Description
Australia was an early supporter of subnational relationships. Even before President Eisenhower championed people-to-people diplomacy, the city of Parkes in New South Wales twinned with Coventry (United Kingdom) in 1939 in order to utilise historical and cultural connections. In the three decades after WW2, Australian cities and states, driven by normative and historical alignments, created dyadic links with partners in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In contrast, relations with China were slower to start. It was not until the 1980s that Australian states and territories began to reach out to their Chinese counterparts. Drawing upon newly opened archival materials, this paper looks at the development of subnational relations between Australian states and cities and their partners in Chinese provinces and cities. While these materials highlight the overarching narrative of cultural connectivity, other issues – such as economic and commercial motivations as well as personal preferences – played a key role in extending diplomatic relations into the subnational realm. This paper explores and weights these different variables in order to analyse which ones had the most impact on these new forms of bilateral engagement. In doing so, it sheds new light on the underlying motivations behind such relations as well as the policy directions on the then growing diplomatic relationship between Australia and China.
