Amidst overlapping conversations among workers on the shop floor, I heard Mrs. Wong informing her husband that she’d agreed to meet their deadline. She then trudged back to her sewing station beside me on the factory floor. I asked her whether there was any way for her to convince Carmen to push the deadline back by one day, so everyone could catch one night of sleep: what difference would one day make?

Mrs. Wong explained that since summer was fast approaching, little girls in Thailand would soon be out of school. Their parents would want their daughters to wear new dresses to play or to go shopping. I was surprised: why did she think that the dresses for little girls in Thailand were more important than a good night’s sleep after long hours of tedious labour? In the tone of a master explaining a basic principle to an apprentice, she said, ‘Sometimes you must understand the position of the other person by putting yourself in their shoes. Our client (Carmen) is getting pressure from her client, so we must do our best to serve her. Plus, we are happy and obligated to help her. When we needed to pay the lease a few weeks back, she asked us if we had enough money. I told her that we didn’t, so she lent us the RMB 10,000 we needed to keep our business going.’

I was taken aback to learn about Carmen’s financial assistance to the Wongs. Over the course of my two-year ethnographic research at the migrant couple’s household workshop (they were originally from the city of Guigang in the neighboring Guangxi province), I had observed the budding of Mrs. Wong and Carmen’s fictive mother-daughter friendship, which blurred the divisions between boss and employee. From 2010 to 2012, I worked alongside Mr. and Mrs. Wong so that I could observe the everyday challenges and rewards of small-scale entrepreneurship in Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector. Some of these challenges included unpredictable market declines, long working hours, demanding clients, exploitative working conditions, unyielding competition, and bankruptcy. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic downturn that unfolded, these challenges made migrant entrepreneurs more vulnerable to pressure to take on whatever production orders were on offer, including those that were only marginally profitable. As I helped to cut loose threads off assembled garments and package them for delivery, I had the opportunity to closely observe and interact with clients, itinerant migrant workers, and the Wongs themselves. Through participant observation, I documented the daily rhythms and everyday struggles of migrant self-enterprise in Guangzhou’s fast-fashion sector.

In the larger context of low-cost fast-fashion production and transnational subcontracting in China, the risk of financial loss, including debt and bankruptcy, was an everyday reality for migrant entrepreneurs like the Wongs. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many migrant entrepreneurs like the Wongs had to informally subcontract from self-employed market intermediaries like Carmen, who received production orders from multinational corporations and big box retailer chains.

Conditions for migrant entrepreneurs like the Wongs have become even more precarious since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because large fast-fashion corporations usually do not directly own or operate any factories or warehouses, small-scale subcontractors shoulder the risks of surplus inventories, capital flight, labour strikes, and falling margins, and do so without socio-economic safety nets. Risks are passed down the supply chains to local manufacturers who then hire migrant labourers at piece-rate wages. This hierarchical chain of command and risk deferment makes low-cost garment production even more vulnerable to exploitation, with the blurring of profit-seeking business activities with fictive kinship and opportunistic intimacy.

When I first visited the Wong’s factory, it was situated in the middle of a long row of densely built apartment buildings along an alleyway in one of Guangzhou’s urban villages. Like many small-scale household workshops or jiagongchang 家工厂in the surrounding garment district, it was hidden and informal. (Since then the Wongs have moved out of the garment district, and have set up another factory elsewhere in the city.) Using low-tech, second-hand industrial irons, cutters, and sewing stations, the migrant couple depended on their personal savings and their experiences as employees of larger garment factories in Shenzhen for financial and social capital. In the early years of their factory, which they started in 2012, the Wongs relied on walk-in clients and temporary migrant workers to kick-start their business. Most clients would drop off an order of about 500-1,000 garment pieces per order, while temporary migrant workers would earn piece-rate wages for a week at a time before venturing off to other jobs.

Like many similar household workshops in the area, the Wongs’ workshop drew upon the family as its basis of organisational support, which served as a buffer from the exploitative effects of industrial labour. The Wongs followed in the footsteps of Mr. Wong’s older brother, who operated a similar workshop nearby. On days when his business was slow, Mr. Wong’s brother would stop by and assist in the ironing or packaging of garments. While using the family (nuclear or extended) as the foundational source of labour and emotional support, the workshop, lacked the long-term stability conventionally associated with kinship.

In this garment district, production orders are often short-term and unpredictable, as is the supply of labour, with many migrant workers preferring temporary work before venturing out to find other jobs or to run their own businesses. Thus, the defining characteristics of this household workshop are short-term fictive-kin relations that blur the boundaries between trust and exploitation to make rapid cycles of fast fashion production work.

Scholars and observers of small-scale household workshops have shown how there is no clear line between the public and private or formal and informal.[1] Their works emphasise how production is cyclical and reliant on social and familial connections rather than formal institutions.[2] My investigations into small-scale household workshops in Guangzhou demonstrate how low-cost garment mass manufacturing also draws upon short-term, precarious, and fictive kin-based relations, which can obscure relations of inequality and exploitation between clients and their subcontractor/ manufacturers.

The relationship between Mrs. Wong and Carmen, for example, demonstrates how sentiments of care, love, and trust can sometimes hide the exploitative effects of fast fashion production. A fledging wholesaler in Guangzhou’s garment sector, Carmen had forfeited her studies at a university in Australia to take over her mother’s garment wholesale business in Guangzhou after her mother’s sudden illness and death, expanding the family business in her mother’s name. As Carmen was struggling to jumpstart her wholesale operations, Mr. and Mrs. Wong were establishing their factory in Guangzhou’s urban village. When Carmen met the Wongs, she and Mrs. Wong bonded over the loss of Carmen’s mother. Her feelings of void and sadness struck a chord with Mrs. Wong’s long-standing desire for a daughter.

Mrs. Wong and Carmen provided crucial assistance to one another as they launched their respective businesses. They shared information on the costs of fabrics and other raw materials, as well as on rental spaces in wholesale markets across the city. Carmen and Mrs. Wong also shared intimate details about their families, calling each other several times a day to chat about the difficulties of marriage, motherhood, and entrepreneurship. The boundaries between care and industrial labour, as well as between boss and employee, became blurred and ambivalent, shifting the dynamics of power between the independent subcontractors in ambiguous and unpredictable ways.

As Mrs. Wong prepared herself for another long night of tedious labour, she described her friendship with Carmen with such compassion and respect that I missed the uneven power dynamics that coloured their boss-client relationship. I went along with Mrs. Wong’s rationale about the ethics of a good manufacturer in understanding the pressures their clients faced. I attributed this to guanxi关系, of maintaining informal personal and business relations marked by reciprocity and mutual obligation. Once I mentioned the term guanxi, Mrs. Wong enthusiastically confirmed that I had correctly understood her characterisation of the friendship by saying, ‘Yes, that’s right. Sometimes many things in life are about guanxi. If she and I didn’t have such a good relationship, I might not be doing this for her.’ The Wong’s decision to fulfill Carmen’s last-minute request at the expense of rest came from their desire to maintain their guanxi with Carmen as both a family friend and as a client. The bonds of exploitation, obligation, and sacrifice between Carmen and the Wongs were tightly enmeshed, blurring the boundaries that separate boss/employee, care work/productive labour, and commodified/ non-commodified work. Their collaboration as independent contractors in the volatile and unpredictable world of fast fashion emerged not only from a shared interest in profits, but also from their fictive, but felt, mother-daughter bond.

Later in the week, when I had a chance to speak with Carmen privately over dinner, she and I shared our appreciation for the Wongs. I talked about the enormous sacrifices that the Wongs had made by living and working in the factory day in and day out. Impressed by the displays of modesty and pride, which the Wongs had shown through their hard work, Carmen and her business partner responded, ‘You know, we have met numerous factory owners around here, and it’s quite easy to find hard working people. But the Wongs are exceptional because we can rely on them. Once we place an order, we know that they will do the best they can to complete it. They do what they say they’ll do. That’s why we trust them.’ Carmen’s decision to provide financial assistance to the Wongs stemmed from her reliance on the couple as both her friends and as business partners.

Months later, Mrs. Wong once again had a difficult time finishing a last-minute production order for one of Carmen’s clients. She had to re-tag the labels from several hundred little girls’ dresses, which required slow and meticulous work. This led her to vent her frustration on her workers. Afterwards, she reflected on her relationship with Carmen as I accompanied her into the kitchen to wash the dishes and vegetables in preparation for dinner. I acknowledged the pressures she was under, including balancing factory work with household labour. She mentioned how one of the women she’d snapped at told her later that she couldn’t sleep that night because of Mrs. Wong’s harsh tone; Mrs. Wong told the woman, whom she called ‘little sister’, that she’d just been venting, and had already forgotten about it.

She said that Carmen would sometimes speak to her in similarly harsh tones. Earlier that week, Mrs. Wong had called Carmen to clarify the proper position of the buttons on an order for girls’ dresses: ‘Carmen snapped at me by saying that she had left the precise measurements with us in one of her notebooks. She said rather bluntly she was busy and couldn’t be bothered with such minor details.’ Carmen promptly called Mrs. Wong again to apologise. Mrs. Wong said she understood Carmen was busy, and she hadn’t taken it to heart. ‘I don’t really care about these things,’ Mrs Wong told me. ‘I simply forget it the next day. I understand that’s how you must be in the business world. I don’t care. I only care about raising my sons and providing them with a good life. That’s all I care about.

Even though Mrs. Wong mentally compartmentalised the business world from other aspects of her family life, her reflections on proper conduct as an entrepreneur reflected her moral disposition and sense of human decency 做人. Echoing her earlier comments about honesty and trust-building, she maintained a clear sense of the importance of moral and ethical conduct in the business world. Balancing multiple roles as a mother, wife, factory owner, and garment worker, she had to strike a balance between her struggles as a migrant entrepreneur and her other roles in the larger world.

Years later, I would learn that her friendship with Carmen could not survive the economic pressures of small-scale entrepreneurship. The Wongs eventually ended their collaboration with Carmen after an elaborate plan to co-invest in a new factory space in the Wongs’ hometown of Guigang. The initial investment in the factory was provided by Carmen. At the time, Carmen was running her own business and had partnered with a man from Dongguan in Guangdong who was about her age. I had seen the two deliver orders and arrange materials in the Wong’s factory several times. I had even had dinners with them years ago. Their business partnership became a romantic one, but after a few years, the relationship ended and they went their separate ways.

Later, Carmen met another romantic partner, this one from Hubei province. Much like the Dongguan man, her new boyfriend collaborated in her business ventures. According to Mrs. Wong, Carmen’s new boyfriend was more assertive in business. Seeing how well she got along with the Wongs, he convinced Carmen to send her production orders to a new factory he had opened in Hubei; he preferred all profits to remain within their joint partnership. This effectively severed Carmen’s business ties with the Wongs.

Mrs. Wong’s story led me to realise the significant role romantic partnerships could play in these small-scale subcontracting partnerships. I was surprised by the extent to which Carmen’s romantic partnerships influenced her business decisions. Migrants (like other businesspeople) often mixed business partnerships with marriage and romantic ties. But their status as rural migrants left them with fewer rights to state welfare and residency protection than city residents. These limitations compelled migrants to become dependent on informal business partnerships and patron-client relationships, which often seeped into the realms of romance and fictive kinship. While the Wongs struggled with their marriage in the context of running the factory, other migrant entrepreneurs in the wholesaling sector broke off their marriages and romantic partnerships in face of financial stress: where love and marriage played a central role in business partnerships they were badly affected by problems in the business.

I was also surprised that Mrs. Wong held little anger or resentment toward Carmen for backing out of the business plan, even though the factory space in the Wongs’ home in Guigang continued to sit idle. The Wongs acknowledged that the in Guangzhou would be eventually dismantled after the municipal government incorporated the area into the urban core and enforced the hukou (household registration) system there. The demolition of factories and warehouses would force many migrant businesses, including theirs, to close. It seemed the Wongs interpreted professional separation from Carmen as simply another part of doing business. Although I knew them for years, I was not sure whether Mrs. Wong saw it as a missed opportunity or as an act of fate.

Besides, the couple hoped to collaborate with Carmen again someday. Mrs. Wong informed me they occasionally communicated over WeChat. Carmen once invited Mr. Wong to visit her new factory in Dongguan. According to Mrs. Wong, Carmen had even tried to persuade Mr. Wong to give up their factory to work at hers. Although Carmen had broached this with the Wongs several times, the couple had not taken the possibility seriously. It did not seem to be a fair trade-off for the factory expansion and investment opportunity they had originally envisioned with her. I was not sure whether Carmen’s offer was an attempt at reconciliation or whether she saw the offer as beneficial for everyone involved.

The Wongs, by contrast, wanted to maintain some control over their labour and livelihood, however difficult. The years of struggling with the challenges of migrant entrepreneurship, from labour sub-contracting to negotiating the transnational supply chains of fast fashion, taught them that they needed to strike a balance between exploiting others and avoiding being exploited themselves. Looking back, they realised this was hardest when client-manufacturer relations blurred boundaries of kinship, entrepreneurship, and industrial labour.

Notes

[1] Hsiung, Ping-Chun. Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender, and the Satellite Factory System in Taiwan. Temple University Press, 1996; Narotzky, Susana and Gavin Smith. Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain. University of California Press, 2006; Yanagisako, Syliva. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

[2] Elyachar, Julia. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Duke University Press, 2007.

