A visceral emphasis on fear over engagement has marked Australia’s approach to China since 2015. Only 17 Australians graduated with Honours degrees in China Studies between 2017 and 2021 across the entire country. This year no grants were awarded by the Australian Research Council for China-related research or collaborative research involving Chinese institutions. Will the Albanese Labor government follow in the steps of Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd, by valuing knowledge and engagement over ignorance and fear?
Last week I attended the 33rd Chinese Economic Society Australia (CESA) Conference, hosted by Macquarie University in Sydney. It was a fantastic opportunity to gain new perspectives and knowledge on the Chinese Economy, spurring new research ideas in the process.
Of more than 60 conference participants, I was the only one who grew up in Australia, and one of only three without Chinese heritage. I found myself thinking about how I’d found my way to becoming an academic specialising on the Chinese economy and when, if ever, a new generation of Australians would embark on such a pursuit?
First of all, I felt gratitude, for Australian government policies in the past that paved the way for the life I’ve had. I know many other people of my generation who feel the same. Good government policy to encourage knowledge about Asia positively impacted our lives and enabled us to explore our geographic neighbourhood with confidence, humility and excitement.
These policies were chronologically traced by the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ report on Australia’s China Knowledge Capability (ACKC), published early this year. A key finding of the report is that Australia is looking seriously deficient in our ‘Core China capability’: grounded in relationships in China, informed by a world-class understanding of China, and integrated across academia, industry and government to serve Australia’s national interests.
It wasn’t always this way.
The report’s timeline of the policies that have shaped Australia’s ‘China knowledge capability’ is revealing. It begins with the arrival of the first Australian exchange students in Beijing in 1973. This followed prime minister Gough Whitlam’s visit that year, the first diplomatic visit by an Australian prime minister to the People’s Republic. Born in 1971, my path was being paved by these events.
I was the perfect age when the Hawke government introduced its National Language Policy in 1987, offering funding for teaching Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese in Australian schools.
My local public school in Canberra offered Japanese for the first time and a trip to Japan – I was in Year 11 and decided to go. The trip was so enthralling that I chose Japanese as a major in my economics degree at the ANU, spending one of the best years of my life in Japan in 1991. As the report identifies, “Asia-focused language and area studies degree programs flourished” through this period, and it was wonderful to a part of that.
In my first job after graduation in 1993, I joined the newly-established Asia Section in the Commonwealth Treasury – an initiative of then treasurer John Dawkins in the Keating government – and was tasked with monitoring China (at the time Japan was too important for a young graduate). I was immediately hooked.
As Australia was heading towards its ‘peak’ China knowledge capability – identified in the ACKC report as 2002 – I was immersed in doctoral research on Chinese regional development, interspersed with as many stints in China as I could squeeze in, making (imperfect) efforts to learn Chinese along the way.
I returned to Canberra and the ANU in 2003, the year the Howard government ceased federal government funding for Asian languages in schools, shifting the responsibility to the state level. Australia’s decline in its hard-earned Asian literacy began at this time, but my own knowledge continued to build on the foundations laid in school, university and the Public Service.
The ACKC report identifies the ANU China Update series as one of the great success stories of translating knowledge into capability. It “grew out of the long era of mutually beneficial engagement between Australia and China”. With twenty volumes published since 1998, the series has fostered research collaborations between Crawford School of Public Policy’s China Economy Program and scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China’s most prestigious universities, along with other world-renowned Chinese economy experts.
Currently supported by BHP, the China Update has “positioned Australia amongst the world leaders in economic research on the PRC”. Knowledge sharing between and among government, business and academia and between Chinese and Australian experts is central to its success.
Personally, since writing my first ‘Update’ chapter in 2004, the series has provided an incredible opportunity to interact with Chinese economy scholars from all over the world, and to bring PhD students into the fold. Some of these students have gone on to academic and public service positions in Australia and China, others have joined the World Bank, while one is the co-founder and CEO of an industrial services conglomerate in Cameroon. China knowledge, developed in Canberra, now spanning the globe.
The ANU also benefited hugely from the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) in 2010. Generously funded by the Rudd Government, CIW was created to encourage “scholars, thinkers and policy specialists” to engage in inter-disciplinary approaches to understanding the Chinese world, spanning history, culture, philosophy, politics, economics and more.
While not without its critics, it was a wonderful place that brought business people, policy makers and scholars together to immerse in all things Chinese, as I had the privilege of doing from 2010 onwards. The Centre’s China Story Yearbooks present wide-ranging perspectives on contemporary developments in China, Taiwan and the Chinese-speaking world, disseminating academic knowledge for non-specialist readers.
Without the Australian government’s support, none of this would have happened. So why my current dismay? The ACKC timeline ends with a “post-2010” period, identified as one in which Australia’s China policy shifted towards a strong focus on the opportunities for Australian trade, and little else. This shift has resulted in “critical gaps and serious signs of decline” in our deep China knowledge.
Funded by the government’s Foundation for Australia-China Relations, the authors of the ACKC report, the Australian Academy of Humanities, presumably chose to be diplomatic in omitting the even sharper policy shift, apparent from around 2015, with the Turnbull and successive governments prioritising security concerns about China, with a visceral emphasis on fear over engagement.
The drop-off in student enrolments since this time is alarming: only 17 Australians graduated with Honours degrees in China Studies between 2017 and 2021 across the entire country! This indicates that a devastatingly low number of young Australians are embarking on the intellectual and professional journey that Australian governments in the past encouraged me and so many others towards.
The Chinese Studies Association of Australia at its Annual General Meeting in Sydney on 8 December noted the findings of the ACKC report and registered its concern that this year no grants had been awarded by the Australian Research Council for China-related research or collaborative research involving Chinese institutions. The incoming President and new Council were instructed to take this up with the Asian Studies Association because of the wider implications for the development of Asian Studies in general.
Without the advanced cultural, linguistic, and analytical knowledge that students develop during their Honours programs and that academics extend through collaborative research, we are taking a huge risk. As former Ambassador to China Frances Adamson points out in her Foreword to the ACKC Report, the risks of making “strategic miscalculation – a real danger in an increasingly volatile world” will rise, just as the likelihood of “positive outcomes” will fall.
It is these risks that somehow give me hope – that the Albanese Labor government will follow in the steps of Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd, by valuing knowledge and engagement over ignorance and fear. Because, as the ACKC Report explains so clearly, it is undeniably in the national interest to do so.al
Jane Golley is Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.
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