Having long encouraged universities to find funding elsewhere, politicians now home in on their ties to China to argue that they’ve lost their way

Outside the political sphere, much of Australia’s China panic centres on university campuses. This is hardly surprising, given the deep connections of the Australian higher-­education sector to China.

In 2019, before the Covid-­19 pandemic hit, higher education brought in some A$12bn in export revenue, most of it from China. With more than 150,000 Chinese international students enrolled, some institutions relied on that single revenue stream to make up a quarter of their total budget before the current drop-­off. Mandarin is the second language of campus life in most universities these days; Confucius Institutes have been established at 13 universities; partnerships and MOUs with Chinese universities proliferate in many fields. Australian academics now collaborate more with colleagues in China than in any other foreign country: one report found that an incredible 16.2% of scientific papers by Australian researchers – almost one in six – were co-­authored with researchers in China, with papers in the fields of materials science, chemical engineering and energy topping the list.