When Chinese Premier Li Qiang lands in Australia for a three day visit, he will encounter an official discourse that rehearses the well known formula from the present national government: “We will cooperate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in our national interest.” Economic relations have taken a positive turn over the past 12 months, with a raft of anti-trade measures on both sides being incrementally removed. That said, even during the years of diplomatic tensions (mid-2020 to mid-2022), trade between the countries continued to expand. This suggests that trade dynamics are driven more by resource complementarities than diplomatic vicissitudes. Nevertheless, few would argue that diplomatic tensions are preferable to normal, stable statecraft.
But, beneath the veneer of diplomatic normalisation is a nation that remains hemmed by the bookends of (1) what historian David Walker described as “an anxious nation” when he examined Australian attitudes towards China and Asia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and (2) a deep seated fear of abandonment by a great power, as observed by noted Australian foreign policy analyst Allan Gyngell. So much is clear from the latest public opinion survey from the UTS-ACRI / BIDA Poll 2024. While Australians want to continue to benefit from the economic relations with China - though many are wary of “over dependence” - the majority believe China is a national security risk and support greater defence spending to respond to the so-called China threat.
Key survey findings include:
64% expressed concerns about Australia’s relationship with China, though 62% believed there were benefits to Australia of the bilateral relationship
61% believe Australia should continue building relations with China, but 71% expressed distrust of the Chinese government
59% supported the Australian government taking a “harder line” on China, with 71% believing that “China is a security threat to Australia”
More Australians believed China (48%) rather than Australia (31%) should be responsible for improving the relationship
31% believed relations would improve over the next three years, while 50% believed that conflict between the nations “within three years is a distinct possibility”
64% believe that the Australian government is right to increase military spending
48% believe that AUKUS “will help keep Australia secure from a military threat from China”
43% believe that Australia “should form trade and security blocs with other countries that deliberately exclude China”
46% believed that Australia should support the U.S. in a conflict over Taiwan, and 43% said that Australia should remain neutral
These generally negative, wary and hostile attitudes towards China aren’t recent phenomena. They have a long historical pedigree, suggesting that whatever the formal stabilities, a meaningful relationship based on mutual interest and trust remains a long way off. And that’s despite the fact that 53% of survey respondents believe that the bilateral relationship contributes to regional stability and security.
Australia-China relations in the longue duree
Australia’s relations with China and Chinese peoples span multiple centuries.
Archaeological records and aboriginal oral histories indicate that Chinese traders interacted with Australia’s indigenous peoples well before the British first fleet came to the continent’s shores. Oral histories tell of direct contact between Chinese and Yolngu people. There are also suggestions that Chinese sailors first discovered and mapped the Australian continent in the early 15th century, well before European and English colonialists.
From the 1700s (at least), before the colony of New South Wales was established in 1788, the Aboriginal people of northern Australia were trading trepang (sea cucumber) with fishermen from Makassar, a port-city on the island of Sulawesi (now Indonesia). The fisherman from Makassar would sail to Australia around December each year, and stay months. Living on Australian beaches they would collect and process sea cucumber before returning with their harvest.
Their harvest was destined for China. Indeed, trade in sea cucumber connected the north coast of Australia, Makassar and southern China.
However, after white settlement (1788), Australia’s relationships with Asia and China (and the Chinese) more particularly became increasingly vexed and marked by extended episodes of tension and violence.
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Sinophobia: Version 1.0
The first recorded Chinese immigrant, from Guangzhou in southern China, to Australia arrived in Sydney in 1818. By the 1850s, the gold rush attracted a large number of Chinese to Australia. An influx of Chinese migration to the gold fields saw their successes fuel arising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment and hostility towards them by the Anglo-Europeans working the fields.
The first anti-Chinese demonstration occurred in Bendigo, in the Victorian goldfields, in July 1854. Some of the demonstrations sought to exclude the Chinese from a goldfield, or a portion of it. Brawls between European and Chinese miners erupted at Daylesford and Castlemaine. A group of Chinese travelling to the Victorian diggings from Robe discovered a new goldfield at Ararat, but were driven off their discovery by Europeans. Similar events took place in New South Wales. European miners drove Chinese off the diggings at Rocky River in New England (NSW) in 1856. There were further confrontations at Adelong in 1857 and Tambaroora in 1858. In Victoria the Buckland River goldfield was the scene of repeated incidents, culminating in a major riot in July 1857.
