By Yi Wang
The Australia-China relationship brings together two vastly different countries at opposite ends of the international political spectrum. One is a relatively young Western democracy transplanted onto a sparsely populated island-continent originally inhabited by Aboriginal people steeped in spiritual ‘Dreamtime’ traditions. The other is an ancient Oriental civilization comprising the largest agglomeration of continental dwellers under a socialist regime, with a keen sense of the nation’s historical glory and more recent humiliation at the hands of imperialist powers.
Yet opposites attract. The disparity between Australia and China often belies the intensity of the bilateral relationship. It is true that, in population terms, Australia is far smaller than China. At 2020, China’s population of 1,411.8m., spread over 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, was 55 times that of Australia, at 25.7m., which was only slightly more than one-half the size of an average Chinese province. However, Australia’s small population is more than offset by its vast terrain and abundance of natural resources, making it an attractive partner for China’s modernization drive. Indeed, the high level of complementarity between China, with its rich human resources, and Australia, with its wealth of natural resources, has brought about unprecedented integration of the two economies. Australia has been one of China’s top suppliers of energy and raw materials, while China has become Australia’s largest trading partner by far, consuming over one-third of total Australian exports of goods and services in 2020.
If opposites attract, they can also clash, especially after the initial infatuation gives way to the humdrum of everyday life— hence the current tension between the two countries. To understand how and why this has come about, we must examine how these two radically different countries came together in the first place.
GETTING ACQUAINTED (PRE-1972) - Early Contacts
Chinese fishermen might have explored the coastal waters of northern Australia for trepang (a delicacy in Chinese cuisine) long before European settlement, but the earliest recorded contact between the two countries took place in 1818, when a Chinese man set foot on Australian soil. The Gold Rush of the 1850s brought more Chinese labourers to Australia. Aware of this sizeable community, which at one point totalled some 40,000 labourers, Liang Qichao—one of the best-known intellectuals of the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1912)—visited New South Wales for six months in 1900, seeking to raise funds for China’s reformist cause.
After the downfall of the Qing Dynasty and the warlord era in the early 20th century, Republican China started to exchange diplomatic envoys with Australia from the 1920s onwards, sporadically at first and more regularly in the 1940s, with Frederic Eggleston from Australia and Hsu Mo from China being the best known.
New China
When the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 October 1949, the Australian Labor Party Government, headed by Prime Minister Ben Chifley, adopted a wait-and-see approach to the new administration in Beijing. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic, under Mao Zedong’s leadership, had more pressing concerns than the attitude of Australia, which Mao regarded as a ‘running dog’ of the imperialist camp.
Indeed, the emergence of New China in late 1949, against the background of the East–West Cold War, presented the Australian Government with a stark choice: recognize the Communist Government that had seized control of the Chinese mainland or retain existing links with the Nationalist authorities now in exile in Taiwan. The Chifley Government was initially poised to take the first course of action. Shortly after the People’s Republic was proclaimed, Keith Officer, who had been accredited in 1948 as Australia’s ambassador to the Chiang Kai-shek regime in China’s erstwhile capital city, Nanjing, was recalled to Australia, while some of his staff established themselves in Hong Kong with the intention of moving to Beijing when recognition was granted. The Australian Minister for External Affairs, Herbert Evatt, had also hinted at the benefits of recognizing the new Government in Beijing, although the Labor Government remained ambiguous in its public statements on China. However, the Chifley Government was voted out of office at a federal election in December 1949, only two months after the founding of the People’s Republic.
Having won the election on an anti-communist platform, the Liberal-Country Party coalition Government, headed by Robert Menzies, was in no rush to accord recognition to the People’s Republic, although some Liberal-Country leaders had privately indicated a willingness to do so. The four Ministers for External Affairs who served under Menzies from 1949 until his retirement in January 1966 all differed in style and emphasis in their respective approaches to China; however, they all shared a belief in the threat of Chinese communism and publicly supported a policy of containment of ‘Red China’.
The longevity of the Menzies era was followed by a series of short-lived coalition Governments under Prime Ministers Harold Holt (1966–67), John McEwen (1967–68, in a caretaker capacity following the disappearance of Holt while swimming in the sea), John Gorton (1968–71) and William McMahon (1971–72). These administrations governed under the shadow of the Menzies legacy, with little room to improvise in foreign policy. Their policies towards China continued to be dominated by hostility and a reluctance to accept the Communist Government.
Trade Amid Enmity
Nonetheless, some significant developments occurred during this period. While Prime Minister Holt, lacking the authority of Menzies, could not afford to strike out in new directions in the general conduct of foreign policy, his Government, in terms of its China policy, stepped further along the path of hostility towards the People’s Republic by establishing an embassy in Taipei, Taiwan, and appointing an ambassador to the exiled Chiang Kai-shek authorities. Holt’s immediate successors, John McEwen and John Gorton, deviated little from the policy of non-recognition towards the People’s Republic, despite their efforts to adopt a more realistic and flexible approach to foreign policy.