The post Chains of Love and Exploitation: Fast Fashion and Migrant Entrepreneurship in Guangzhou appeared first on The China Story.

One possible explanation for the progress on barley focuses on foreign policy drivers. The barriers may have been removed due to warming bilateral relations under a new Australian government and a transition to a bargaining phase in the relationship. Another possibility is that Beijing dismantled the tariffs to avoid the potential reputational costs that might stem from the public release of a panel report adverse to China by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Here, we consider the logic of these two arguments, and introduce a third explanation that is largely missing from current analyses: the vested interests of groups within China, both government and non-government, and especially industry associations.

Examining the factors driving the removal of the barriers to Australian barley imports provides insight into a wider question which has received scant attention: when and why China removes sanctions. Although a burgeoning scholarly literature examines the termination of Western economic sanctions, it has not considered China. New insights on this issue may have significant policy implications. Most immediately, they are relevant to ongoing negotiations about the removal of China’s barriers on Australian wine. Many expect that the ‘template’ used in the barley negotiations — combining warming diplomatic relations with the concession of withdrawing a WTO case — will be successfully applied a second time. This appears to be playing out at the time of writing. On the back of some recent Australian decisions that may have sweetened the deal, Beijing has agreed to conduct a five-month review of its wine tariffs, and Canberra has temporarily suspended its WTO case. Unlike the case for barley, however, Beijing’s review may be complicated by substantially different underlying domestic political economy dynamics in the wine industry which could well determine whether the tariffs ultimately stand or fall.

The Imposition and Removal of the Barley Tariffs

The origins of China’s barriers on Australian barley go back to 2018. In October that year, the China Chamber of International Commerce (CCIC, 中国国际商会) requested that the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM, 商务部) investigate the dumping of Australian barley on the Chinese market. MOFCOM began its investigation in November. On 28 May 2020, after China-Australia relations had slipped into free fall, MOFCOM handed down its ruling and applied tariffs of 80.5 percent (73.6 percent anti-dumping, 6.9 percent anti-subsidy) on the import of Australian barley. The barriers reduced a trade of US$1 billion in 2018 to zero in 2021.

Against the advice of some commentators, the then centre-right Coalition government took the matter to the WTO dispute settlement system in December 2020. After two and a half years of deliberation, the WTO issued its draft panel report confidentially to the parties. This appeared to expedite bilateral negotiations for a resumption of trade, where Australia agreed to suspend its WTO complaint in April 2023 while MOFCOM undertook to conduct a three-month review of its tariffs. After extending the review to four months, China removed the barriers in August 2023. The WTO case was subsequently settled and within weeks large shipments of barley set sail from Australia for China.

What enabled this to happen?

Explanation One: Warming Bilateral Relations

The first explanation focuses on the state of the bilateral relationship between Australia and China. If imposition of the barriers, or at least a failure to negotiate their removal, stemmed from a range of political grievances on the part of Beijing, something was needed to enable a warming of the relationship. In this case, the election of a centre-left Labor government in May 2022 created the opportunity for both sides to move beyond positions hardened over the previous two years, first to resume high-level talks (previously rebuffed by Beijing) and later to negotiate the tariff’s removal. Critical of their Coalition predecessors’ rhetorical hostility toward China, the Labor government under Anthony Albanese stressed a change in tone even as it made clear there was no change in underlying interests. The goal was to ‘stabilise’ the relationship without making substantive concessions on any of the grievances believed to be motivating China’s sanctions. Canberra has, however, refrained from adopting new policies that may have been seen by Beijing as provocative, and which would have disrupted relations and the resolution of the trade disputes. A change in government and tone, and the resulting resumption of high-level contact, were likely major factors in causing Beijing to remove sanctions. However, the stabilisation of the political relationship alone cannot explain the removal’s timing and sequencing, nor does it provide confidence that the remaining barriers will be removed.

Explanation Two: the WTO Dispute and Aversion to Hypocrisy Costs

A second explanation is specific to barley itself and relates to the confidential draft panel report that was released to the Chinese and Australian governments shortly before the parties announced the suspension of the WTO dispute and Beijing’s review of the duties. The content of the draft report is not known and unlikely ever to be released. However, the decision was likely favourable to Australia due to significant weaknesses in China’s arguments that Australia had been dumping barley on its market.[1]

This explanation, also rooted in foreign policy logics, attributes Beijing’s removal of the barriers to the impending adverse decision. But why would the Chinese government be so reluctant for the panel report to be released? After all, China has lost WTO disputes in the past.

One possibility is that policymakers were particularly sensitive about this case given it related to measures which had openly been characterised as coercive sanctions. Although China is alleged to have deployed economic coercion in multiple cases over the past two decades, none of the underlying measures have ever been formally ruled upon by the WTO. The only case to come close — one concerning Canadian canola — was also resolved via negotiation before a panel report was issued.

The panel report would not have ruled on whether China’s measures were ‘coercive’ or ‘sanctions’, but rather likely presented a detailed critique of the compatibility of China’s approach with WTO anti-dumping rules. Nevertheless, Beijing may have wished to avoid a formal rebuke of its measures, which would give even more ammunition to critics arguing that the tariffs were ‘blatant economic coercion’, rather than legitimate trade measures. In other words, it may have sought to avoid ‘hypocrisy costs’. Chinese officials have annually denounced the use of sanctions — so-called ‘unilateral coercive measures’ — as a violation of international law at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and other international forums since the 1990s. Policymakers may have had concerns that to be seen to be using sanctions might damage China’s credibility and reputation in world politics (especially with states who sign onto its anti-sanction UNGA resolutions).

According to this explanation, the draft WTO panel report created the space for a negotiated solution. It generated additional incentive for Beijing to find an alternative and avoid a formal and public ruling against it, thereby aligning with the goals of Australian industry and government to resume exports as soon as possible. Both sides preferred an outcome in which barriers were amicably removed.

One might think this explanation would generate optimism about wine, given Beijing agreed to conduct a similar review in tandem with Australia suspending its WTO case. However, it is possible that leverage from the WTO ruling alone was insufficient in achieving this outcome for barley, as we explain in the next section.

A Third Factor: Domestic Drivers of China’s Barrier Imposition and Removal

One factor that is often overlooked in analyses of China’s use of politically motivated trade barriers is the role of domestic interest groups and domestic policy objectives. As we have argued elsewhere, these factors are key to understanding the logic of the sanctions imposed on Australia. Likewise, they may help explain their removal.

The Imposition of Barriers on Barley

Policymakers: While China’s barley tariffs may have been partly motivated by a coercive objective when they were imposed in 2020, the original 2018 anti-dumping investigation was driven by agricultural protectionism. In particular, as revealed in legal case documents and other substantive reports on the issue, Chinese policymakers were acutely concerned with issues of food security or the ‘choke point’ 卡脖子 in China’s barley supply.

From a peak in the mid-1990s, China’s domestic barley production has undergone a long-term decline. By the period of anti-dumping investigation (2017–18), domestic supply accounted for an exceptionally low 11 percent of total barley supply. At the same time, barley imports for brewing and livestock feed accelerated, especially after 2015, with Australian companies accounting for 75 percent of all imports in some years (Figure 1). Chinese officials argued the imports led to losses in farmers’ incomes in the less developed areas of China where most barley is grown.

The barriers appear designed to arrest these trends, driven by a range of party and state units that have an interest in food security, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA, 农业农村部), which assisted with the investigation.

Industry associations: Like other products, barley is grown both as an agricultural commodity and an industrial input (for brewing and livestock feed). This brings into competition sectoral interests which need to be adjudicated at a higher level. Industry associations and chambers of commerce are key players, both as representatives of their industries and conduits for the interests of the party-state.

While there is an array of industry organisations in China, the more established and influential organisations are a vestige of the central planning era, where government departments with specialised economic functions managed the operations of state-owned enterprises under their control. During administrative reforms in the 1990s, many specialised economic departments were devolved to become industry associations, comprised of enterprise members that pay membership fees for representation and services. Reforms starting in 2016 and implemented through to 2019 aimed to further administratively decouple associations and chambers of commerce from the party-state, with caveats. The key powers of party-building in associations were to be centralised and led by the Party Committee of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC, 国务院国有资产监督管理委员会), while foreign affairs were more clearly placed within the purview of the relevant (party-state) organs. A framework of state corporatism has been used to describe the ties that bind the party-state to associations and their enterprise members.

Barley provides an interesting case study in industry representation. Barley is grown in China by a multitude of individual households not represented by any industry organisation and so, by default, by government. Jurisdiction over barley production and farmer incomes from agricultural activities like barley lies with MARA. The ministry has long been concerned about China’s balance of production, consumption, and trade for barley.

Government units rarely make anti-dumping applications.[2] The organisation chosen to apply for the dumping investigation on Australian barley was the China Chamber of International Commerce (CCOIC), which has a mandate to represent the interests of Chinese enterprises in international trade and investment. CCOIC falls under the umbrella of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT, 中国国际贸易促进委员).[3] CCPIT has a vast network of branches within China, a legal affairs department and a network of overseas law firms used for dealing with anti-dumping, subsidy and safeguard issues. It also runs the Economic and Trade Friction Early Warning System 中国国际贸易促进委员会经贸摩擦预警管理系统, which includes an international agricultural branch 中国国际商会农业行业经贸摩擦预警中心.

While the CCOIC notionally represents enterprises with foreign interests, the barriers on Australian barley are contrary to the interests of enterprises that use it for brewing and livestock feed. This is particularly the case for beer brewers that are members of the China Alcoholic Drinks Association (CADA中国酒业协会). CADA has origins as a department within the former Ministry (and then Bureau) of Light Industry before being moved into SASAC. It gained more administrative independence in the 2016–19 association reforms but retains links to the party-state.

CADA has been a participant in at least five international trade cases, either to support trade barriers (Australian wine, EU wine, US distillers’ grains) or oppose them (Australian barley, US sorghum). The differing positions reflect differences in the characteristics of alcoholic drinks including the inputs and outputs used in manufacturing and the relationship with adjacent products (ethanol and various livestock feeds). Different interests are expressed through branches within CADA, representing at least eight types of alcohol including baijiu, beer and wine. Barley is of primary concern to the CADA Beer Sub-Association (CBSA, 中国酒业协会啤酒分会) and the Beer Raw Material Expert Committee 中国酒业协会啤酒原料专业委员会. With seventy-three members, CBSA is powerful and has a strong interest in maintaining supplies of Australia’s malting barley. The attraction of Chinese brewers to Australian barley was not just access to consistent supplies of high-quality malting barley, but also access to a lower-priced grade of barley (‘Fair Average Quality’) permitted under China’s food laws for use in food (including beer) rather than being relegated to feed use.

CBSA made a forceful submission against the tariffs on Australian barley in the initial anti-dumping investigation in 2020, but to no avail. Policymakers concerned with agriculture and food security and the foreign policy preferences of the central government held sway in the initial round leading to the imposition of barriers. There was no prospect for an early reversal in 2020–22, a period of high tensions from COVID-19, strained international relations, the dual circulation policy to promote self-reliance and heightened concerns about food security, including for non-staple foods.

The Removal of Barriers on Barley

For Chinese policymakers, the tariffs had generated mixed success by 2023. As shown for the period 2020-22 in Figure 1, the tariffs successfully stopped Australian barley imports, forcing brewers and livestock companies to diversify inputs to other sources (Argentina, France, Canada, Ukraine). However, total imports in the period increased significantly, mainly for livestock feed. The trade barriers on Australian barley did not in themselves provide the protection that would generate an increase in Chinese barley production. China did however use the period to pursue new domestic policy measures including breeding, research and revised industry standards as well as the building of new barley production areas for breweries in China.[4]

Official statistics report a doubling of Chinese barley production over the period in which Australian barley was blocked (2019 to 2022) but this is a statistical quirk. From 2020 onwards, reporting on Chinese barley production (damai 大麦) included a different variety, highland barley (qingke 青稞) grown in Tibet, Sichuan, Yunnan and Qinghai: this doubled the reported planted area and production of ‘barley’. Nevertheless, with increased reported domestic production and diversification away from Australian barley, policymakers may have concluded that the barriers had served their purpose. Accordingly, when discussion of relaxing the barriers occurred in 2023, there could be expected to have been less resistance from interests within the Chinese party-state.

Simultaneously, domestic industry groups continued their opposition to the barriers. In fact, a submission made by CBSA earlier in the year became the centrepiece of the MOFCOM review. The submission argued China’s domestic barley production programs were unsuccessful and that, with the barriers in place, international supplies were expensive, inconsistent and did not meet requirements, all of which hurt the viability of Chinese beer companies. It also argued the tariffs were counter-productive to China’s own policy objectives in three areas: industrial upgrading and international competitiveness; increasing consumer confidence and spending; and meeting national standards (guobiao 国标) on beer and malting barley. The MOFCOM ruling to drop the barriers also included consideration of submissions from the China Feed Industry Association and Australian industry organisations. Chinese industry groups have similarly been active in government decisions to drop barriers on US sorghum and on lucerne, an item subject to China-US tariff escalations from 2018.

