is one of the most networked countries on the planet, drenched in social media. For the emerging middle class, for all its complexity and unevenness across a huge economy like China’s, people want property, luxury goods, foreign travel – the same commodities as anywhere else. The Chinese government has to keep these people happy. Promising good rewards in ten or twenty years’ time no longer suffices. People want it now. The very nature of citizenship in China is changing, and the government has to respond to that.

Andrew Charlton

Complication as a cure for the simplicity making Australia lazy now is, in essence, Charlton’s remedy. He argues for a ‘flexible’ economy, one that weans itself off the quick, massive returns that feeding China’s resource hunger has offered until now. We have had the warning. Over the past two years, China’s resource needs have slowed as its growth has dropped below double digits. The economy that Charlton breathlessly describes, displaying the awe of many onlookers, is showing intimations of mortality. But the very way in which he frames the ensuing question is telling: ‘How do we maintain our prosperity when the boom times end?’ The calculation remains the same: when the current model of making money from China dries up, where will we turn? From what other sectors can we seek wealth and profit?

My hunch after thinking long about different aspects of China is that, despite Charlton’s eloquent diagnostic, the fact that he comes up with few solid policy proposals shows that the issue is not about where we should seek alternative prosperity, but how we might view our relationship with China in a wholly different way. We can stay in the territory of keeping things simple and sidestepping complexity. Perhaps the parlous experience of a country like the United Kingdom, which seems to never avoid complexity in its dealing with China, is warning enough. But Australia does need a more nuanced narrative than one based wholly on trade, doing deals, and economics. There are security, environmental, and cultural challenges (social cohesion and tackling inequality among them) to consider. But we lack a common intellectual language and framework to do so.

Charlton’s essay is a welcome addition to an important national debate on the place of China in our lives and our future. It illustrates the limits of thinking about the China–Australia relationship solely in terms of economics. Our search for the right sort of complexity to resolve the current malaise continues.