When William McMahon, the last in the Menzies lineage of Liberal Prime Ministers, came to power in March 1971, the world was considerably different from the one that Menzies had faced. Under the new circumstances, the McMahon Government introduced new features into its China policy. Two months after taking office, McMahon announced his Government’s intention to start a dialogue with the People’s Republic. In May 1972 the coalition Government went so far as to offer ‘simple recognition’ in a ‘two China’ formula—that is, recognizing the People’s Republic without ‘disowning’ Taiwan. Nonetheless, burdened by the weight of its past anti-communist rhetoric and policies, the coalition Government failed to normalize relations with the People’s Republic before the end of its rule in late 1972.
However, the absence of diplomatic recognition did not prevent a growing trade relationship between the two countries. Starting from a small base, with a total value of A$3.9m. in 1949/50, bilateral trade continued to develop, especially from the 1960s, when China began importing wheat from Australia. China consequently became the sixth largest market for Australian exports in the 1960s. In 1963/64, for instance, wheat sales to China reached a record value of A$128.2m., representing one-third of Australia’s total wheat exports in that year. This momentum continued in subsequent years, with the exception of 1971/72, when China suspended wheat imports from Australia in part owing to Canberra’s ongoing refusal to accord formal recognition to the People’s Republic.
ENGAGEMENT TO HONEYMOON (1972–88)
While Australia’s coalition Government sought to enjoy the benefits of trade with China without according recognition to the People’s Republic, the opposition Labor Party (especially after Gough Whitlam became party leader in 1967) argued that the strong trading relationship warranted the establishment of diplomatic relations, which would in turn facilitate trade. This culminated in a historic visit to Beijing by Whitlam in 1971, which coincided with US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s now-famous secret mission to China that helped to reshape the strategic configuration of the Cold War world.
Tying the Knot: Whitlam (1972–75)
Upon winning the federal election of 1972, one of Whitlam’s first acts as Prime Minister was to recognize the People’s Republic as the sole legitimate Government of China, honouring a promise that he had made to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during his visit to Beijing in the previous year and ushering in a new era in Sino-Australian relations.
The Australian embassy was moved from Taipei to Beijing, and Whitlam appointed Stephen FitzGerald—a sinologist who had made himself known to the Chinese leadership as a Mandarin-speaking member of the celebrated Labor Party delegation to Beijing—as ambassador to the People’s Republic. The Australian initiative was well received by Beijing, which lost no time in accrediting a senior official, Wang Guoquan, as ambassador to Australia in appreciation of the goodwill extended by the new administration in Canberra. A bilateral trade agreement was signed in 1973. Whitlam’s pioneering role in recognizing the People’s Republic is still fondly remembered by the Chinese, who regard him as the ‘well-digger’ of Sino- Australian friendship.
Friendship notwithstanding, the Whitlam Government took pains to maintain independence and balance in international affairs and practised even-handedness vis-a`-vis the Sino– Soviet dispute in the early 1970s when China asked Australia for support against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). As well as visiting China as Prime Minister, Whitlam also paid a visit to the Soviet capital, Moscow, in January 1975.
Warming Up: Fraser (1975–83)
If the Whitlam administration had succeeded in laying a new foundation for Australia’s China policy during its short term of office, much remained to be done in order to develop a more comprehensive framework for the conduct of bilateral relations. Following Governor-General John Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, the Liberal-Country Party coalition (later renamed the Liberal-National Party coalition) emerged victorious from the snap election held in December 1975. Led by Malcolm Fraser, the coalition abandoned its former hostility towards Beijing and instead adopted Whitlam’s policy of friendly engagement.
Fraser’s anti-Soviet sentiments led him and his Government to side with China in a three-cornered contest, sometimes caricatured as ‘the Marsupial and the Dragon versus the Bear’, which suited the Chinese perfectly and contributed to the greater level of warmth in the burgeoning Sino-Australian relationship. This was highlighted by the exchange of defense attache ́s between the two countries—a highly significant development, not only because China was the first communist country to send defense attache ́s to Australia, but also, more importantly, because the move stood in sharp contrast to the days when Australian troops were dispatched to the battlefields in Vietnam to combat communism.
Infatuation: Hawke (1983–91)
Despite the increasing political warmth during the first decade of the new bilateral relationship, economic co-operation lagged behind. It was not until the 1980s that economic reforms and the opening up of China for international trade and global investment under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping gave a new lease of life to economic engagement, enabling the Government of Bob Hawke to approach bilateral relations with unprecedented vigour.
