Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd pressed Tuesday for a global effort to bring China into institutions, saying that the future of the world economy depended on it.
Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking China expert said that bodies such as the Group of 20 major economies and the East Asia Summit could put Beijing on the right path as its power grows.
"Continued regional and global economic growth will depend on maintaining for the next 40 years the sort of strategic stability in the East that we have seen over the last 40 years," Rudd said in an address in Washington.
"And this will not be an easy thing to do," he said at the Brookings Institution think-tank.
Rudd acknowledged myriad concerns abroad about Beijing - from growing assertiveness to human rights to environmental pollution - but said that it was crucial also to look at Chinese leaders' own interests and way of thinking.
Rudd said the United States and its allies should talk to China in the terms of its philosophical tradition - such as the concept, often cited by Beijing's leadership, of creating a "harmonious society" and "harmonious world."
"That is a China which helps construct a harmonious global order by contributing to and abiding by the rules of that global order - rules that not only enhance China's own interests but contribute to global public goods as well," Rudd said.
The former Australian leader pointed to the Group of 20 - a collection of the world's largest economies borne of the 2008 financial crisis - as an area where China has had a "comprehensively positive" role.
"The Chinese recognize, particularly at a time of potential global economic implosion, that they had huge interests at stake in preserving the order," he said.
Rudd also pointed to the East Asia Summit, an annual forum created in 2005 and which will include the US president for the first time this year when Barack Obama attends the talks on the Indonesian island of Bali.
