FCA Briefing with Hugh White and Wen-Ti-Sung

March 24, 2022 Raj Suri

The two experts, Professor Hugh White from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre School of International, Political and Strategic Studies at ANU, and Wen-Ti Sung, a lecturer in the ANU Taiwan Studies Programme, talked with the FCA Members at a virtual briefing on Zoom on Wednesday, 23 March 2022.

Each expert briefed the FCA Members on the current situation concerning China’s attitude in the Ukraine war, and, if the reaction of the Western world will deter or encourage a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and how Australia can handle a more and more assertive China.

Wen-Ti Sung is a lecturer in the ANU Taiwan Studies Programme, with particular expertise in: Chinese elite politics and foreign policy and Taiwanese politics and foreign policy; Taiwan-China-United States trilateral relations, and foreign policy think tanks and track II mechanisms in the Indo-Pacific region. His dissertation, “Influencing American foreign policy towards Greater China: the role of epistemic community and foreign policy thinktanks”, examines the policy influence of foreign policy thinktanks in shaping American foreign policy towards China and Taiwan.|A regular on the thinktank and media scenes, Wen-Ti has served as an expert commentator for international media outlets such as: Newsweek, Al Jazeera, BBC Chinese, The Daily Beast, Radio Free Asia, ABC Australia, SBS Chinese, The Australian Business Review, Business Today, etc.

Hugh White, AO, is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. Hugh’s work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

He has been an intelligence analyst, journalist, ministerial adviser, departmental official, think tanker and academic. In the 1990s he served as International Relations Adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and as Deputy Secretary of Defence for Strategy and Intelligence. Hugh was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. He was the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). His recent publications include Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing and The China Choice: Why America should share power. The China Choice has also been published in Chinese and Japanese.