In April 1983, only one month after Hawke took office, Zhao Ziyang became the first Chinese Premier to make an official visit to Australia, thus placing Sino-Australian relations at the forefront of Hawke’s foreign policy agenda. Zhao’s visit also demonstrated bipartisanship in Australia’s China policy because it was Fraser, Hawke’s predecessor of a different political persuasion, who had issued the invitation to Zhao.
Zhao’s visit was followed by a flurry of other high-level visits to Australia, including those by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Hu Yaobang, in 1985 and Premier Li Peng in 1988. In return, Hawke and almost all his cabinet ministers paid frequent visits to China to boost Australia’s profile and to help create opportunities for Australian businesses in the vast yet underdeveloped Chinese market. During Hawke’s period as Prime Minister economic diplomacy, in the form of the China Action Plan, played a key role in Australia’s China policy, leading to such high-profile projects as the Channar mining joint venture agreement between Australia’s Rio Tinto and China’s Sinosteel Corporation which was signed in 1987. The venture provided iron ores from Western Australia’s Pilbara region to the Baoshan Iron and Steel Complex in Shanghai, China.
These developments heralded a new high in bilateral relations in 1988, when Australia celebrated the official bicentenary of its founding. China became a major contributor to the celebrations, including the provision of fireworks for the opening ceremony in Sydney on 1 January, participation in World Expo ’88 in Brisbane, a tour of Australia by a Peking Opera troupe, the loan of two giant pandas for exhibition in Melbourne and Sydney, and the presentation of two traditional carved stone lions and stone lamps as ornaments for the new Parliament House in Canberra. Of more enduring popular appeal was the opening of a Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney in January 1988. Built to symbolize the friendship between sister cities Sydney and Guangzhou, and gifted by Guangdong Province to the state of New South Wales, the garden has become a renowned tourist attraction in the heart of Australia’s largest city.
GETTING ON WITH LIFE (1989–2007)
Bilateral relations were speeding towards a new plateau when the violent crackdown on demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing, occurred on 4 June 1989. Like many other (particularly Western) countries, Australia condemned the Chinese Government’s actions and denounced the ‘use of violence and force’, an unspecified number of protesters having been killed. Such condemnation was also registered more formally through diplomatic channels.
The Chinese ambassador to Australia, Zhang Zai, was summoned for a meeting with the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Gareth Evans, who expressed deep distress and regret over the incident. The Australian ambassador in Beijing, David Sadleir, was instructed to lodge a protest in the strongest terms possible with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Australia unilaterally cancelled several important bilateral exchanges, including a planned visit to China by Prime Minister Hawke later that year, as well as a goodwill port call at Shanghai by the Australian destroyer escort HMAS Parramatta, which had been due to take place within the month.
Nevertheless, great care was taken to avoid upsetting the operational basis of the bilateral relationship, especially in the economic domain. For instance, Canberra resisted US appeals to apply tougher trade sanctions against China. Unlike the USA, Australia did not contemplate revising its most favoured nation (MFN) trading arrangement with China, as enshrined in the 1973 Sino-Australian trade agreement. In fact, Australian politicians and officials worked actively to dissuade their US counterparts from linking MFN status to China’s human rights performance, arguing that to do so would be detrimental to both parties and could lead to a more inward-looking China at odds with the international community.
In February 1991 the Australian Government formally announced the lifting of remaining restrictions on political and economic contacts with China imposed in July 1989, with the exception of defense exchanges. Ministerial visits soon resumed, and Canberra dispatched parliamentary delegations to investigate China’s human rights situation. These exchanges helped to set the stage for a fresh start in bilateral relations as the two countries prepared for the 20th anniversary, in 1992, of the establishment of diplomatic ties.
Burying the Hatchet: Keating (1991–96)
Following a reorganization of the Labor leadership in December 1991, former Treasurer Paul Keating replaced Hawke as Prime Minister. However, while the change of leadership exerted considerable impact on domestic politics, it had little immediate effect on Australia’s foreign policy, with responsibility for the foreign affairs portfolio continuing to rest with Evans.
Meanwhile, China’s three-year economic rectification campaign had ended officially in late 1991, and the country initiated the large-scale introduction of market mechanisms into the national economy in early 1992, following Deng Xiaoping’s inspection tour of southern China, where he called for bolder steps towards marketization. The 14th National Congress of the CPC, held in October, and the first session of the Eighth National People’s Congress, which convened in March 1993, formally endorsed the concept of a socialist market economy as the guiding principle for the country’s development, opening up new opportunities for both domestic business initiatives and foreign economic co-operation. This development also provided a favourable setting for Keating to promote Australia’s economic diplomacy in China.
A visit by Keating to Beijing in June 1993, which marked the resumption of bilateral exchanges at the highest level, injected fresh impetus to trade and investment initiatives. Apart from the two largest Chinese-invested ventures, Channar and Aluminium Smelters of Victoria (Aluvic), an increasing number of Chinese investors were engaging in small-scale operations in such industries as clothing, wool processing, paper production, mineral exploration, food and catering, real estate, general trading and retail services. More than 100 Chinese corporations and business organizations had opened representative or branch offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and other Australian cities by the mid-1990s.