To sum up, in 2020, opposition to the barriers on Australian barley from domestic industry groups was overridden by the preferences of the central government and parts of the Chinese bureaucracy that favoured the introduction of the tariffs — either to achieve domestic agricultural policy objectives, or foreign policy objectives vis-à-vis Australia. By 2023, there was a realignment of interests in favour of the removal of the barriers, which helps to explain when and why the tariffs were dropped.

Implications for Australian Wine

The three conditions that allowed for the lifting of barriers on Australian barley — improved bilateral relations, leverage from WTO proceedings, and an alignment of industry and policy interests in China — provide some guidance on prospects for a similar outcome for Australian wine, on which China has applied similar anti-dumping tariffs. Certainly, negotiations are occurring within a similarly conciliatory bilateral environment. Moreover, given China’s case for imposing tariffs on wine appears even more tenuous than barley, the recently issued confidential draft panel report may motivate Beijing to settle if it is deemed to raise the spectre of hypocrisy costs.

However, unlike barley, there is no alignment of domestic interests in China against the barriers on wine. To the contrary, both industry associations and industry-oriented policymakers have vested interests in continuing the ban.

In the case of barley, the users of Australian product had close links to the state system and a strong stake in the resumption of the trade. But the buyers of Australian wine — importers, retailers and consumers — are not an organised group. Wine is also a luxury product that is not a priority for the party-state.

China’s wine growers, meanwhile, are in an influential position. China has for many years sought to develop a large domestic wine sector as a pillar industry with high potential for value-adding, to raise farmer incomes including in rural and undeveloped areas with grape-growing potential (Ningxia, Xinjiang and Gansu) and to promote ‘ecological’ land use and eco-tourism. Importantly, Chinese wineries are represented by an established industry organisation that falls under the same parent association that opposed the barriers on Australian barley — CADA — but a different branch, the CADA Wine Sub-Association (CWSA, 中国酒业协会葡萄酒分会). CWSA — which comprised 119 domestic wineries in 2022 — was the applicant in the investigation into the dumping of Australian wine and compiled the information for the case. In the lead-up to the investigation, the association said that imports were ‘robbing’ Chinese wineries of the domestic market, especially in the higher-value, cold-weather reds. Thus, unlike the breweries of the CBSA that benefit from Australian barley imports, the wineries of the CWSA compete with Australian wine imports and have an interest in establishing and maintaining the barriers.

The barriers on Australian wine may not have fully allayed the concerns of Chinese industry and policymakers. Chinese wine production and consumption continued to decline in 2022 and the proportion of domestic production in total supply decreased (to 54 percent, see Figure 2). China’s Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao 王文涛 relayed concerns about the production and profitability of the Chinese wine industry as a potential obstacle to his Australian counterpart in discussions about lifting the trade barriers on wine. The potential for this to be a snag was also reflected in a cautious statement from the peak Australian industry group earlier in the year. As a way of addressing the concerns of Chinese industry and interest groups, the largest Australian exporter of wines to China entered into a joint venture in 2022 to produce Australian wine in China. The venture involves an agreement with CWSA, which sees the venture as an opportunity to transfer expertise and build China’s domestic industry.

Nevertheless, the process used to resolve the barriers on Australian barley appears under way for wine. Following the circulation of the WTO panel’s draft report on the wine dispute in October, China and Australia reached an agreement to suspend the panel while Beijing conducts a five-month review of its barriers. It is unclear where the review will land, though the expectation in Canberra on the eve of Prime Minister Albanese’s visit to Beijing in early November was for a favourable outcome. Chinese policymakers may again wish to avoid a potentially adverse WTO ruling and signal their commitment to improving the bilateral relationship. However, it may also be possible that the relationship is sufficiently ‘stabilised’ and instead in a ‘bargaining’ phase, with Beijing therefore adopting a more transactional logic where it looks to extract concessions from Canberra as quid pro quo.

One possible concession is closing a separate WTO dispute with Australia. In September it was reported that Canberra had rejected a proposed ‘package deal’ in which the wine barriers would be removed if Australia dropped anti-dumping duties it had earlier imposed on Chinese wind towers. A statement from China’s Ministry of Commerce in October, however, linked the new wine review to progress on that exact issue. Canberra denied this linkage, and anti-dumping duties are normally determined by an independent Anti-Dumping Commission that would not consider foreign policy interests in its decision. However, even if coincidental, the timing is hard to ignore — the commission released a preliminary report indicating a willingness to let the wind tower duties expire in the same week that Canberra decided not to cancel a lease held by a Chinese company over the port of Darwin, just prior to the announcement of the deal on wine. Furthermore, the week prior Australian citizen Cheng Lei had been allowed to return to Australia following three years in detention. Both sides pocketing ‘wins’ in the month prior to the first visit by an Australian prime minister in seven years speaks to a new phase in the relationship.

At the same time, unlike the barley case, the fact that there remains robust support for the wine barriers within China suggests the policy calculus is more complex. The fact that the wine review period is longer than that for barley might suggest Beijing anticipates a longer internal debate to reconcile unaligned interests, although it may also be designed to coincide with the expiration of the wind tower duties. It may be that domestic concerns are ultimately overruled, not merely by the shadow of a potentially adverse panel report, but a broader deal in an increasingly transactional relationship. In the end, if China does eventually remove the barriers, it will indicate the prioritisation of foreign policy goals and other equities over the preferences of the affected domestic industry and interest groups.

Broader Implications

It is well-recognised that domestic interest groups play an important role in trade formation, processes, and the resolution of trade conflicts. While this is borne out in the case of China-Australian barley and wine, analysis of interest group representation has largely been absent from commentary both inside and outside of China on Beijing’s politically motivated trade barriers. Such analysis can be challenging given the sprawling and opaque nature of party-state and societal linkages in the Chinese ‘leviathan’, but is nevertheless crucial for informed public debate.

More generally, our analysis has implications both for policy and emerging research on the political economy of China’s power in world politics. Concerned about China’s apparent use of international trade as a ‘weapon’, several governments have recently announced plans to coordinate their responses to Beijing’s behaviour. If these coalitions are serious about influencing when and how China uses different international economic policies, they need to pay attention to the domestic micro-foundations that underpin them.

Since the Australia episode, China has continued to impose trade restrictions during political disputes. Notable instances have involved Lithuania, Taiwan and Japan. In each case, as with Australia, governments have looked to WTO dispute settlement as a mechanism to have the barriers removed. Brussels, Taipei and Tokyo should carefully study the domestic politics behind the when, how, and why of China’s removal of barriers in earlier cases — including those involving Australian barley and wine — and look for any parallels that could help them resolve their own disputes.

In terms of research, our findings illustrate the importance of exploring the mechanics and consequences of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ in the trade domain. It is well understood that the Chinese party-state is not unitary — even in the Xi era. But there remains considerable scope to further illuminate the mechanisms and conditions by which domestic interest groups shape China’s international economic policies.

The authors are grateful to Pru Gordon, Benjamin Herscovitch and Paul Hubbard for helpful comments.

Notes

[1] Such as using the price of Australian shipments to Egypt — a very minor export market — to determine the ‘normal value’ of Australian barley, and the claim that Australian barley imports damaged Chinese barley production, even though it had been in decline for decades (see Figure 1).

[2] One exception was on sorghum from the United States.

[3] In 2022, the spokesperson of the CCPIT was the Secretary-General of the CCOIC.

[4] Wary of the distortions caused from previous interventions in the corn market from 2015, China has since refrained from large-scale, direct interventions in feed grains.

The post When Does China Terminate Sanctions? Lessons From the Case of Australian Barley appeared first on The China Story.

How does China compare to these other countries trapped at the middle-income level? Since the beginning of reforms under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China has undergone remarkable development. After four decades of strong economic growth, China has become the second largest economy (in terms of nominal GDP), the largest exporter and the second largest importer in the world.[1] However, China’s growth, even with double-digit growth rates, has relied heavily on unskilled labour. Most of the workers who have fuelled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never gone to high school. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in the education and health of a large share of its people.[2]

One key factor that may account for disparate development paths among nations is education. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2015, in countries that graduated to high-income status (i.e. they escape from middle income), 72 percent of the working age population (18–65 years)[3] had completed secondary education when the country was still at middle-income status. In countries stuck in the Middle-Income Trap, the share of the working-age population with a secondary education is much lower—only 36 percent on average.

Having a large supply of educated workers ensures that enough talent exists to meet and drive demand for high-value goods and services that drive an economy when it becomes a high-income one, thereby sustaining growth. When too many unskilled workers are squeezed out of upgraded industries, their wages tend to stagnate or fall, curtailing demand and hampering growth. This eventually leads to serious social problems, such as higher rates of unemployment and increased crime and social unrest. Nations with socially polarised work forces also suffer from political instability.

Shortcomings in education and health threaten China’s growth

Education attainment metrics help reveal China’s potential future development and growth trajectory. The share of uneducated workers in China’s labour force is larger than that of virtually all upper middle-income countries. According to China’s own 2015 micro-census data,[4] there are between 450 to 500 million people in China between the ages of 18 and 65 who have never attended one day of high school, which is 70 percent of the labour force. This makes China one of the least educated middle-income countries in the world.

A large population of uneducated workers was not a problem while China was moving from low- to middle-income status. Unskilled labour was in high demand. Unskilled wages were low, and low-cost manufacturing and construction were growing. But China’s growth model has been changing over the past decade or more. Unskilled wages are much higher, so foreign investors have begun to shift their attention towards other countries with cheaper labour. China’s own massive push to automate (also to avoid having to pay for labour that became increasingly expensive since the mid-2000s) also is rendering low-skilled workers redundant. Construction jobs have tapered off as investment in infrastructure cools as well. China’s unskilled workers may become increasingly unemployable (and have actually begun to see wages falling) as the economy upgrades.

The only destination for China’s unskilled workforce — new entrants to the labour force and laid-off workers alike — is the informal (or blue-collar) service sector. Data from the 2018 China Statistical Yearbook shows that informal employment is currently the fastest growing sector in China, increasing from 33 percent in 2004 to 56 percent in 2017.[5] A rising supply of unskilled workers (along with only moderately growing demand for services) means stagnating wages. With strong demand for skilled work in the white-collar sector, higher wages are going to those with higher levels of education. This result appears to have a large number of similarities to what happened in Mexico in the 1990s (although there are differences): Mexico had solid macroeconomic performance, export success and an accumulation of physical capital. However, despite these strengths, the nation’s poorly educated labour force and the emergence of a dominating informal economy swamped and dragged down the development of the formal economy. Despite rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s (which ended with Mexico being admitted to the OECD as a rapidly developing upper middle-income economy), Mexico has almost experienced no growth since the mid-1990s and today is a clearly a stagnant middle-income nation!

Recognising the critical need for secondary education, China’s government has expanded access to high school throughout the country in the mid-2000s.[6] High school attainment among the youngest cohorts in the labour force is close to 80 percent. But hundreds of millions of less educated people will remain in the labour force for the next thirty years.[7] The government will face huge challenges trying either to retrain workers or to provide a social safety net.

The quality of China’s expanded secondary school education is also uncertain. Almost all low-skilled labour comes from rural areas, where school and health systems are under-resourced due to the legacy of national policies.[8] The household registration (hukou 戶口) system played an important role in the widening of China’s rural/urban disparities. The system was introduced in the 1950s as a way of managing labour and population flows in an economy that was being run by central planners (as opposed to markets). Although hukou-related restrictions on labour mobility were relaxed gradually after the early 1990s, the system continued to limit educational, health and employment opportunities for rural hukou holders. Moreover, historically higher shares of public investments in infrastructure and services have been channelled towards urban areas in China. As a result, many of China’s new secondary school graduates attended poor-quality vocational high schools and are not learning the maths, science, computer and language skills that China will need in the future in its labour force if the nation graduates to high-income status.

Systemic shortfalls in education and the health of young children in rural areas may also render many young people unprepared to learn complex skills as they age. Large-scale field studies showed that more than a quarter of Chinese school children were anemic; one out of five were myopic (and did not have eyeglasses); and one out of four children had intestinal worms. Soil-transmitted helminth infections are a threat to the nutritional status of children and their cognitive development.[9]

Increasingly, studies recognise that early childhood (up to three years old) is a sensitive and critical stage, foundational for lifelong human development.[10] In the international literature, delays in early childhood development have been associated with decreased cognitive functioning and lower labour productivity in adulthood.[11] Empirical evidence from China specifically demonstrates that the rural/urban education gap in the country emerges during the first years of life,[12] when rural children start lagging behind in their development. A systematic review and meta-analysis calculated that the risks of delay to early cognitive development and language function for children younger than five years of age in rural study sites across China amount to 45 percent and 46 percent, respectively.[13]

A safe home environment with sufficient learning opportunities, healthy nutrition and responsive caregiving are essential for healthy development during early childhood. An optimal home is a clean and safe environment, sensitive to the nutritional needs of young children and equipped with developmentally appropriate objects, toys and books that provide opportunities for children to play, explore and discover. However, survey results have shown that parental investment in cognitively stimulating parenting practices and child nutrition in rural China is low. No more than 25 percent of the rural caregivers in large-scale field surveys in rural China report frequently reading or telling stories to their young children.[14] Another study in China’s rural areas found that no more than 30 percent of the caregivers provide a diet for their children that satisfies the WHO’s minimum dietary diversity criterion.[15]

Parenting training programs focusing on cognitive stimulation can benefit the developmental opportunities of young children in developing countries.[16] Pioneering studies from the 1970s and 1980s, with long-term follow-up, include the Jamaican Nutrition and Cognitive Stimulation Program (or Reach Up and Learn). They found evidence of lasting positive impacts of small-scale parenting interventions on a range of adult outcomes,[17] including lifetime educational attainment. The promising results incentivised researchers and policymakers in the 2010s, in particular after the United Nations introduced Target 4.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which would ‘ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development by 2030’, to replicate such interventions in resource-poor settings around the world. Over the past decade, evidence from randomised controlled trials has confirmed the effectiveness of parental training experiments in resource-poor settings in a range of developing regions, including in rural China.[18] Therefore policymakers no longer debate the effectiveness of parenting programs, only how quality child and family services can be delivered cost effectively, sustainably and at scale.