This ongoing tension and resentment from the Anglo-European gold miners came to a head in the Lambing Flat Riots, a series of violent anti-Chinese demonstrations in the Burrangong region of NSW. There between 2,000-3,000 European, American and Australian-born miners attacked about 2,000 Chinese miners and drove them from the fields. Chinese camps were destroyed and numerous were injured.
One of the concerns that the Anglo-Europeans had during this period of time about Chinese immigrants was that they were carriers of disease and smallpox, which posed a health risk to the local population.
Newspapers at that time often ran inflammatory materials, designed to be shocking, scary and give Chinese immigrants a bad reputation.
Sinophobia 2.0
For the best part of the 20th century, Australia’s vexed and at times hostile relationship with the Chinese continued.
At the heart of Australia’s posture towards non-Europeans - particularly the Chinese - was the White Australia Policy. The White Australia Policy was a set of policies designed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origin – especially Asians (primarily Chinese) and Pacific Islanders – from immigrating to Australia. The Policy came into effect in 1901, with the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act, and continued in various guises through to the 1970s. The Policy was foundational to the Australian national identity.
This period also saw Australia’s external security relationships go through a major shift. As an English colony Australia was tethered to the British Crown and the Commonwealth. Its security came from its relationship to the British Empire. This situation existed until World War 2, when it became clear that the British Empire was in no position to provide Australia with the necessary security in the face of Japanese aggression.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the sinking of the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin became increasingly concerned about Australia's reliance on Britain and the naval base at Singapore. As the fall of Singapore became increasingly obvious, Curtin concluded that Australia needed a new ally. Australia turned to the U.S.
Turn to Asia
White Australia was formally disbanded in finality in 1973 with the introduction of laws prohibiting the restriction of migration based on race. In 1975 the national government introduced the Racial Discrimination Act, making racially based selection criteria illegal. At around this time, Australia recognised the People’s Republic of China (21 December 1972).
Relations between Australia and China progressively improved. Indeed, by the late 1980s, the Australian government recognised that Australia’s future economic prosperity was going to become increasingly dependent on expanding its trading and investment relationships with the countries of North Asia (Japan, Korea and China) and to a lesser extent South East Asia. A number of key reports were published at the time, which bookend the explicit policy commitment towards expanding bilateral economic relations.
Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendency (1989), otherwise known as the Garnaut Report, argued for domestic and international policy realignment and reform and recognised Australia's future lay very much to the north. By 1994, the Asian Languages and Australia’s Economic Future report (the Rudd Report) was submitted to the Council of Australian Governments and a national strategy was subsequently agreed to drive Australian Asian literacy. That report recommended that every Australian child from primary school year 3 onwards be required to study at least one of four Asian languages - Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian.
Australia’s Asian literacy - including China literacy - peaked in 2002, according to some analysts. This year coincided with the cessation of the national Asian languages and cultures education strategy, as coordinated funding was discontinued.
Despite this, Australia’s relations with China continued to flourish, especially on economic fronts. Australia also saw another wave of immigration from China, so much so that by 2011 immigrants from China had overtaken the traditional main source of migration - the United Kingdom.
Today there are over 1.2 million Chinese speakers living in Australia. Of these about half are migrants from the People’s Republic of China. Trade relations have also flourished, with China now Australia’s largest trading partner. Indeed, about 30% of Australian trade these days is with China. The importance of bilateral trade to both nations was recognised with the execution of the China Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) in 2016.
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Sinophobia 3.0
Yet, despite the burgeoning economic complementarity, and the establishment of the ChAFTA, bilateral relations have not been smooth sailing in recent years.
Examples of the deterioration in economic relations include the prohibition of Huawei from participating in Australian government telecommunications projects, and various anti-dumping measures initiated by Australia and China against each other’s products. Despite these various measures, trade between the countries has, in aggregate terms, continued to grow. Diplomatic tensions did not fundamentally affect trading value, though some sectors were arguably more impacted than others (with wine and seafood being the most obvious).
Deteriorating bilateral relations has spilled over into non-economic arenas. The main backdrop to this has been the shift in American military-security posture since the Obama “pivot to Asia” in 2011, which has reverberated through the Australian defence establishment. The intensification of American hostility towards China during the 2010s also impacted Australian attitudes. The Turnbull Government’s banning of Huawei - the first such action in the world - exemplifies the alignment of Australian “security” priorities with those of the United States. This intuitive alignment can be understood by reference to the notion of Australia as a “subimperial power” (as argued by Professor Clinton Fernandes), which argues that Australia’s defence/security policy establishment sees Australia’s national security interest to be intrinsically tied to ongoing U.S. primacy in Asia (and globally). Consequently, Australian policy should always been aligned with the preservation of American primacy.