Having it Both Ways: Howard (1996–2007)
Having defeated Keating in the federal election of March 1996, John Howard embarked on what would turn out to be the second longest period of service as Australian Prime Minister to date. His Government’s relations with China got off to an inauspicious start. A string of issues soured the relationship, including escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait regarding Taiwan’s presidential election and Beijing’s missile tests; China’s nuclear test and Australia’s resultant condemnation; the inaugural Australia–United States Ministerial Consultations, held in Sydney, and the subsequent joint declaration on strengthening the alliance between Australia, New Zealand and the USA (ANZUS) into the 21st century; the controversial attendance of Chen Shui-bian, the mayor of Taipei, at the inaugural Asia-Pacific Cities Summit in Brisbane, from which the mayors of Beijing and Shenzhen withdrew in protest; the revelation that the Howard Government was conducting secret negotiations with Taipei over possible uranium sales to Taiwan; and the visit to Taiwan by the Australian Minister for Primary Industries and Energy, John Anderson, possibly in association with the uranium negotiations. Furthermore, despite repeated warnings from the Chinese Government, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama was allowed to visit Australia in September 1996 and meet both Prime Minister Howard and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, to the fury of Beijing.
To show its displeasure, the Chinese Government decided to suspend ministerial and high-level exchanges with Australia. Within only six months of the Howard administration assuming power, the political relationship between the two countries had plunged to its lowest point since the so-called ‘June Fourth incident’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
However, a turnaround occurred just as quickly. In November 1996, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Manila, Philippines, Howard met Chinese President Jiang Zemin. At the meeting, he assured Jiang that Australia’s alliance with the USA was rooted in history and was designed to enhance Australia’s own security rather than being directed against China. Howard emphasized his personal commitment to building closer bilateral relations and expressed his Government’s support for China’s bid for membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Howard reiterated his Government’s support for the ‘One China’ policy and made clear that he regarded China’s participation in the region as a force for stability.
The meeting went so well that Jiang invited Howard to visit China, an invitation that Howard was more than ready to accept. and the visit duly took place in March 1997, marking the first of several such visits during Howard’s 11-year tenure. These visits were reciprocated by Chinese leaders, including President Jiang Zemin in 1999, President Hu Jintao in 2003 and again in 2007, and Premier Wen Jiabao in 2006. The 2003 visit by President Hu was of particular symbolic significance because it took place within the same week as a visit by US President George W. Bush, with both Presidents accorded the honor of addressing a joint sitting of Australia’s bicameral Federal Parliament in Canberra. This arrangement was indicative of Howard’s determination to demonstrate that, rather than choosing one over the other, his Government enjoyed good relations with both Beijing and Washington.
Meanwhile, eager to take advantage of China’s economic boom, Howard adopted a more pragmatic approach to contentious issues. Instead of continuing to support resolutions censuring Beijing’s human rights record at the UN Commission on Human Rights, in 1997 Howard established a bilateral annual vice-ministerial dialogue on human rights (with the Chinese participants led by Yang Jiechi, who was to become President Xi Jinping’s chief foreign policy adviser a decade later) and supported China’s bid for WTO membership. Instead of joining the United Kingdom and the USA in boycotting the inauguration of the appointed Provisional Legislature in Hong Kong on 1 July 1997 (following the formal handover ceremony transferring the territory from British to Chinese sovereignty), Howard sent Minister for Foreign Affairs Downer to attend as the representative of the Australian Government.
In April 2005, Howard initiated free trade negotiations with China, a move with far-reaching significance for bilateral trade. Such trade had benefited tremendously from China’s rapid economic takeoff from the mid-1990s. Two-way trade increased more than six times from under A$8,000m. in 1996 to over A$50,000m. in 2007. The composition of trade also underwent a transformation. Wheat had long been overtaken by minerals and resources, such as iron ore, coal and aluminium, as Australia’s principal export commodities. Iron ore was by far the most important export, with China surpassing Japan as the largest consumer. Among agricultural produce, wool and barley were significant items, with China being the largest importer of both. China’s exports to Australia were also diversifying from traditionally labour-intensive products such as textiles, clothing and footwear to electronic products and other manufactured goods, with computers, toys, games, sporting goods and telecommunications equipment among the top earners.
Equally noteworthy was the growth in bilateral tourism and educational exchanges. In 2005, for instance, nearly 300,000 Chinese tourists visited Australia, with China constituting the largest source of tourists in Asia. China also became Australia’s largest source of foreign students, numbering 63,714 in 2005, a figure that would multiply to 211,965 in 2019, before travel restrictions related to the global pandemic of COVID-19 led to a reduction in numbers in 2020–21.