China’s government has announced its intention to steer China on a path of ‘people-centred development’ towards Common Prosperity. In 2010 China became the second largest economy in the world after the United States, and claims to have eradicated extreme poverty in 2020. Despite achieving these milestones, 600 million Chinese had a monthly per capita income of US$140 or less in 2020, and regional and rural/urban inequalities have widened over the past decades.[19] In the face of these remaining challenges, China’s central leadership has promoted the phrase ‘Common Prosperity’ 共同富裕 since 2020. This signals an intent on the one hand to curtail income inequality and excessive wealth accumulation by individuals and on the other to help people achieve a better standard of living.

Investing in the developmental opportunities of disadvantaged children is crucial to improve equality of educational opportunity and social mobility and to build the large, high-skilled labour force China will need to support a strong, innovation-driven economy in the future. Providing young children with a fair start in life is crucial to address the ‘principal contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life’ that China’s society faces today. This principal contradiction was highlighted as the main stumbling block that needed to be tackled for further social development by Xi Jinping during his report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017.

Why we should want China to succeed … or at least not to fail

The risks of a stagnating China would reverberate far beyond its shores. China’s sheer size — one-fifth of the world’s population — means that what happens there will have outsized implications for foreign trade, global supply chains, financial markets and growth around the globe. There are political perils, too. An economically insecure China might boost nationalism to maintain legitimacy. No assessment of China’s growth is complete without considering the implications of China having hundreds of millions of underemployed people in its economy for the foreseeable future.

Notes

[1] Junsen Zhang, ‘A survey on income inequality in China’, Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 59, no. 4 (2021): 1191–239.

[2] Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, Invisible China: How the Urban–Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

[3] OECD, Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators, Paris: OECD Publishing, 2016.

[4] Niny Khor, Lihua Pang, Chengfang Liu, Fang Chang, Di Mo, Prashant Loyalka and Scott Rozelle, ‘China’s looming human capital crisis: Upper secondary educational attainment rates and the middle-income trap’, China Quarterly, vol. 228 (2016): 905–26.

[5] Scott Rozelle and Matthew Boswell, ‘Complicating China’s rise: Rural underemployment’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2 (2021): 61–74.

[6] Yu Bai, Siqi Zhang, Lei Wang, Ruirui Dang, Cody Abbey and Scott Rozelle, ‘Past successes and future challenges in rural China’s human capital’, Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 28, no. 120 (2019): 883–98.

[7] Rozelle and Hell, Invisible China.

[8] Zhang, ‘A survey on income inequality in China’.

[9] Chengfang Liu, Renfu Luo, Hongmei Yi, Linxiu Zhang, Shaoping Li, Yunli Bai, Alexis Medina, Scott Rozelle, Scott Smith, Guofei Wang and Jujun Wang, ‘Soil-transmitted helminths in southwestern China: A cross-sectional study of links to cognitive ability, nutrition, and school performance among children’, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, vol. 9, no. 6 (2015): e0003877.

[10] James J. Heckman, Giving Kids a Fair Chance, Boston: MIT Press, 2017.

[11] Susan P. Walker, Susan M. Chang, Amika S. Wright, Rodrigo Pinto, James J. Heckman and Sally M. Grantham-McGregor, ‘Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 63, no. 6 (2022): 626–35.

[12] Lei Wang, Wilson Liang, Siqi Zhang, Laura Jonsson, Mengjie Li, Cordelia Yu, Yonglei Sun, Qingrui Ma, Yu Bai, Cody Abbey, Renfu Luo, Ai Yue and Scott Rozelle, ‘Are infant/toddler developmental delays a problem across rural China?’, Journal of Comparative Economics, vol. 47, no. 2 (2019): 458–69.

[13] Dorien Emmers, Qi Jiang, Hao Xue, Yue Zhang, Yunting Zhang, Yingxue Zhao, Bin Liu, Sarah-Eve Dill, Yiwei Qian, Nele Warrinnier, Hannah Johnstone, Jianhua Cai, Xiaoli Wang, Lei Wang, Renfu Luo, Guirong Li, Jiajia Xu, Ming Liu, Yaqing Huang, Wenjie Shan, Zhihui Li, Yu Zhang, Sean Sylvia, Yue Ma, Alexis Medina and Scott Rozelle, ‘Early childhood development and parental training interventions in rural China: A systematic review and meta-analysis’, BMJ Global Health, vol. 6, no. 8 (2021): e005578.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ai Yue, Nianrui Zhang, Xueyang Liu, Lei Tang, Renfu Luo, Meredith Yang and Scott Rozelle, ‘Do infant feeding practices differ between grandmothers and mothers in rural China? Evidence from rural Shaanxi Province’, Family and Community Health, vol. 41, no. 4 (2018): 233–43.

[16] Sean Sylvia, Nele Warrinnier, Renfu Luo, Ai Yue, Orazio Attanasio, Alexis Medina and Scott Rozelle, ‘From quantity to quality: Delivering a home-based parenting intervention through China’s family planning cadres’, Economic Journal, vol. 131, no. 635 (2021): 1365–1400.

[17] Walker et al., ‘Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial’.

[18] Dorien Emmers, Juan C. Caro, Scott Rozelle and Sean Sylvia, ‘Early parenting interventions to foster human capital in developing countries’, Annual Review of Resource Economics, vol. 14 (2022): 169–92.

[19] Zhang, ‘A survey on income inequality in China’.

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Chinese companies were quick to spot the changing investment environment. Since 2016, Chinese investment in Australia has fallen sharply every year from US$11.6bn to a low in 2021 of just US$585m. Despite KPMG & University of Sydney reporting that Chinese investment in Australia had risen a staggering 143 percent in 2022, that investment remains lower than it had been in 2007 — and continues to be viewed with suspicion with recent calls for a widening array of industries which should be off-limits for Chinese investors on national security grounds despite the high-profile attempts this year by Labor government ministers to re-animate the investment climate.

Chinalco — a Lively Debate

In 2008, in the early days of the new Labor government of Kevin Rudd, journalists had plenty to say when Chinalco, China’s biggest aluminium producer, made a dawn raid on 12 percent of Rio Tinto Plc’s dual-listed stock in London before the market opened. The US$14.1 billion investment was the largest investment to date by a Chinese company in Australia. Far from being alarmed, Australian journalists and commentators were fascinated with the boldness of the Chinese move and captivated by the dilemma that it presented to Treasurer Wayne Swan and the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), the body which must ensure that foreign investment is in Australia’s national interest.

During Chinalco’s sixteen-month campaign for Rio, journalists at three of Australia’s leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The Australian, and The Australian Financial Review (AFR) wrote 1,461 pieces on the subject. These pieces expressed every view under the sun, but the one thing they missed was what Morrison called for eight years later — a sense of journalism’s shared responsibility for national interest or national security.

From the start of the ‘Going Global’ strategy 走出去战略 announced by Chinese premier Jiang Zemin in March 2000, Chinese investment abroad had been variously welcomed and viewed with suspicion, depending on how the benefits were distributed. This was true in Australia as in the rest of the world. British journalist Ben Chu, reflecting back on this period in 2013, coined the ugly contraction ‘Changst’ (‘China Angst’) to describe how fellow journalists expressed rising concern about the rapid expansion of China’s economic influence, even as they expressed admiration for the speed of its development.[1] The years between the start of China’s ‘Going Global’ project, super-charged by its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the glorious spectacle of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, saw the publication of thousands of news articles and hundreds of thousands of words extolling China’s meteoric economic rise. But the framing of that rise was also frequently cast within the context of global competition, one that commentators fretted China was destined to win.

When Chinalco made its move in 2008, there was another factor at play. BNP Paribas pulled the trigger on the official start of the Global Financial Crisis in August 2007 when it admitted it did not know how to value assets on its balance sheet. The admission marked the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ moment for complicated credit assets loosely based on US sub-prime mortgages unfortunately held by almost every major bank. At the start of the deal, banking problems in Europe and the United States looked comfortably far from Australia, but by the time the Rio/Chinalco deal had collapsed in June 2009, the effects of the subsequent global credit crunch and the China-driven commodities super cycle had changed everything. The United States and Europe descended into a long-running recession. China, meanwhile, powered by government spending, roared ahead, pulling Australia — with its vast supplies of iron ore, copper, and coal — along with it.

An analysis of the business reporting of the Rio/Chinalco deal in The Australian, the AFR and the SMH shows very little ‘Changst’. In total between 1 percent and 7 percent of the articles published about the Chinalco bid were classified as ‘China Threat’ stories — stories where the primary sources and main thrust of the article suggested that Chinalco’s bid would be harmful to Australia.[2] A more detailed breakdown of articles over the 16-month period of the bid shows that as the GFC worsened and the credit crunch started to bite, Chinese investment was looked upon much more favourably — ‘threat’ stories disappeared altogether. Conversely, as the commodities super-cycle ramped up and Rio, and Australia as a whole, started to benefit from sharply increasing prices (driven by Chinese demand), some ‘threat’ stories started to emerge as it became clearer that a stronger Rio did not need Chinese investment so badly.

The waxing and waning of enthusiasm for the deal was part of robust debate on the business pages of the country’s newspapers as politicians, economists, business leaders, commentators and journalists considered the merits of the Chinalco proposal. Media academic Aeron Davis refers to this sort of debate as an elite discourse network — where a tiny group of people in powerful positions talk to and about each other in the financial pages of national newspapers.[3] This was elite debate, but at least there was debate. After the Ausgrid decision Morrison effectively called for the end of debate — at issue was security and questions would not be answered.

Moral Panic over the Port

In 1972, Stanley Cohen popularised the term ‘moral panic’: a situation where ‘claims-makers’, often politicians with the help of media, galvanise public support against a ‘folk devil’ — an ‘unambiguously unfavourable’ actor. [4] The ‘folk devil’ in Chinese foreign direct investment in Australia in the 2010s was the AU$506m sale of a 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin in 2015 to a subsidiary of Shandong Landbridge.

The sale by the Country Liberal-led Northern Territory government was, at the time, exempt from FIRB investigation. In the rancorous aftermath — where hundreds of articles questions if this was a danger to national security — Scott Morrison suggested that the federal government barely knew the sale was taking place. If that was true, he was not the only one not paying close attention. The sale initially attracted thirty-three bidders. Yet The Australian covered it in passing in just nine round-up stories before the deal closed on 13 October, 2015. The AFR showed a little more interest, with twenty stories that mentioned the sale, including eleven explicitly focusing on the bidders. Landbridge was first mentioned as a bidder just one month before the deal was due to close. This stands in contrast with the forensic coverage of other previous foreign direct investment deals such as the Rio Tinto or later Ausgrid examples.

Even when the Port of Darwin lease deal was announced and in the first few days following, there were few stories. Journalists were slow to grasp the security implications, which later became an all-consuming focus of reporting. At first, The Australian focused on the windfall for the ‘cash-strapped NT state’ as well as lauding Landbridge’s plans to improve the port’s refrigeration storage facilities for beef exports. The AFR focused on Landbridge’s plan to expand the port to accommodate cruise ships and build luxury hotels, potentially transforming the tourist economy of the Top End. The SMH didn’t report the deal at all.

It took two days after the deal had first been announced before the first journalists raised security concerns. In a 15 October story entitled Senior Defence official raises security concerns over Darwin port lease to Chinese-owned company Landbridge, the ABC’s political editor Chris Uhlmann quoted an ‘unnamed senior defence official’. This marked the start of a years-long dissection of the anatomy of the deal, which worked to whip up a moral panic. Within a month, The Australian would publish an exclusive story based on unnamed defence sources claiming that Landbridge was ‘a commercial front for the PLA’. Thereafter, despite its denials, the company was regularly referred to in the press as being ‘PLA-linked’.

Ausgrid

In the beginning, the sale of a 99-year lease of 50.4 per cent of Ausgrid, the poles-and-wires infrastructure business in NSW, seemed uncontroversial. Chinese corporations had invested in Australia’s energy sector for several years, and owned generation, transmission and retail energy companies. The deal was just one in a number of privatisations planned as part of Premier Mike Baird’s ‘asset recycling’ scheme — whereby the NSW government planned to use the proceeds of infrastructure sales to invest in further state-wide infrastructure improvements. Indicative bids were due in February 2016, with completion due mid-year. Press coverage of the deal was extensive — almost 100 stories written in The Australian, 140 in the AFR, and 25 in the SMH from the start of the year. But how they covered the deal differs significantly before and after the July 2016 federal election.

