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China-Australia relations
This Week in AsiaGeopolitics

What’s driving China conspiracy theories in Australia?

  • China is Australia’s biggest trading partner and its people flock down under for both tourism and education
  • But intellectuals say a racialised anti-China narrative has taken hold in the media – and it’s time to call it out

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Tamara Thiessen

Two of Australia’s leading daily newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age launched an advertising campaign recently to demonstrate their commitment to investigative journalism.

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Headlined “It’s Your Future, You Deserve to Know”, the campaign featured four broad areas of coverage, including one titled “China’s Growing Influence”. Articles in that category were described as revealing the “true scale of China’s ambition for power” and examining if Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road infrastructure initiative was a “benign economic plan or the rise of a new empire”.
The descriptions reflect how deeply concerns about China’s rising influence in Australian politics and society – thrown into the open in December 2017 by then-leader Malcolm Turnbull when discussing new laws against foreign interference – have taken root.
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull meets Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou. Photo: Reuters
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull meets Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou. Photo: Reuters

“There’s also a lot of anxiety right now among the public and in universities, local government and the media about Chinese investments, and what the Australian government should do about it,” said University of Sydney Associate Professor James Reilly.

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Mixed feelings towards China has inevitably polarised debate among public intellectuals and commentators. Former Australian ambassador to Beijing, Geoff Raby, said last year that bilateral ties were in a mess. Canberra was struggling to come to terms with China’s rise, he said, pointing to “an ideologically pre-conditioned policymaking establishment ... which is quixotically hoping for the return of the old, US-led order”.

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