Over four decades, Australian universities developed strong teaching and research ties with China. But a wave of fear-driven policies and rising national security pressures has reshaped those relationships. Are we witnessing a retreat from engagement – or the start of a new era?

A recent article by emeritus professor Ian Ramsay from Melbourne University highlighted influential reports stressing an erosion of trust within and towards Australian universities.

A more detailed investigation of the challenges faced by Australian universities is presented in a spirited new book by the vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University, George Williams: Aiming Higher: Universities and Australia’s Future. Williams also emphasises the erosion of trust in universities observing that their “social licence” is now in question.

Thus far, the shifting nature of Australian universities’ offshore relationships – in particular, with China - have been less methodically examined.

How it used to be

In late 1972, the new Whitlam Government in Canberra recognised the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole legal government of China. In the years that followed, Australian universities established remarkably strong teaching and research relationships with China.

The first students began arriving in Australia from China in the early 1970s. Significant growth in onshore Chinese student numbers attending a wide range of Australian tertiary institutions soon followed. By 1989, there were around 18,000 PRC students in Australia. This number soon swelled to over 30,000. By 2018 the total number exceeded 200,000.

It was not long before China and Asian-related research centres were springing up within Australian universities focused, for example, on the hard sciences, engineering and social science. Collaborative research programs with Chinese and other Asian universities were also regularly established.

A conspicuous example was the establishment of the Asian Law Centre at the University of Melbourne. Created to conduct research on Asian legal systems, including those in Japan and China, it is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The current director, professor Sarah Biddulph, recently explained how: “At the beginning, the Centre was focused on establishing a cohort of Asian-literate lawyers.” Moreover, its mission has always been to deepen Australia’s engagement with Asia, given that: “We live in a world where our default position cannot be ignorance and suspicion.”

A turning point

In the 1990s, US President Bill Clinton was a primary advocate of convergence theory, which argued that by integrating China into global systems, including the WTO, this would foster gradual political liberalisation and an eventual convergence with liberal-Western political norms like those outlined in Francis Fukuyama’s audacious, 1989 End of History article.

This was a Western-crafted view of what the West believed the future held for China. While it prevailed, significant Western government, regulatory and business operatives treated it as indicative of how China would develop, implicitly imagining that this was also how Beijing essentially envisaged China’s own future.

So far so good. More specifically, it was within this comparatively benign and (Western) optimistic context that the robustly rising engagement of Australian universities with China unfolded for several decades after 1972.

However, when Deng Xiaoping, the father of China’s post-Mao, open-door economic revolution, first stressed the need to borrow selectively from Western understanding, he also emphasised that China’s political development must proceed according to China’s own special characteristics.

In 2018, The Economist confirmed, definitively, that Beijing had never accepted the guiding wisdom of this Western convergence theory.

Consequently, the Global West found itself looking for a substitute grand theory of what China had in mind for its own future – never mind what China itself might, in fact, think about its own future.

This new widely embraced Sino-explanatory-scheme, once more crafted by the US (surely while looking in the mirror) is deeply tainted compared to its predecessor.  This is the intensifying, China Threat storyline, sharply summarised by one scholar as a disfiguring narrative that casts China as a “scheming and highly sophisticated hostile foreign entity aiming for global dominance." Its most radical advocates favour extreme containment measures.

As it happened, China acquired a new leader in 2013, Xi Jinping. Reserved, highly experienced, deeply thoughtful and equally forceful, he was soon cast by the Western mainstream media as the personalised embodiment of the China Threat.

In Australia, many media outlets have ever since, repeatedly advanced this revived, yellow-red peril meta-narrative. “Pulp geopolitics” is an apt term used to classify this phenomenon.

However, economic growth charts explain visibly more about the rise of this politically engineered storyline than any claimed, glaring Beijing malevolence. Recent statistics provided by the Belfer Center at Harvard University, for example, confirm, using PPP figures, that while the US economy was double the size of the Chinese economy in 2005, by 2025, the Chinese economy was, alarmingly, 30 per cent larger than America’s. Five years ago one American analyst argued that US fear-mongering about China was not rooted in facts but in racism.