The election was a close one. The Coalition held the House of Representatives by just one seat, and did not have a majority in the Senate. The Senate saw a return from the political wilderness for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which won four seats, and held similar anti-China sentiment to independent Senators Bob Katter and Nick Xenophon; they all demanded greater influence over policy. The number of seats held by representatives of smaller parties and independents led to journalists quoting them more frequently and at greater length. Populist and hardline protectionist statements appeared more often in the business pages of publications which had previously editorialised in favour of free market principles.

In press coverage of the Ausgrid deal, both politicians outside government and inside the Coalition, where nationalist factions were gaining power, raised national security concerns with increasing frequency.

Of the Ausgrid stories written in The Australian before the election, just 17 percent mentioned national security or national interest (two different terms often used interchangeably). After the election 68 percent of stories mentioned national security or national interest. The situation was similar in the AFR where stories mentioning national security or national interest increased from 8 percent before the election to 38 percent after and in the SMH where it went from zero to 66 percent. In many cases, the same politicians were making the same points that they did in 2008 during Chinalco’s bid for Rio, but this time there was dramatically less opposition. Similarly, ‘China threat’ stories, which during the Rio Tinto bid constituted 1 to 7 percent of coverage in the three newspapers, rose to between 8 and 25 percent.

In the days that followed Morrison’s rejection of the Ausgrid bid for unspecified national security reasons on 12 August 2016, there was a sharp increase in news stories about Chinese investment which quoted ‘security agencies’ or the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), as journalists started to follow the government’s lead.

Looking at the role of elite opinion at times of national tension, US researcher Daniel Hallin found that when elite opinion is divided, the press reflects robust debate, but when elite opinion is united, debate is limited to what he refers to as the ‘sphere of consensus’. [5] Opinions that fall outside of the sphere of consensus are seen as divergent, minority and easily dismissed. Researchers generally consider journalists, however neutral they may believe they are, to be elite opinion makers. In interviews about their coverage of the Ausgrid bid, journalists who reported daily on the deal were aware of the shift in sentiment, prioritising security. One political reporter said of the Coalition government: ‘maybe they had been a little bit captured by the national security establishment. But I think we have got to give the government some benefit of the doubt… we make a lot of money out of foreign investment so there’d have to be a very good reason why you’d be knocking it back.’

The new reliance on security sources was noticed by other journalists although it was not universally welcomed. One journalist pointed out the impossibility of checking, let alone double-checking, information from off-the-record security sources: ‘You can’t challenge it. You can’t ring up another person and cross reference. It’s all classified.’ He said it was clear that the ‘received wisdom’ regarding stories about Chinese investment had changed. Seeing the strong tendency to approach stories from a security angle, he said, ‘you socialise yourself in a kind of ecosystem’ — the sphere of consensus. When ‘the senior guys are writing like that’, that becomes the ‘story’ and the ‘flavour’.

A New Era or Same Old?

The Labor government which took over in 2022 has made a deliberate effort to restore some cordiality to the trading environment with China, with Foreign Minister Penny Wong celebrating successes getting Chinese tariffs dropped on barley and wine. Some companies were quick to spot the commercial opportunity of the thaw — Rio Tinto once again leading the charge. Just months after the new government took office, Rio announced a AU$2bn joint venture in the Pilbara with China’s Baowu Steel Group, while offshore in Guinea, Rio has continued to push forward this year with its one-time partner Chinalco in the world’s biggest iron ore project. But what looks like an opportunity for some is seen as a risk by others. ASPI warned in September that Chinese companies held a dominant position in critical minerals and called for a ban on Chinese investment in ‘strategically essential commodities’, calling it a ‘national security issue’. Yet the report was not reported with the reverence that might have been accorded during the Morrison years. Instead, the AFR commissioned James Laurenceson from the Australia-China Relations Institute of UTS to examine the claims. He accused ASPI of mischaracterising some of the joint ventures in a way that was ‘disingenuous at best’ by ignoring the majority US partner in one of the Australia–China–US ventures and cast doubt on a notion of national interest that excluded economic interest.

The tussle for supremacy between economic and security interests — Tony Abbott’s fear and greed — is sure to continue in Canberra’s corridors of power in 2024. But it should also be welcomed back into the pages of Australia’s leading newspapers. Some debates are too important to be secret.

Notes

[1] Ben Chu, Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard About China Is Wrong, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013.

[2] This analysis is based on unpublished PhD research of more than 2,000 news stories, features and comment pieces in The Australian, the AFR, and the SMH published on Chinese foreign direct investment, between 2008–2020, carried out by the author.

[3] Aeron Davis, ‘Whither Mass Media and Power? Evidence for a Critical Elite Theory Alternative’, Media, Culture & Society, vol.25, no.5, (2003): 669–690.

[4] Stanley Cohen, Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers, London: Routledge, 1972.

[5] Daniel Hallin, ‘The media, the war in Vietnam, and political support: A critique of the thesis of an oppositional media,’ The Journal of Politics, vol.46, no.1 (1984): 2–24.

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Chief among these was brokering a deal between Saudi Arabia – a long-time staunch US ally – and Iran on 10 March 2023 in Beijing for the two countries to restore diplomatic relations. This achievement shocked Washington. The United States had long been dominant external force in the Middle East and had brokered key developments there from the Camp David Accords in 1978 to the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) of 1993. The last three years had seen the Abraham Accords where the United States brokered the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Morocco and Sudan.

China, a long-time observer and trader in the Middle East, is now suddenly a key player and peacemaker in the region, a mark of its rising position and influence in the world. The Saudi-Iran deal signals that the United States cannot take its dominance in the diplomatic sphere for granted. Many other countries are prioritising good relations with Beijing and hedging their diplomatic strategic bets.

This has been most marked in the Global South, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In South East Asia, much of ASEAN seeks to avoid choosing between China and the United States as tension has developed between the two major powers. Other regional players, including Australia and Japan and increasingly the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Philippines have strengthened their alignment with US strategic goals while continuing to build and stress the importance of economic and other ties with China. Though China’s role as a de facto supporter of Russia in the Ukraine war has strained relations with much of the European Union, during his 5-7 April 2023 visit to China, French president Emmanuel Macron said that Europe should not automatically follow the United States get ‘caught up in crises that are not ours’. On the subject of Taiwan, Macron advocated a course of ‘strategic autonomy’ for the European Union.

A second significant example of the development of an alternative non-Western grouping is the BRICS, comprising of the large developing countries Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. At the BRICS meeting in South Africa in late August, the BRICS grouping announced the admission of six new members in a decision widely interpreted as an attempt to reshape the international order and provide a counterweight to the United States and its allies. From January 2024, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will join the grouping in a move described by China’s President Xi Jinping as ‘historic’. The significance of this expansion is the development of a non-Western grouping with significant political and economic power and with China as one of its central members. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the BRICS grouping will collectively account for 32.1 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2023, more than the G7’s share of 29.9 percent of global GDP. With addition of the six new members in January 2024, the GDP of BRICS will grow to 36 percent of global GDP. The grouping with its focus on de-dollarisation, promotion of local currencies for global trade and finance, and the admission of new members, mostly accords with Beijing’s agenda.

China’s Diplomatic Initiatives

A suite of major initiatives serves as the basis of China’s new approach to diplomacy. These include the Global Security Initiative (GSI), the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI), the Global Development Initiative (GDI) as well as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The GSI opposes Western ‘hegemonic’ dominance in the areas of international security, promoting a central role for the United Nations and emphasising non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and sovereign equality under international law. The multi-billion dollar BRI launched by Xi Jinping in 2013 aims to improve China’s connectivity with the world through infrastructure and investment. The United States and other Western countries have criticised the BRI as merely a mechanism to spread China’s geo-political and financial influence throughout the world. The success of many of the projects have been mixed, but it is certain that the BRI has expanded China’s influence, especially in the Global South. Of the 152 countries that signed BRI memorandums of understanding, 52 are in Africa, 40 are in Asia with the rest in the Middle East, Latin America and Europe. The BRI also appears to have increased Chinese exports to the member countries.

Taken together, these initiatives aim both to enhance China’s global influence and build a diplomatic and security architecture to rival the US-led system of multilateral alliances, and institutions. They also aim to enhance China’s role as mediator or peacemaker in regional conflicts.

Other important bodies that are non-Western focused in which China plays a significant role in include BRICS Plus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and a range of summits that China holds with groupings such as the China-Arab League Summit, the China Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit and the China-Africa Summit.[1] There is also the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which China put forward to the World Bank in 2016; by 2023, it had over one hundred members, including Australia, a Triple-A rating and some US$100 billion in capitalisation. These are all part of a suite of organisations and initiatives which are beyond US and G7 influence. The GSI and the other initiatives together with the BRI provide an alternative to the US-led rules-based order and are attractive to many countries especially in the Global South.

Riyadh and Tehran to Beijing

In the past, China was satisfied to trade and observe in the Middle East, an area where US influence was politically and militarily dominant. However, China is now the largest trading partner of most GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia. China has backed this economic influence with active diplomacy. Xi Jinping made a high-profile visit to Riyadh in December 2022, during which he participated in the first China-GCC Summit on 9 December and the first China-Arab States Summit that same afternoon. Most participants at these meetings were expressly focused on building relations with Beijing as a hedge against dependence on the United States. Most countries, however, were conscious that the United States was still the most significant defence partner in the region. There have also been several announcements recently of large scale Saudi-Chinese investment deals worth more than US$10 billion. On 5 September 2023, the Bank of China (BOC) opened its first branch in Saudi Arabia in a move to expand the use of yuan in the growing number of economic deals between the two countries. Saudi Arabia is China’s largest source of crude oil imports, with 87.5 million metric tonnes (641 million barrels) shipped in 2022. BOC is the second Chinese bank to open branches in Saudi Arabia after the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which has branches in Riyadh and Jeddah. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi went to Beijing for 14-16 February 2023.

Many Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, admire China’s four-decade record of deploying state capital to achieve profound economic change while tightly managing social and political change. China’s experience challenges US insistence that only liberal systems can produce economic growth and stability. As Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner, with growing economic influence in the Middle East and friendship with Iran, China was a logical partner for the mediation process.

China the Peacemaker?

Chinese officials describe facilitating the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran as a successful example of the GSI at work. The discussions that led to the 10 March 2023 accord began in the Middle East. Iraq and Oman hosted talks between 2020 and 2022, but the accord needed China’s imprimatur to finalise the deal. It was impossible for Washington to plays its traditional role of mediator in this case because, after four decades of mutual hostility, the United States still does not have diplomatic relations with Iran. Another factor was that, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, long-term US-ally Saudi Arabia is seeking a more independent foreign policy, and rebalancing its relations with the major powers including China.

Additionally, in contrast to the Trump administration and family’s close relations with and support for the Saudi royal family, which didn’t waver even after evidence linked the Crown Prince to the killing of journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, the Biden administration has hardened its policy towards Saudi Arabia. While campaigning in 2019, Biden said he would make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’. When the Saudis cut oil production after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fuelling global inflation, Biden threatened ‘consequences’. US policy and rhetoric only helped to open the door for Beijing. Iran has good relations and a strong economic relationship with China. A close economic relationship with both countries based both on economics and China’s new ambitious foreign policy made China the natural partner to secure the deal. In addition, China’s new influence in the region was achieved without the use of military coercion, in contrast with the US record of the use of military force and coercion to resolve differences with Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and other countries.

China has relished its role bridging the gap between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Beijing continues to seek to pay the role of mediator and peacemaker. It has put forward a peace plan for the Ukraine War and is seeking to play a role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although there are serious doubts it can achieve much in either case.

A Chinese emissary, Ambassador Li Hui, visited Kyiv and Moscow from 14 to 18 May 2023 with a plan announced by Beijing in April to end the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. As the plan did not call for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, Ukraine rejected the proposal. The proposal was politely received in Moscow but not accepted by President Putin. Although the Chinese intervention was broadly welcomed it did not provide a way forward for the ending the war. Nonetheless, again it was an example of China projecting itself on the global stage as a positive player.

On 18 April 2023, China offered to broker peace talks between Israel and Palestine. On 13-15 June 2023, Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visited Beijing, where he welcomed China’s involvement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on 26 June 2023 that he will make his fourth visit to China as prime minister at the invitation of Beijing before the end of 2023. However, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a vexed one and despite having good relations with both Israel and the Palestinians, the Chinese are unlikely to make much progress. The gesture is undoubtedly also aimed at strengthening the positive perception of China in the Arab World and the Global South.

China’s Power is Rising Globally

China’s power and influence is also rising in Central Asia. On 18 May 2023, at the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit attended by the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Xi Jinping announced 26 billion yuan (US$3.8 billion) of loans, financial support and non-reimbursable funds for the five Central Asian republics and a new gas pipeline to China from Turkmenistan. Xi also met individually with each of the five presidents. Each of the five republics are active members of the BRI. Bilateral trade between China and the Central Asian republics reached US$70.2 billion in 2022. As China’s power has risen in Central Asia, it has remained careful to not cut across vital Russian interests. China’s centrality to the power structure in Central Asia is also ensured by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the fact that both Russia and China face competition from the US-led West. China’s partnership with Russia is based on common interests and economic complementarity that has become even more important to Russia since the start of the Ukraine war. Russia is increasingly becoming a junior partner in what is proving nonetheless a durable relationship.