This positioning, as a subimperial power, is also linked to a deep historical unease as an Anglo-European settler colonial nation in Asia. This unease underpins what historical David Walker has described as an “anxious nation” in which Australia’s geographical place in Asia, and its cultural-historic roots in Northern Europe, generated displacement unease, which continues to permeate Australia’s sense of identity and place in the world. Indeed, in foreign policy circles, this “anxiety” feeds a “fear of abandonment” (Gyngell), in which Australia loses the security of its great transatlantic protectors.
By 2018 US foreign policy had more or less abandoned the idea that China could be fashioned in the image of the liberal west. China was not “going to be like us”; rather, it was increasingly seen as not just a competitor but as a systemic rival and even existential threat. Australian foreign policy followed suit. The outbreak of COVID-19 catalysed the intensification of this shift - with resonance from the attitudes of the 1850s when the Chinese were pilloried as disease carriers.
A new round of intensified “China fear / threat” discourse exploded. The “reds under the bed” campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s were revived, as the drums of war with China began to beat ever so loudly. Assorted think tanks associated with the defence and intelligence industries promoted campaigns that aimed to pain China as a hostile threat to Australia and to regional peace and security.
Public attitude surveys show a sizeable and growing proportion of Australian believe China to be increasingly “aggressive” and that China could invade Australia. Australians’ fear of China was again activated. During the epidemic period (2020-2022), Chinese in Australia were targeted with growing verbal abuse and physical violence.
Thaw
The change of government in May 2022 acted as something of a circuit breaker - at an official government-to-government level, at the very least. This has certainly been the case on economic issues, as the previously imposed restrictions have begun to be lifted.
However, in other dimensions, there are overriding dynamics that will cloud the economic discourse for the foreseeable future. Just as economic and diplomatic relations have warmed, Australia’s defence / security posture has consolidated behind the American efforts to reassert U.S. primacy in Asia.
These security factors are likely to impact some aspects of economic policy making in Australia particularly in areas such as technology collaboration, rare earths and critical minerals supply chains and American policy imperatives underpinned by notions of “de-risking” and “decoupling”. This is despite the fact that a detailed examination of Australian supply chain risks undertaken by the Productivity Commission (2021-22) concluded that by and large Australian supply chains were not at risk and that, in fact, supply chain security would be best achieve not by narrow policies based on ideas like “friend-shoring” but by ongoing support of the open global trading regime underpinned by the WTO.
Similarly, as Australia seeks to grow its value-added capacity in critical minerals and rare earths, the experience to date is that the only nation whose firms have contributed to this endeavour have been investors from China. Yet, tying Australia’s critical mineral supply chain potential to American security imperatives may increase risks to Australian capacity development rather than reduce them.
Outlook
The threat narrative continues to resonate across the body politic. Today’s narrative readily energised the anxieties that are deeply embedded in the historical cultural psyche of Australia. In the 1860s anti-Chinese sentiments spilled over into violence against Chinese workers on Australia’s gold fields.
This is fertile ground being exploited by those seeking to pursue policies aligned with the U.S. and its ambitions of reclaiming lost regional primacy.
The Australian policy elite - particularly those ensconced in the apparatuses of the military and intelligence establishment - have long cultivated the habits of subimperial allies, and over the past 20 years have overseen a national defence capability and posture that has lost all capacity for autonomous and sovereign action. In times past, the foundation stone of Australia’s national defence policy was to ensure self-sufficiency; this is no longer a reality.
A subordination of national sovereignty in defence capability effectively shackles Australian foreign policy writ large to the interests and imperatives of the “great protector”. Trade policy may still seek openness, and leans heavily on bilateral and regional and global multilateral institutions to make the most of national complementarities. It remains in the interests of both Australia and China to maintain open trade flows.
How Australia’s medium to long term posture unfolds will depend less on its own autonomous decision-making and much more on how the U.S. copes with progressive loss of primacy in the region. Australia, meanwhile, remains the “anxious nation”. Its attitudes towards Asia generally, and China specifically, will have much to do with what happens in Washington.
Meanwhile, one wonders what can be done to assuage the centuries old anxieties.
*A Chinese version of this essay has been published in Guancha.