ESTRANGEMENT (2007–)
However, strengthening economic ties belied fracturing political relations, an unexpected trend given the entry into office of the first Mandarin-speaking Australian Prime Minister in December 2007.
Asset as Liability: Rudd (2007–10)
If Howard had got off to a bad start vis-a`-vis China, Kevin Rudd started his prime-ministerial venture with Beijing on a very high note. His ascendancy as the first Mandarin-speaking Western leader was greeted with fascination in China. As Rudd rose through the ranks in Australian politics, achieving prominence first as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and then as Leader of the Opposition, the Chinese name that he had adopted during his university studies, ‘Lu Kewen’, became increasingly well known among the Chinese public.
During President Hu Jintao’s second visit to Australia in September 2007, Rudd, while still Leader of the Opposition, stole the show by addressing the Chinese President in Mandarin, much to the chagrin of Prime Minister Howard. Rudd’s landslide electoral victory over Howard in November gave a further boost to ‘Ruddmania’ in China, a point not lost on Rudd’s political opponents, among them Malcolm Turnbull, who became Leader of the Opposition in September 2008 and dubbed the Prime Minister ‘a travelling advocate for China’ as opposed to Australia.
However, the euphoria did not last long. After Rudd’s official visit to China in April 2008, when he mentioned human rights issues in Tibet during a speech delivered in Mandarin to staff and students at Beijing University, his Chinese hosts began to doubt whether this sinologist was quite the sinophile for whom they had hoped.
Subsequently a series of incidents occurred that cast further doubt on the bilateral relationship. These included curbs on investment by China’s state-owned enterprises, most notably Chinalco’s bid for an 18% stake in Rio Tinto; the arrest of Rio Tinto mining executive, and Australian citizen, Stern Hu in Shanghai on suspicion of stealing commercial secrets and accepting bribes; Australian accusations of Chinese cyber-attacks; controversy over the failure of the Australian Minister for Defense, Joel Fitzgibbon, to declare travel to China funded by Chinese-Australian businesswoman Helen Liu, who was alleged to have links with the Chinese military; the Rudd Government’s 2009 Defense White Paper, which implicitly saw China’s rise as a threat to regional security; and Australia’s decision to issue an entry visa to Rebiya Kadeer, whom China believed to be the mastermind of violent riots in Urumqi, in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in July 2009.
To register its displeasure, Beijing suspended high-level contacts with Canberra, in a move comparable with similar actions a decade later. The lack of senior Chinese visits in the latter part of Rudd’s tenure was in sharp contrast to the earlier period of frequent high-level exchanges, when Rudd found it necessary to avoid being seen as too close to Chinese interlocuters for fear of being branded ‘a Manchurian candidate’ by his political opponents. In March 2009, for example, the same Rudd who had previously enjoyed publicly conversing with Chinese dignitaries in Mandarin appeared to be embarrassed to be seated next to the Chinese ambassador to the UK, Fu Ying (whom he had known for a long time), during the recording of a television programme aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
However, even during the height of strained relations, both sides tried to prevent political wrangling from obstructing trade and business transactions. In August 2009, with political relations plunging to their lowest since Rudd took office amid high tensions over Kadeer, the two countries clinched their largest ever business deal, with PetroChina and ExxonMobil signing a A$50,000m. contract to supply liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Gorgon on Australia’s north-west coast to China’s booming regions. This deal came after a previous 20-year agreement that PetroChina had signed with Shell for 100,000 metric tons of LNG per annum. The strained political relationship certainly took the shine off the new agreement, which received only subdued coverage in the official Chinese media, in contrast to the fanfare and top-level presence associated with similar, but much smaller, deals in the past.
Nonetheless, the scale of the Gorgon LNG deal was indicative of the phenomenal growth of China and the overall economic relationship between the two countries during the Rudd era. By the last year of Rudd’s term as Prime Minister, in 2010, China had become the world’s second largest economy, with Australia being a major beneficiary of such growth. China
not only remained Australia’s largest trading partner—a status that it had attained in 2007, the last year of the Howard era—but also overtook Japan to become Australia’s largest export market in 2009, absorbing one-quarter of Australia’s total exports in that year. The trade deficit that Australia had complained about since the 1980s also turned into a surplus during the Rudd years.
In the Shadow of China’s Rise: Gillard (2010–13) and Abbott (2013–15)
As China’s economy grew stronger, the moderate style of Hu Jintao’s administration gave way to the more strident leadership of Xi Jinping, who demonstrated his determination to realize his vision of ‘the Chinese Dream’. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign and subsequent abolition of presidential term limits helped to consolidate his power domestically, but his Government’s international stance, especially over the South China Sea dispute, as well as a pattern of feisty behaviour that came to be dubbed ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’, caused concern among various countries, including Australia. Although Rudd’s successors on both sides of the political divide, Labor’s Julia Gillard and Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott, tried to re-energize political relations with China, they achieved only limited success amid a general climate of distrust towards Beijing.