From 12 to 17 April 2023, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited China and called for an end to US dollar dominance of the world’s financial systems. This reflected a growing trend towards countries moving to reduce their dependence on the dollar as a reserve, exchange or accounting currency in certain areas of the world. For countries in the Global South including Brazil, this is driven by efforts to avoid US sanctions and the Biden administration’s control over microchips. In reality, however, only a small percentage of the world’s financial system uses the Chinese yuan and other non-Western currencies as the basis for reserves and exchange. Nonetheless, there is some appetite in parts of the world for moving beyond the control of the US dollar and to adopt the yuan.

China Hasn’t Surpassed the United States yet

Chinese activism is based on a sense that the global role of the United States is declining and China’s is rising. While there is some evidence of shifting strategic power balances it would be wrong to discount the remaining power and influence of the United States. President Biden has made it clear that the United States is determined to compete with China for influence and strategic power. In terms of military power and economic and financial heft, the United States remains the world’s leading power despite the rise of China, the multipolar world and groupings like the expanded BRICS. While the United States remains the single most powerful country in the world, the global strategic environment is increasingly multipolar and de-dollarisation is increasing, facts recognised by much of the world. China with its Global Security Initiative and its suite of other projects and initiatives has become a significant challenger to the US and Western hegemony in the Global South and in regions long dominated by the United States like the Middle East.

Despite the increasing multipolar nature of the world, both Beijing and Washington see their great power competition as the fulcrum of international relations as countries are increasingly encouraged to line up with one side or the other. Australia and regional countries like Japan and the Philippines have clearly declared their adherence to Washington. Many other countries especially in the Global South seek to maintain a balance between China and the United States and hedge against both countries. Other rising powers like India seek to follow their own independent strategic and economic paths and are wary to a degree of both Beijing and Washington. With a period of competition and uncertainty ahead, much of the world, especially the Global South, would welcome a world without US primacy. Perhaps the accord between arch rivals Riyadh and Tehran is a harbinger and a foretaste of the future Chinese role in a contested strategic world.

Notes

[1] Shanghai Cooperation Organisation members are: China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

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Q1. You and you fellow editors have created a wonderful volume on contemporary queer Chinese art that is otherwise almost invisible in English (and suppressed or with compromised visibility in Chinese contexts). What was it like to curate a volume that included contributors and subjects ranging from film-makers like Shi Tou 石頭 and Fan Popo 範坡坡 (who are also artists and activists), to kink practitioners, performance artists, artists like Ma Liuming 馬六明 working with trans motifs, ‘neuroqueer’ artists, and seasoned curators like Si Han 思漢?  

Thank you for your very kind words, Ari. The book is a labour of love and an outcome of collaborative work between editors and numerous artists, activists, curators, and scholars. We are indebted to so many people. Without their generous help and support, this book wouldn’t have been possible.

You are spot-on about the sheer diversity of the book. From the outset, we didn’t want to make this a conventional academic book. We wanted to challenge the conventional categories of cultural forms (e.g. fine art, traditional art, media and film, installation, and performance art) as well as the distinctions between and hierarchies of professions. We would like to make the book more interesting, diverse, and inclusive, by including the voices of artists, curators, critics, activists, and scholars – many of these categories overlap for our contributors, anyway.

Linguistic and cultural translation was an integral part of the project. Many artists and scholars are based in China and are more comfortable expressing themselves in Mandarin, and this fact partly contributed to their marginality and obscurity in the Anglophone world. We think it is important to showcase their work outside China. We therefore translated their essays from Mandarin Chinese to English. In some cases, we transcribed their online talk verbatim and then translated the transcript into English. Kudos to our editors and translators. The translation process was a two-way dialogue between editors, translators, and artists. We often had to ask the artists for clarification and elaboration of key points, and the artists frequently challenged our understandings of queer Chinese art. Some chapters read like a person’s conversation with friends. We are pleased that we were able to preserve the verbatim, dialogical, and intimate quality of the intellectual exchange. This makes the book more reader friendly.

What draws all these chapters together is the broad concept of art (art as technique, as expression, as social intervention, as a way of life, and more) and how they can be queered, or practiced non-normatively. We ask: What if we see art practice as research, academic work as curation, and everyone as activists promoting a more capacious understanding of gender, sexuality, and human expression? We hope this book can be found in university libraries, museums, and art galleries as well as in ordinary people’s homes. It’s beautifully designed and richly illustrated, with eighty-seven colour images, and can be used as a coffee table book – well, for me at least.

Q2. In the Introduction, you note that it was in the context of ‘queer Chinese culture and activism…[facing] serious challenges in the middle of a global pandemic and under constant government crackdowns on civil society’ that the book was put together ‘as an effort to document fast disappearing and resurging queer history and culture, reflect upon what has happened and what has been achieved in the past decades and consider what we can learn from this important history’ (p.6).  

The book project started as a research workshop co-organized by our co-editor Diyi Mergenthaler at the University of Zurich in May 2021. As an invited speaker, I was overwhelmed by the fantastic work presented at the workshop. When Diyi asked my advice for the next step, I brought myself and Dr Jamie Jing Zhao (from City University of Hong Kong) on board to help turn the workshop papers into a book. We were able to list the book as the first title in a new book series called ‘Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities’ published by Bloomsbury Academic.

While we were preparing the book launch in May 2023, the sad news of the forced closure of the Beijing LGBT Centre arrived and everyone fell into silence. Queer Chinese community lost another important community space. Beijing LGBT Centre was not only a community space; it also hosted a community archive. With the loss of another important part of queer history, the work of preserving that history seems ever more important and urgent. We hope this book can function as a queer art archive to celebrate the strength, resilience, and creativity of the queer Chinese community globally.

Q3. You also mention that the book gives a ‘special focus…to the lived experiences, stories and memories inscribed in these contemporary artworks and practices’ (p.5). How do the four subthemes of the book relate to this effort to capture the ebb and flow of queer cultural production in contemporary Chinese settings, as well as the lived experiences of its producers?  

The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with a separate subtheme. The first section is dedicated to the discussion of ‘queer forms’: from traditional papercut and kinbaku (rope bondage) to children’s drawings and paintings. Many of these art forms are not traditionally seen as queer; it is the artists’ intentionality and the audience’s interpretation that lend them to queerness. They have ‘queered’ the art form or created queer art forms, so to speak. In this section, we also draw attention to issues of materials and materiality – be they paper, or rope, or acrylic paint. Access to and use of these materials ‘matters’ – both significant and pertaining to issues of materiality – to queer art. Queer cultural analysis traditionally focuses on issues of representation – that is, signs, symbols, and meanings – at the expense of objects and materiality. For queer people, physical access to these objects, materials, skills, spaces and opportunities is as important as the content of representation. Through these artworks, we hope to demonstrate that although many traditions are often seen to be queer-unfriendly or queer-insensitive, they embody enormous potential for queer use and appropriation. After all, traditions are not static; they can be queered and queer. Xiyadie’s 西亞蝶 creative use of the traditional papercut form is a good example. Papercuts are traditionally used in rural China in festive occasions such as weddings and the lunar new year to celebrate a heteronormative imagination of happiness. Xiyadie’s works boldly depict his homoerotic desires; the also document rural queer life and urban queer cruising scene, both of which have received very little scholarly attention to date.

We also wanted to draw attention to the intersection between sexuality and gender, demonstrated by the cross-fertilisation of queer and feminist movements in contemporary China. The second section of the book includes a diverse body of works that place women’s experience at the centre of their artistic and political expression. These works also highlight the role of female same-sex intimacy in helping to conceptualise women’s bodies and desires. Although not all artists identify as feminist and queer, their works manage to articulate a distinct queer feminist politics. For example, Ma Yanhong’s 馬延紅 paintings depicting male and female nudity are often seen to depict same-sex intimacy, although the characters’ sexuality is unknown. These paintings raise the issue of queer spectatorship as well as the politics of gaze: what would it be like for a female Chinese artist to paint the nude bodies of two European men, instead of the other way around? What if queerness is a way of looking at things against normative scripts of gender, sexuality, and race?

The third section engages with the emerging and exciting subfield of curatorial studies. It lays bare curators’ creative and affective work as well as the hidden power relations that structure the exhibition and labelling of artworks. We present four instances of how curators and critics translate their feminist, queer and trans politics into the way they select, interpret and exhibit artworks. Banying 半影curators Jiete Li and Claire Ping introduce how they organized the Women’s Arts Festival in Beijing in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021; their concept of turning the whole city into a ‘fluid museum’ functions as a creative feminist curatorial practice against dominant, institutionalized, and male-centred curatorial practice. Studies of two major queer Asian art exhibitions, Secret Love that took place in Stockholm in 2012 and Spectrosynthesis that took place in Taipei in 2017, demonstrate how curatorial strategies work to produce queerness and how curatorial contexts shaped these strategies. The legendary work Fen-Ma Liuming 芬·馬六明 also manifests the role of historical contexts and discursive frameworks in shaping the reception and interpretation of artworks.

The last section of the book places queer Chinese art in a transnational and diasporic context. London-based performance artist Burong Zeng 曾不容and Berlin-based filmmaker Popo Fan 範坡坡introduce their recent artworks and practices in Europe, especially during the Covid pandemic. Their works have interrogated themes such as Chineseness, orientalism and pandemic racism that many queer Chinese people encounter in the diasporic context. The book concludes with my own chapter, a discussion of the wonderful Imagining Queer Bandung project, a series of filmmaking and podcasting workshops for queer people of colour living in Europe in 2021. What is important about the project is the queer of colour solidarity centring around the political imaginary of ‘Queer Bandung’, which not only queers the hegemonic historical Bandung discourse but also articulates a queer of colour solidarity in a European context that marginalizes them.

Q4. Why do you think there has been so little work on queer Chinese art in English, given what could be understood as a proliferation—or at least the emergence of a small field—of queer Sinophone literature and cultural studies? Given how ‘queer’ contemporary Western art has been (you could even say that queerness is in its DNA), how do you explain the lack of attention to queer Chinese art in contemporary Western-language visual culture studies? 

This is an interesting question for sure. The marginality of queer Chinese art in Anglophone scholarship can result from many reasons. First of all, queer topics are considered marginal in the study of Chinese society and culture. Inside the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this is understandable as queer topics are seen as taboo topics, especially in recent years, stigmatising researchers and even putting a scholar’s career at risk. In the Anglophone world, queer researchers do not face the same degree of stigmatisation, but they are certainly marginalised institutionally. People often consider queer studies scholars to be EDI (equality, diversity, and inclusion) hires whose work may not be the best, or who only know a niche field of study and therefore cannot be hired to teach ‘bigger’ issues. Besides, although queer studies scholars often take pride in interdisciplinarity, the academia (and the academic job recruitment) is still structured by rigid disciplinary boundaries. I can’t think of many universities that advertise a position in queer studies, let alone in Chinese queer studies. Because of these discriminatory institutional structures and practices, it is extremely difficult for a queer researcher to find a long-term academic job to sustain their research.

Secondly, queer art research is marginalised in queer studies overall. Despite the proliferation of queer scholars trained in social sciences, arts and humanities scholars, especially art historians, are relatively few in number. This probably says something about the status quo of arts and humanities in neoliberal universities and in society overall as about the stubborn and often exclusionary tradition of art history as a field of study. Despite laudable decolonisation initiatives in recent years, art history is still heavily dominated by the study of white, European art history, to the exclusion of other cultures and traditions. In media and cultural studies in which I am situated, an obsession with the ‘new’, the popular and the digital does not dovetail with art historical research. The popular misconception that art is high and elite culture does not help bring media and cultural studies scholar closer to art research, either.

Thirdly, the study of contemporary Chinese art follows the art market closely and the market has certain stereotypes and conventions. As contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei 艾未未 and Xu Bing 徐冰 made their names in the international art market, a certain style, or aesthetics, is expected of contemporary Chinese art from curators and art critics: those openly critical of the Chinese state and those reproducing stereotypical images of Chineseness are valued. Most queer Chinese art does not sell, and most are made by young and budding artists; most do not follow a particular convention or style. These are hardly appealing to curators and art critics. The idea that queerness is about transgression, about crossing boundaries, about challenging norms and perceptions, does not translate well in an international art world that sees ‘Chineseness’ in a rigid and stereotypical way.

Also importantly, there is a lack of art critics, curators, and historians from queer Chinese backgrounds or who are familiar with queer Chinese art. Art critics, curators and historians are gatekeepers in the art world and academic world. Their job is to select artists, evaluate artworks, and introduce them to the public. If they do not see the existence of queer art, or see its value and importance, how can queer art enter museums, art galleries, and history books? Some see queer art as a ‘niche’ thing that do not speak to the ‘universal’ experience, others see queer art lacking in aesthetic and artistic value. But whose ‘universal’ experience does art speak to and who sets up the criteria for such a value judgment?

Q5. The word ‘China’ vs. ‘Sinophone’ carries different weights and histories vis-à-vis the queer. You and contributors refer to Petrus Liu’s work and acknowledge some of these other discursive universes.  How do you see the contributions in this volume in relation to these larger debates about what counts as ‘Chinese’, as ‘Sinophone’, or indeed as queer? 

