As an Endeavour Research Fellowship recipient in 2016, Dr Chengxin Pan started his four-month research at Australian Studies Centre (ASC) at Peking University in early October. His research focuses on Australia in China’s strategic calculations.
 

Dr Pan, a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, has received a prestigious Endeavour Research Fellowship from the Australian Department of Education and Training to conduct his research. Hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at Peking University, he will spend four months examining how Chinese scholars, public intellectuals and policy-makers perceive Australia in a strategic sense. This includes how ‘China’ perceives Australia’s strategic role in the region and its key relations with regional and global actors, particularly the United States; how ‘China’ perceives its relationship with Australia, especially in the strategic context of U.S.-China relations; and what ‘China’ thinks about Australia’s ongoing debate about the ‘China choice’. In Australia’s China debate, there have been many explicit or implicit assumptions about how China perceives Australia, but so far few empirical studies have been done to test those assumptions. 

Dr Pan says the Endeavour Research Fellowship provides him with a great opportunity to study these highly policy-relevant questions. He has a longstanding interest in Western (including Australian) images and representations of China and cross-cultural dialogue. Two of his books focus on these themes: Knowledge, Desire, and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise (Edward Elgar, 2012, recently translated into Chinese as 《国际政治中的知识、欲望与权力：中国崛起的西方叙事》，社会科学文献出版社，2016年) and Australia and China: Challenges and Ideas in Cross-cultural Engagement (English edition, China Social Science Press, 2015). In April this year, he initiated and coordinated the ‘Australia-China Roundtable Series: In Dialogue with Distinguished Chinese International Relations Scholars’. Generously funded by the Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC) and supported by Deakin University, La Trobe University, the Australian National University, and the University of Sydney, he invited Professors Wang Jisi, Jia Qingguo and Yan Xuetong to Australia to give a series of highly successful talks in Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney. 

He chose the Australian Studies Centre at PKU as his host institution because the Centre has quickly become a hub for Australian Studies across China. This enables him to develop and expand collaboration with colleagues not only at PKU, but also at other Australian Studies Centres in Beijing and beyond. Hosting the BHP Billiton Chair for Australian Studies, the ASC at PKU has extensive expertise and academic resources on Australia and regularly hosts important scholarly events such as the first FASIC Conference (2013) and the recent Biennial Conference on Australian Studies (2016). He will also talk with scholars in the School of International Studies at PKU, where he graduated with Bachelor of Law and Master of Law in the 1990s. As a happy coincidence, Dr Pan was present as a reporter when the Australian Studies Centre at PKU was launched in August 1996.