Gillard, for instance, visited China twice during her three years in office and managed to achieve direct conversion between Chinese and Australian currencies and to secure Premier Li Keqiang’s agreement to establish an annual bilateral leadership summit. Yet distrust of China contributed to her Government’s decision to increase the presence of US marines in Darwin, in the Northern Territory, and in March 2012 to block Chinese technology giant Huawei from participating in the construction of Australia’s National Broadband Network, although the latter received much less publicity at the time than the exclusion of Huawei from involvement in the development of the 5G mobile network six years later.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, although known for his praise of Japan as ‘Australia’s best friend in Asia’, also sought to strengthen trade ties with China. At his urging, Australian officials finally, during a visit to Australia by President Xi in November 2014, concluded protracted negotiations with Chinese counterparts on a bilateral free trade agreement (ChAFTA). The agreement was signed in June 2015 and came into effect in December of that year, a decade after negotiations had been initiated by Howard.
However, ChAFTA did not dispel Australia’s anxieties over China’s growing power and influence. The Abbott Government was hesitant about Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and did not join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank until after major European countries had done so. Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop’s vocal criticism of China’s decision to establish an air defense identification zone over the East China Sea and of Beijing’s defiance in response to the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s July 2016 ruling on the South China Sea (which rejected China’s claim to historic rights in the South China Sea as invalid under international law) was symptomatic of the general climate of distrust between the two sides. So too were the Abbott administration’s concerns over China’s role in the North Korean issue, cyberwarfare and espionage, which serves to explain why, when asked by German Chancellor Angela Merkel what motivated Australia’s China policy, Abbott famously answered: ‘Fear and greed’.
Boxing the Shadows: Turnbull (2015–18)
It was against this backdrop of growing concern over Chinese influence that Malcolm Turnbull, who has often been blamed by Chinese media as the initiator of current bilateral tensions, took over from Abbott as Prime Minister in September 2015. Although Turnbull bore no personal animosity towards China, he had to respond to events that deepened public fears of Chinese influence and infiltration.
One month after Turnbull took office, Port Darwin, which was playing host to US marines, was leased to the Chinese-owned Landbridge Group, believed to be ultimately answerable to the CPC. This development aroused concerns from both the Administration of US President Barack Obama and the Australian public, which became increasingly uneasy over similar Chinese bids for important infrastructures like the Port of Melbourne, the electricity grid (Ausgrid) and the largest cattle farm (Kidman & Co).
Meanwhile, news continued to emerge of China’s efforts through its United Front networks to infiltrate Australian society, with the Sam Dastyari affair being the most notable example. Between September 2016 and December 2017 a series of reports focused on Labor Senator Dastyari, who was alleged to have accepted payments from Chinese businessmen believed to have close links with the CPC. It was claimed that, in return for these payments, Dastyari had given conference speeches in favour of China’s stance on the South China Sea, had tried to persuade the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tanya Plibersek, to cancel a meeting with a pro-democracy Hong Kong activist, and had offered counter- surveillance advice to Chinese political donor Huang Xiangmo, suggesting that Huang’s telephones were probably being tapped by Australian and US intelligence agencies. The revelations eventually led to Dastyari’s resignation from the Senate in January 2018 and caused widespread fears about Chinese infiltration into various walks of Australian life.
Apart from individual cases like the Dastyari affair, Australian media often reported on the broader impact of Chinese influence in Australia. One particularly consequential report was broadcast in June 2017 on Four Corners, Australia’s flagship investigative journalism programme, aired by Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia’s most trusted public broadcaster. Featuring a range of witness accounts, the programme warned that Chinese influence had pervaded many aspects of Australian society and that urgent action was needed to curb such influence. Although some of the content in the report was later found to be inaccurate, after some of the witnesses featured in the documentary disputed the programme’s conclusions and imputations, the alarm bells about Chinese influence and infiltration grew ever louder.
The Turnbull Government’s answer to the public outcry soon came in the form of new laws against foreign interference, which were introduced in late 2017 and received parliamentary approval in June 2018. The legislation marked a turning point in Sino-Australian relations. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972 China had been a country to be worked on; however, with the adoption of the foreign interference legislation, China became a country to be guarded against.
Although the legislation referred generally to all foreign countries without specifying China, when introducing the new laws, Turnbull cited ‘disturbing reports about Chinese influence’, thus making explicit the target of such legislation. This might have been a shrewd political move domestically, as it was aimed at pacifying public anxieties in Australia, but it was poor diplomacy because it tore off the last facade of pretence (or, to use a Chinese saying, sipo lianpi) against the image-conscious Chinese authorities, which felt affronted and betrayed by a country that should have been grateful for the huge benefits that it had reaped from China’s boom.