We are aware of the discussion of China and the Sinophone. While some scholars see the two as binary opposites that are mutually exclusive, we see them as related and complementary categories. We share with Sinophone scholars the desire to deconstruct and decentre an essentialised notion of ‘Chineseness’. As Sinophone scholars do this from the outside, we do it from within. We contend that it is important to see the subversive and resistant potential of queer and feminist work within the PRC to deconstruct a hegemonic, heteropatriarchal construction of ‘Chineseness’. Aware of the heated scholarly debates, we would also like to bypass the debate, as well as the political and ideological divisions, between China and the Sinophone altogether. This is because most of the artists discussed in this book come from and are currently based in the PRC, and most of them identify more with a critical use of ‘Chineseness’ than an uncritical use of the term ‘Sinophone’. Also, if the concept of Sinophone focuses primarily on written language and phonetic sounds, most of the artworks discussed in the book are not based on written words or phonetic sounds. Focusing on the openness of the visual, the tactile, the sensorial as well as the worldmaking potential of artworks allows us to think about both queerness and Chineseness in a more capacious way, one that is not anchored to language, sound and nation states, but opening up borders, boundaries and spaces.

Q6. Your own essay on ‘Imagining Queer Bandung’ breaks new ground by using ‘participatory action research’ (p.203) to organise online public forums after the ‘Queering Bandung’ project—a film festival, podcasting workshop, and filmmaking workshop that took place over eight days in Berlin in 2021.  As you note, ‘[t]he title of the project references the first Asia-Africa Conference—also known as the Bandung Conference—that took place in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, which once marked the height of Third World Solidarity’ (p.203), and the events—including the ones you organised afterward—offer ‘a good example of the queer people of colour’s transnational solidarity and decolonization enacted at a grassroots level outside the purview of nation states” (p.201).  For our readers, can you say more about ‘Queer Bandung’?  What inspired you to organise follow-on events?  How did you learn about the project originally? 

Imagining Queer Banding is a fantastic project. Thanks go to the organisers and participants who have made the filmmaking and podcasting workshops possible. I first heard about the project from queer filmmaker Fan Popo, who also contributed a chapter to the book, in 2021, in the middle of the global pandemic. Fan, together with other diasporic queer filmmakers living in Berlin, organised a series of filmmaking and podcasting workshops, together with a film festival, to foster and celebrate queer people of colour solidarity. This was particularly important at the time because the COVID-19 pandemic made everyone vulnerable, queer people of colour living in diasporic contexts especially so. Their vulnerability lay not only in the racism they experienced in a white, European society, but also the precarity of jobs in white-centred creative and cultural industries. But vulnerability can also be a form of strength, an opportunity to build coalition and solidarity. So I contacted them and invited them to talk about their projects in two online, public events. I also managed to get some funding to pay them an honorarium. I saw these online events as a form of social activism to raise people’s awareness of queer people of colour’s existence and experience, to bring to public attention issues of racism and marginalisation, and to showcase the brilliant work of these wonderful artists.

Since the pandemic started, I have organised a series of events, both online and in-person, with diasporic queer Chinese communities, including the Queer Art of Surviving the Pandemic Workshop, the Queer Arts in the Pandemic Festival, Queer Zine-Making Workshops, and Drag Up! I am in a privileged position of having a stable academic job and having access to some university resources, in a way many artists and community members do not. How to make use of these resources to help queer Chinese communities and promote social justice is a question I’ve constantly been exploring.

Q7. The curator Si Han makes the point that the artworks included in his exhibit Secret Love, while displayed openly in Sweden, can’t be shown in China, (p.148); and in the Introduction you share the insight that ‘a variety of forms only become available to the eyes in transcultural encounters’ (p.7). Si Han also frames this as an almost existential question when he observes that ‘[t]he fear of the visual and its power often leads to the harshest censorship of pictorial art and all forms of visual culture as something threatening. If you cannot be seen, you do not exist’ (p.146) (does a queer tree fall in a forest?). And, referring to the work of Shi Tou, you note that one of the artist’s paintings (Female Friends, 1997) ‘documents not only the feelings of feminist sisterhood, but also the existence of female same-sex intimacy in the 1990s’ (p.10). To what extent is contemporary queer Chinese art only ‘creatable’ either in secret or outside China? Do you see parallels between this kind of paradox and the challenges of dissident art more generally?   

I like the question ‘does a queer tree fall in a forest?’ although I don’t have an answer to this intriguing question. I can think of reasons for both positive and negative answers. Visibility is important, not only in terms of representation but also in terms of access to resources and right to existence. That’s why queer people have constantly been fighting against invisibility and marginalization, and that’s also why we did this book, to make a declaration that queer people and their artworks do exist. However, there is also a value for being invisible, opaque, ambiguous, and not having a name, as in the case of same-sex intimacy in premodern China. There are caveats, though: firstly, the premodern conditions of invisibility do not apply today. We live in a society where the modern epistemologies of visibility and rights have powerfully structured how we see ourselves and others, often through naming and categorizing. Secondly, there should be options, or multiple and contingent approaches, instead of a universal solution for all. Visibility and invisibility should be seen as a choice, not completely free from social conditions. But such a choice is not always available to many people.

Now in answer to your question: contemporary queer Chinese art is not, and should not, be ‘creatable’ only in secret or only outside China. Many of our contributors are based in China, and many – although not all of them – understand their artworks in terms of queer art. In a globalised world, to demarcate between what is inside and what is outside China is a difficult task. Many of our artists have read books, either in Chinese or in English, on queer theory, and some have held exhibitions internationally. Contemporary queer Chinese art should be seen as a continent assemblage that brings together people, ideas, technologies, materials, representations, and affects globally. Binary oppositions such as ‘secret/open’ and ‘in/outside’ risk obscuring the complexity of the global queer art ecology of which queer Chinese art is a part.

On the other hand, it is exactly what happens in China that makes queer art – and a particular expression of queer art – possible in the first place. This includes China’s political and cultural censorship. In this light, being secret, or doing things secretly, should not be merely seen as a constraint, but also as a condition, an enabling factor that encourages queer art production and creativity in a particular way, and that continues to shape queer Chinese art as it is today.

Q8. Premodern art and literature could be understood to have aspects we might interpret retroactively as expressions of gender diversity and queerness. In the book, traditional opera (involving cross-dressing) is mentioned, for example, and of course I always think about Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢 as a work which really ‘queers’ boyhood and sexuality in so many profound ways, even though that was not the book’s ‘agenda’ per se. How do you see the relationship, if any, between contemporary queer Chinese art such as that you have included in this volume, and expressions of gender and sexual diversity from the past?

This is a great question. Dream of the Red Chamber, as well as many other premodern Chinese art and literary works, certainly embodies a lot of queer potential, not least because these works contain depiction of same-sex intimacy, but also because they reveal to us a fascinating world full of queer and trans potential before the modern, Western epistemologies of gender and sexuality took hold. It may be naïve to think about contemporary Chinese art to be a continuation of that history of gender and sexual plurality, but it would be equally problematic to deny the impact of these historical memories, or traces, on contemporary cultural production. Besides traditional Chinese opera, the book also presents the queer use of the Republican era New Year Calendars, as in Shi Tou and Ming Ming’s 明明 artworks. An advantage about thinking of queerness through art is that artworks rely on visual, embodied and affective expressions that are more ambiguous, polysemic and open-ended than written or spoken language that denotes rigid identity categories. As such, artworks are conducive to queer readings; it is useful to think about queerness through art, situated in historical contexts.

Q9. And an impossible question, just for fun: Why art? Why is art important for queer theory and activism?

I started my research into queer Chinese culture by documenting organized forms of queer activism. In the writing up of the book, I realised that there are more ways to do activism than pride parades, street protests or demanding change in legislation; engaging with art and culture is one of them. This has been a key argument of my recent work. Art and culture shouldn’t be seen as peripheral or insignificant. They should be taken seriously for their roles to help people express themselves, bring communities together, and imagine social change. They also help us see beyond the quagmires of the present and open our imaginations to an unknown but more habitable future.

I have always been thinking about what art can do. For me, art is not simply about objectively depicting an already existing world: it is also about creating an image, or imaginary, of a world that can be and that is yet to come. Understanding this is important, because we are no longer confined to an already existing world; we live in a world in constant formation and transformation. For queer people, that also means to believe in social change and have faith in hope. Art is an important part of that queer world-making process. For both queer theorisation and queer activism, this means to reject the self-assured certainty in our knowledge and to embrace the unknown, the open and the fantastic.

Q10. Finally, how can interested readers access additional works or materials on the artists, activists, and curators introduced in the book? Can you recommend them to any other resources, whether in English or Chinese? Other films, events, productions, or artworks to look forward to?

I encourage readers who are interested in the topic to read my books, including Queer Comrades, Queer China, Queer Media in China, Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, and Contemporary Queer Chinese Art. They are complementary and they all document Chinese queer history and culture from different perspectives. I also encourage readers to read my author’s page on the Routledge website and my Queer Lens column on the Chinese Independent Film Archive website, both of which host some teaching and learning resources on queer Chinese culture.

Unfortunately, there is not a single queer art archive, as queer artworks are scattered everywhere, from individual artists’ homes to art galleries. This highlights the necessity and urgency of creating a more sustainable queer art archive. Interested readers can explore the websites of queer art exhibitions such as Queer Chinese Art Festival, Secret Love, and Spectrosynthesis. For those who are interested in following up the Women’s Arts Festival introduced in the Contemporary Queer Chinese Art book, curator Jiete Li discussed the second iteration of the festival held in Yunnan in this interview. Individual artists’ websites and social media are worth following too. Our book has only scratched the surface of the topic, a fantastic queer Chinese art world is there to be unfolded.

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Tactical Caution

Despite sharing many of the China policy objectives of its predecessor, the Albanese government has taken a cautious approach to implementation. This is apparent in its handling of Confucious Institutes and Chinese investments in critical minerals. Like the Coalition before them, Labor has sought to mitigate the perceived security risks associated with exposure to Chinese investors and education links. But, unlike their predecessor, the Albanese government has pursued this in ways that minimise Beijing’s ire.

Under the Foreign Relations Act (FRA) legislated in 2020 by the Morrison government, Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong could have expelled Confucius Institutes from Australian universities. The Albanese government instead sought to achieve its national security goals without diplomatic fallout by opting for ongoing scrutiny. With the Albanese government ‘concerned about foreign interference and potential risks to academic freedom’, they’ve pledged to ‘keep these arrangements under review’ and ruled out the establishment of new Confucius Institutes.

Likewise, the securitisation of the critical minerals industry appears to have been finessed to avoid antagonising Beijing, which has longstanding concerns about Australia’s treatment of Chinese companies. The Albanese government has twice in the last six months rejected investments from Chinese or China-linked firms in Australian rare earth elements and lithium mining companies. Yet both decisions coincided with Canberra approving large Chinese investments in parts of the mining industry deemed to be less sensitive, including iron ore and nickel. Coincidence can’t be ruled out. But the pattern of rejections coinciding with approvals and the political dimension of investment decisions suggest that the Albanese government is seeking to simultaneously keep Chinese and China-linked companies out of the critical minerals industry, while also sending a welcoming message to Chinese investors more broadly and reducing the likelihood of getting Beijing offside.

Might the Coalition have charted such a tactically cautious course on Confucius Institutes and investment decisions had they retained government? Maybe, although their use of the FRA to veto Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative agreements in 2021 and the Coalition’s criticism of the Albanese government’s conditional acceptance of existing Confucius Institutes suggests not. On two sensitive bilateral issues, the Albanese government has acted tactically: opting to put Confucius Institutes on notice and yet avoid the blunt trauma of expulsion, and soothing the sting of critical minerals investment rejections with the balm of approvals in other industries.

Policy Compromise

The Albanese government’s approach to China is defined not just by the tactics employed, but also the decisions not taken. Most conspicuously, the Albanese government has decided not to sanction Chinese officials and entities implicated in severe and systematic human rights abuses. Even though Magnitsky-style sanctions were legislated in 2021, Australia has declined to use these powers against China as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have done. Despite 82 percent of Australians supporting such targeted sanctions against China and credible reports of ongoing mass incarcerations, forced removals of children and cultural erasure in Xinjiang, Tibet and other regions, the Albanese government is unwilling to deny the perpetrators the freedom to travel to Australia and take advantage of financial opportunities here.

Morality aside, the case for sanctions is far from clear-cut when viewed from the perspective of the national interest. Imposing sanctions on officials and entities implicated in human rights abuses is unlikely to change the Chinese government’s behaviour. It might also have unintended negative implications for a wide range of Australian priorities, including trade. It’s likely that China would respond with reprisals such as tit-for-tat countersanctions, arbitrarily detaining (more) Australian citizens, prolonging the detention of Australians already imprisoned in China, and blocking further normalisation of the bilateral diplomatic and trade relationship.

Having levelled numerous sanctions against Iran, Myanmar, and Russia since taking office, the Albanese government has shied away from targeting China. Yet not only did Minister for Foreign Affairs Wong tentatively support targeted sanctions against China when in opposition, but the Albanese government has committed to ‘employ every strategy at [Australia’s] disposal towards upholding human rights, consistent with our values and with our interests.’ Taken together, this makes the Albanese government’s unwillingness to sanction Chinese officials and entities look like a calculated compromise.