Ominous consequences

The stage was thus now set for an extraordinary intervention by national security operatives on campuses across Australia.

In March 2021, the Sydney Morning Herald reported: “Collaboration between Australia’s intelligence services and universities has ramped up dramatically over the past three years in response to an escalating threat of interference by China and other foreign governments.”

Another article at about the same time noted that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) confirmed it had engaged with leading Australian universities 60 times in 2020. New stringent guidelines for offshore interaction, especially with China, began to be applied. Several leading Australian universities felt such a need to badge themselves as wholly patriotic that they began paying for private risk assessment by a consultancy led by a former journalist who claimed to be an expert on the operations of the Communist Party of China. Scott Burchill argued: “It is not clear whether this is designed to appease Canberra’s increasingly unhinged Sinophobia or to pre-empt and hopefully ward off further government erosions of academic independence.”

Unsurprisingly, this intrusive, revitalised national security regime adopted a black hat-white hat mode for selecting targets of concern. China, inter alia, was plainly black-hatted while self-serving Global West allies like America and Britain and Israel were surely white-hatted, never mind their grim, meddling track records related to Australia.

Conclusion

By 2018, the FBI reported it had over 2,000 active investigations running under the notorious China Initiative program in the US. Although this project was wound up by the Biden administration, Marco Rubio, now the US secretary of state, favours its reintroduction. Apart from the appalling level of racially focused academic intimidation, the departure (to China) of Chinese-born scientists rose 75 per cent once the China Initiative gained traction.

Thankfully, Canberra has shunned replication of that dismal scheme in Australia. And it has spurned reliance on the very harsh academic-intimidation policies that now characterise the second Trump administration, described recently as “open warfare on higher educations”

However, controls on the offshore academic freedom of Australian universities have been conspicuously amplified since the menacing rise of the China Threat storyline. Around 20 years ago, when I retired from Monash University to take up a visiting appointment at Hong Kong University, the present level of security service, hands-on involvement in the offshore relationships of Australian universities was inconceivable.

One measure of how dramatically matters have changed emerged recently, when Canberra was reported to favour reduced scrutiny of universities setting up offshore relationships, not least with China. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) swiftly and alarmingly warned: “This is not the time to lower scrutiny of Australian unis’ deals with China.”

Still, there are signs – ASPI anxieties notwithstanding – that the worst of the China Threat confinement of Australian academic freedom is, today, easing under the Albanese government. The chair of Universities Australia, Carolyn Evans, recently led a significant mission to Beijing. Professor Evans noted how:

“Education has long been one of the strongest and most stable bridges between Australia and China. After years of disruption caused by the pandemic and broader geopolitical issues, this visit marks the start of a new era – one focused on innovation, collaboration and solving shared challenges. Australia’s and China’s universities have a proud record of working together to advance knowledge, strengthen industry capability and build the people-to-people links that underpin our relationship.”

This positive overview reflects primary, time-tested achievements. Moreover, the particular significance of China was recently confirmed (not least for Australia) by President Trump following his recent meeting with President Xi when he referred to the two countries as the “G2”.

Many potential research cooperation areas suggest themselves as China sets about implementing its latest, pivotal five-year plan. These include all forms of green development, artificial intelligence, the digital economy, medical science and agriculture.

First published in 1869, Nature describes itself as the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. It recently listed the leading cities in the world for high quality research. Chinese cities dominated the ranked lists for the physical sciences, chemistry and environmental science, with rising scores evident in biological sciences.

Finally, Allan Patience lately reminded us how, in fact, “China-phobia” measurably endangers Australia’s national security today because of the way it camouflages the greatest threat to our security identified by Malcolm Fraser more than a decade ago – America.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.