It is important to note, however, that the ‘disturbing reports’ to which Turnbull referred were not just media reports, but also classified intelligence reports. In August 2016, for instance, Turnbull commissioned a cross-agency investigation into covert Chinese operations in and against Australia, with John Garnaut, his China-literate adviser, playing a co-ordinating role. The findings of such investigations were already available to Turnbull when he made the above reference, but, as with all intelligence reports, the public had no way of knowing and verifying the details.
When later questioned by reporters on his remarks, Turnbull used accented Mandarin (perhaps learned from his Chinese-speaking daughter-in-law) to declare that ‘the Australian people are standing up’, in an echo of Mao Zedong’s famous line upon proclaiming the People’s Republic - ‘the Chinese people are standing up’. However, it backfired and, as expected, Beijing responded strongly against the legislation, once again suspending all high-level exchanges with the Australian Government. For several months Australian ministers were denied access to their Chinese counterparts, a situation that made many Australians with a stake in the China market feel anxious. The same media outlets that had earlier reveled in decrying Chinese influence began to publish articles urging the Turnbull administration to do something in order to restore contacts with the Chinese Government—but no invitation came from Beijing.
In August 2018, Turnbull made a conciliatory speech at the University of New South Wales, in the presence of the Chinese ambassador, Cheng Jingye, in which he emphasized the importance of relations with China and praised the contributions of the Chinese community in Australia. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed the gesture, stating that it had ‘noted and commended these positive remarks’. Alongside such comments, the Chinese Government presumably expected some concrete action from the Turnbull administration to demonstrate its sincerity in mending the fraying relations. However, before Turnbull could take any such action, he was toppled in a Liberal Party leadership challenge and was replaced as Prime Minister by Scott Morrison.
Chiaroscuro of Politics: Morrison (2018–)
What China had really wanted, among other things, was for Huawei, its most prized technology company, to be given approval to build Australia’s 5G network, but Canberra’s distrust of Beijing made this impossible. In August 2018, on the eve of Turnbull’s ousting, Australia formally announced a ban on the involvement of both Huawei and another Chinese telecommunications company, ZTE, in the national rollout of 5G mobile technology, citing national security concerns. The announcement was made by none other than Morrison, then acting as Minister for Home Affairs.
After becoming Prime Minister, Morrison refrained from making direct policy pronouncements on China. Beijing also appeared to give the new Government in Canberra the benefit of the doubt, allowing Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne to visit Beijing for a dialogue with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in November 2018. In the same month Morrison met Premier Li Keqiang during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Singapore, but no progress was made.
Meanwhile, a succession of events pulled the two sides further apart. In 2018–19 these included the Australian Government’s rejection of an application for Australian citizenship by Huang Xiangmo, who had been implicated in the Dastyari affair; reports of the repeated hacking of websites belonging to Australian political parties and the Federal Parliament by ‘state actors’, widely suspected to be emanating from China; unexpected delays to the clearance of Australian coal shipments at Chinese ports; reports of secret plans to develop a new port at Glyde Point, near Darwin, in order to accommodate more US military facilities; Morrison’s announcement of the ‘Pacific Step-up’ initiative, intended to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific region; Australian condemnation of Beijing’s tough actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang; the detention in Guangzhou of Australian-Chinese writer Yang Hengjun on charges of espionage; the establishment of a University Foreign Interference Taskforce to investigate Chinese influence within Australian higher education institutions; the banning of Confucius Institutes in schools in New South Wales; media controversy surrounding Australian-Chinese politician Gladys Liu, who was accused of having close links to Chinese United Front organizations; disparaging remarks made against China by politicians of the ruling Liberal-National coalition, including members of Parliament Andrew Hastie and Barry O’Sullivan; Australian media and public interest in the publication of Silent Invasion, a book alleging widespread attempts by the CPC to infiltrate Australian and Western societies; the defection to Australia of Wang Liqiang, who identified himself as a former Chinese spy but was branded by Chinese authorities as a fraudster and fugitive; and the allocation by Canberra of A$88m. to establish a taskforce comprising the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Federal Police and other intelligence organizations to combat foreign interference.
The deterioration in bilateral relations continued in 2020, when contributing incidents included police raids of the office and home of Shaoquett Moselmane, a Labor member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, searching for evidence of Chinese infiltration, implicating his Chinese-born associate, John Zhang Zhisen, and a number of Chinese journalists and academics who happened to be part of a mobile messaging group with Moselmane; the detention by the Chinese authorities of Chinese-born Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who was working for China’s official English-language cable television channel China Global Television Network; alleged harassment by the Chinese authorities of Australian correspondents Bill Birtles of the ABC and Mike Smith of the Australian Financial Review newspaper; and a tweet by Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Zhao Lijian that included a cartoon depicting Australian soldiers engaged in cruelty in Afghani- stan, with Prime Minister Morrison’s angry demand for an apology rebuffed by Beijing.
This (by no means exhaustive) catalogue of events illustrates the tension, intensity and diversity of the current Australia-China relationship, a far cry from the situation in 1972, when the two countries first established diplomatic ties and interaction was limited to arms-length trading of basic produce.
China hoped that the trade sanctions would soften Australia’s stance, but, unlike the Turnbull administration two years earlier, the Morrison Government continued to harden its defiance against Chinese pressures. At the end of 2020, the Federal Parliament approved new legislation to override international agreements signed by state and local governments, and in April 2021 the federal Government used the legislation to nullify the state of Victoria’s agreements with China facilitating Victorian participation in the Belt and Road Initiative. In May, Morrison also indicated his willingness to consider security advice on whether to cancel Port Darwin’s 99-year lease to Landbridge. In response, China suspended all activities under the Strategic Economic Dialogue between its National Development and Reform Commission and Australia’s federal Government.
Among the various reasons for Canberra’s continued defiance, two are particularly noteworthy. First, despite the multiple trade sanctions applied by Beijing, Canberra still had a trump card in its trade repertoire. The biggest and most lucrative item of Australian exports—iron ore—was a commodity on which China’s infrastructural projects depended, at least for the time being. The overall value of Australian exports to China, helped by high international prices for iron ores, continued to rise in the first half of 2021. In response, China has been actively formulating plans to reduce its dependence on Australian iron ores, with prices falling from mid-2021. Meanwhile, international demand for other Australian commodities kept increasing, including coal, gas and, significantly, lithium, a key resource for producing renewable energy.
Second, recovering from the uncertainties of the Trump Administration’s commitment to its allies, Morrison and his key ministers became more confident of support from the incoming US Administration of Joe Biden in their joint face-off with China. At a press conference with Minister for Foreign Affairs Payne in May 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that Washington would not leave Australia ‘alone on the field’ to contend with ‘economic coercion by China’. These words took on more concrete meaning in September 2021 when the USA reached agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom to provide nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian navy. By signing the AUKUS pact, as the agreement came to be known, Australia tied itself more closely to the US chariot.
This marked a departure from the Howard era, when the Australian Government successfully resisted pressure to take sides between Beijing and Washington. The situation not only reflects Australia’s desperation for US support in confronting a stronger China, but also reduces China’s room for manoeuvre between Washington and its antipodean ally.
CONCLUSION
It is hard to identify another pair of countries as different yet as intensely entangled as the dyad of Australia and China in present-day international relations. As the smaller partner, Australia has played a more active role in the relationship, often exhibiting characteristics associated with those of a larrikin, combining youthful energy with maverick humour and a rebellious spirit. As the much bigger partner, China has responded to Australian initiatives with patience and poise when the relationship was moving forward, and with dismay and annoyance when its feathers have been ruffled by the larrikin.
As a rising giant, China has tended to cast its eyes on larger objects on the horizon, often interpreting Australia’s actions as reflective of the strategic interests of the reigning giant, the USA. In doing so, it has at times been stunned by the boldness of the larrikin’s actions, not realizing that some of these actions might have been motivated by anxieties over the rising giant’s postures and intentions in rushing to rise to its feet.
Nonetheless, the Australia-China relationship has come a long way since their initial encounter 200 years ago. From the formal engagement in 1972, through the honeymoon of the Hawke era, the relationship has weathered the storm of the 1989 crisis and managed to get on with serious business during the Howard era and beyond. Yet, with China’s rise, the ever-present distrust has taken on new dimensions, resulting in the current estrangement.
Will this estrangement lead to a total rupture of the relationship? Or will the current stoush give way to a new lease of life? Therein lies a test of the wisdom of the leadership on both sides. If history is any guide, such leadership could benefit from Whitlam’s fortitude and foresight on the Australian side and Deng’s pragmatism and open-mindedness on the Chinese side.
About the author: Yi Wang is a multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual scholar, with a unique track record through a variety of industries, which has enriched his work, inter alia, on Australia-China relations, Chinese politics, media management, bilingualism and translation. Working across several different fields, Dr. Yi Wang is noted for his research on Australia-China relations, having published two books and various articles on the topic in both English and Chinese. Just as significant are his studies on contemporary Chinese leaders, such as Wang Huning and Yang Jiechi, that have appeared in high-impact publications, being cited or featured in the quality international press, including The Economist, the Washington Post, the BBC, and The Diplomat.
A full version of this article including bibliography can be found here.
I am surprised that there is no mention of PM Morrison’s call for an investigation into the origins of COVID and the cancellation of imports of wheat, barley beef and coal, China’s 14 demands and the latest 4 demands and what might be China’s response if similar threats were made to China. Mention of Chinese hegemony in the South Pacific is also relevant. Otherwise an interesting historical summary. CW 4810