The response to Beijing’s anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Australian barley similarly points to the role of policy compromise in Canberra’s China strategy. Rather than pursuing Australia’s World Trade Organization (WTO) case against China to its likely successful conclusion, Canberra chose to discontinue legal proceedings in exchange for the removal of duties. Although Australia lost an opportunity to highlight China’s trade malfeasance via the outcome of the WTO proceedings, the decision gives Australian barley exporters access to the Chinese market, which pursuing the legal route might not have delivered. But it remains a textbook definition of compromise, involving as it does mutual concessions from both Canberra and Beijing to settle a dispute.

Invidious Choices and the Costs of Compromise

Some looming policy dilemmas don’t seem to permit the kind of supple tactical gymnastics that the Albanese government has pulled off to date. These include whether to leave Chinese company Landbridge Group’s 99-year lease of Darwin Port in place, and the choice between the Chinese and Taiwanese bids to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade pact. But Canberra could still avoid being wedged by binary choices on these issues.

Prime Minister Albanese’s definitive past opposition to Landbridge Group’s lease and the growing importance of Darwin and surrounds for the Australian and US militaries likely make the politics and diplomacy of leaving the lease unchanged untenable for Labor. But that doesn’t mean that Canberra needs to anger Beijing by tearing up the lease. A range of different possible arrangements for Darwin Port could allow the Albanese government to put Landbridge Group under scrutiny without affronting Beijing by booting the company out of the Top End. These might include adding additional security oversight or limiting the length and/or geographic scope of the lease.

Meanwhile, Canberra is likely to be shielded from making any tough CPTPP choices. Yes, Beijing will heap pressure on Canberra and other capitals to back its bid just as Taipei also lobbies for support for its candidature.  Yet the slow-moving and consensus-based CPTPP decision-making process and the trade pact’s diverse membership mean that Australia may be able to sidestep taking any public positions on China’s and Taiwan’s competing bids. With Japan, among others, wary of China’s membership and smaller CPTPP members unlikely to back Taipei’s accession for fear of frustrating Beijing, there’s every chance that Canberra will be able to avoid having to cast the deciding vote.

The Albanese government’s formula of China policy consistency and diplomatic decorum combined with a side of tactical caution and policy compromise will continue to be pressure tested. Reports of Chinese state-owned firms sending dual-use technology to sanctioned Russian defence companies point to how much strain the formula might come under as the case grows for punishing Beijing’s support for Moscow’s war effort. But if Canberra’s shrewd manoeuvrings to date are a guide, there’s good reason to think that the Albanese government will continue to find ways to combine tough China policy settings with ongoing relationship repair.

Still, as China’s systematic and severe human rights abuses continue, past policy compromises will become difficult to defend. Statecraft doesn’t allow much space for saintliness. Principled measures to punish human rights abusers might simply entail too much risk for the national interest. But we should at least honestly and openly recognise the moral impost of the Albanese government’s so-far successful China strategy.

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This political performance has provoked conjecture and critique globally. Some critics argue that China’s affinity with Russia – the ‘no-limits friendship’ Xi Jinping affirmed with Putin on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – compromises Beijing’s ability to act as an impartial mediator. Others raise separate concerns about the Chinese leadership’s motivations, goals and diplomatic script.

Yet, these perspectives oversimplify the situation, reducing China’s actions to mere tactical manoeuvres. Arguably, the driving force behind China’s role is not solely based on the ‘no limits’ status of China-Russia relations. More fundamentally, it’s about Beijing’s inherent interest in sustaining regional stability and security. Viewed through this lens, while it may align with broader ambitions for global influence and showcase diplomatic finesse, above all, it underscores China’s enduring focus on maintaining geopolitical stability in its immediate surroundings.

Regional Stability in the Context of the Russia-Ukraine Crisis

China’s strategic and cautious decisions with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrate concern for regional security and stability. On 22 February 2023, Foreign Minister Wang Yi 王毅 went to Moscow, where he described the two countries’ bond as ‘mature, tough, tenacious and as stable as Mount Tai’ 成熟坚韧、稳如泰山. The official Chinese perspective is that this bond forms a political base for conflict resolution grounded in principles of ‘non-alignment, non-confrontation, and non-targeting of third parties’ 不结盟、不对抗、不针对第三方. Beijing appears to aim at ‘stabilising’ Russia—curbing Russia’s aggression and encouraging it towards peace talks, thus underscoring China’s potential to step into a mediating role in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Further illustrating its strategic intent, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs unveiled a ‘12-point plan’ just two days after Wang’s visit, on 24 February 2023. It calls for a political resolution to the conflict in line with the principles of the UN Charter: it ‘actively encourages peace talks’ 积极劝和促谈, and calls for a ceasefire to kickstart start negotiations between the Russia and Ukraine.

Reactions to this plan, however, vary significantly.

On the one hand, Chinese analysts view the ‘12-point plan’ with optimism. Professor Li Haidong 李海东 of the International Relations Research Institute of the Diplomatic Academy represents the view of some Chinese analysts who see the plan as comprehensive, describing it as ‘a rational, balanced and selfless plan’ that seeks to ‘return to the original issue’ 正本清源, subtly implying a need to address the root cause of  geopolitical complexities, and suggesting that while the US’s attempts may have escalated the crisis, China has been remained genuinely neutral throughout the matter.

On the other hand, the world greeted China’s peace plan with caution. Many criticised the vagueness of the plan. Jo Inge Bekkevold, a senior China fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, describes it as ‘clearly too abstract to be a road map to end the war’ in his article for Foreign Policy. Alexander Gabuev, Director Carnegie Russia Eurasia centre, dismisses it as merely ‘a laundry list’ drawn from the UN Charter. Others accused Beijing of a self-serving approach, that Beijing was casting its own interests above those of Ukraine by rebuking the sanctions against Russia, with which it is friendly, and criticising the broadening reach of US-led military alliances, which concerns it as well, especially in the Asia-Pacific.

Yet, these criticism of China’s strategic interest obscures a simple truth: China’s leaders are alarmed by the potential of this conflict to upset the strategic balance of the region, and possibly the world. Wang Huiyao 王辉耀, founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a leading think tank in China, says the ‘12-point plan’ should be seen as China’s ‘starting point’ rather than a full and detailed solution.

While the ‘12-point plan’ set the tone for Xi’s diplomatic visit to Moscow in March 2023, Xi himself seems to harbour reservations about drawing too close to Russia, wary of Russia’s potential to drag China into a diplomatic quagmire. Despite all the rhetoric around economic cooperation, it could be argued that there is no pressing incentive for China to significantly upgrade its political ties with Russia in the current scenario. As I have argued elsewhere, such reservation may stem from concerns about the potential ramifications of overtly supporting Russia in its actions against Ukraine. An explicit stance could result in increased diplomatic tensions, not only with Moscow should future disagreements arise, but also with other nations observing the situation. This approach might risk portraying China as a power playing favourites, thus jeopardising its cherished self-image as a global peace promoter.

If Xi recognises an over-tilt towards Russia could prove detrimental to China’s broader interests, then his subsequent moves demonstrate intent to balance this by reaching out to Ukraine. He spoke by phone in late April with Ukrainian President Zelensky, a call that Zelensky has described as ‘long and meaningful’ and a significant advancement in their bilateral relations. As the BBC reported, this call, along with Zelensky’s appointment of Pavlo Ryabikin, a former minister, as Ukraine’s ambassador to Beijing, is perceived to give a powerful impetus to their bilateral relationship development.

Xi also dispatched Li Hui 李辉, a diplomat known for his Moscow expertise, as a special envoy to Ukraine; Li, who was in Ukraine from 16-17 May, became the highest-ranking Chinese diplomat to visit since the Russian invasion. This sends a signal that China is willing to engage directly with Ukraine, thus avoiding the appearance of taking sides. In addition, Xi also prioritised the Ukraine crisis in discussions with French President Macron, European Commission President von der Leyen, and Brazilian President Lula.

Collectively, these actions, ranging from Wang Yi’s visit to Moscow, President Xi’s diplomatic trip to the same destination, his phone calls to Ukrainian leadership, his discussions with international leaders, and the deployment of special envoy Li Hui to Ukraine, reflect China’s nuanced approach to this geopolitical situation. These measures manifest Beijing’s aspiration to be viewed as a credible actor on the international stage, but also reflect China’s desire to cultivate regional stability while navigating a turbulent geopolitical landscape.

In light of the recent attempted coup in Russia, Beijing’s approach could be further tested. The mutiny, although it has sent shockwaves through the international community, has not stirred substantial reactions within China. Beijing did not let this incident change its stance of its self-defined neutrality. This was evident when it issued a brief statement on 25 June 2023 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, referring to it as an ‘internal affair’ of Russia. The statement also expressed China’s support as a ‘friendly neighbour’ and ‘comprehensive strategic partner of the new era,’ urging Russia to ‘maintain national stability and achieve development and prosperity.’ This not only downplays the Wagner incident but also signals China’s cautious stance towards the situation, avoiding becoming embroiled in the situation and attempting to balance its strategic interests, navigating between the political dynamics of its key strategic partner and broader regional implications.

Backstage: Decoding China’s Motivations

China’s views on the Russia-Ukraine conflict on its western frontier are heavily informed by the situation to its east, particularly the growing tensions between China and US over the Taiwan Strait and Asia Pacific more generally. Seeing China as a rising ‘strategic competitor’, the US and its allies have focused on China’s challenge the US-supported ‘rules-based order’. From Beijing’s view, the US assembly of coalitions such as the Quad (the US, India, Japan and Australia) and AUKUS (the US, Australia and UK), implicitly, if not explicitly, aims to contain China’s rise. This US containment strategy seems to be most evident in the East and South China Seas, where the Chinese leadership is wary of Washington’s security and related links with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in particular. The Quad and AUKUS are most deeply concerning from Beijing’s perspective. Da Wei 达巍, a professor of international relations and director of the Centre for Strategic and Security Studies at Tsinghua University, highlighted in his op-ed for Huanqiu (the Chinese version of the Global Times)  that actions taken by the US – including sending congressional delegations to Taiwan, enforcing embargoes on exporting advanced chip technology to China, and pressuring other countries to partake in its strategic competition against China – have further aroused PRC suspicion of US motives, thereby heightening bilateral tensions and even risks conflict.

Beijing views US (and NATO) engagement in the Ukraine crisis in light of all this: Russia and Eurasia are the gaps in US ‘encirclement’ strategy. [1] As the US engagement in Eurasia grows, and concerted efforts to limit China’s influence in the East, particularly at ‘the first island chain’ (the islands and archipelagos stretching from the Kuril Islands, southwestward through Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo), [2] and to constrain China’s access to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, China perceives Washington as attempting an ‘O-shaped encirclement’, aimed at surrounding and isolating China.

China’s interest in acting as a mediator in Ukraine aligns with its overarching diplomatic strategy: ‘Big powers are key; China’s neighbouring countries are the priority; developing countries are the foundation; multilateral platforms are the stage’. Under this framework, the US and EU are considered ‘big powers’, and Russia, as the ‘largest neighbour and comprehensive strategic partner of coordination’, ranks high in China’s diplomatic priorities. Xi’s speech in Moscow in March 2023 affirmed this, stating that ‘both countries see their relationship as a high priority in their overall diplomacy and policy on external affairs’.

China is in a complex position. If it is overly supportive of Russia, it risks being perceived as making a binary choice between the West and Russia, which could play into ‘new cold war’ rhetoric, intensify diplomatic confrontation and potentially bring economic sanctions. By the same token, if China and Russia formed a conventional military alliance, China would risk its long-sought relations with Europe – a region with which economic cooperation remains a top priority in China’s strategic agenda, making it a crucial player in China’s grand strategy.

Crucially, Beijing has asserted its preference for a multipolar world order and multilateral decision-making in international affairs. Multilateralism has benefited China extensively in the last decades, and Beijing has viewed Russia as a potential contributor to these goals. As suggested by Yang Jiemian 杨洁勉, senior fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies and the brother of senior diplomat Yang Jiechi 杨洁篪, interactions between Beijing, Moscow, Europe, and Washington are seen as major determinants in future world affairs. In 2021, Yang proposed the notion of a ‘China-Russia-US-EU Quartet Strategy’ that could potentially be a framework for facilitating more harmonious international relations. [3]

This backdrop may shed light on why Beijing prefers to steer clear of publicly critiquing Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine or endorsing Western sanctions, preferring instead to ‘determine one’s position based on the merits of the situation’按照事情本身的是非曲直决定自身立场. China is keen to be seen to be taking a different approach from that of the US. In their emphasis that ‘dialogue’ is the most viable route out of the conflict, Chinese policymakers point to the actions of ‘specific countries’ forming ‘small cliques’ through traditional alliances – an oblique reference to countries such as the US, UK, and Australia and alliances like NATO or Quad. They argue that these behaviours further complicate the situation and pose additional challenges to ending the war. Rejecting Washington’s ‘Cold War mentality’ Beijing promotes a more multilateral and institutionalised approach, both in the case of Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.

In conclusion, China’s dynamic strategy in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is neither driven by its historical relationship with Russia nor its ambitions to be a regional leader in Eurasia. It is deeply rooted in Beijing’s anxieties about peripheral security and its broader diplomatic philosophy. Understanding China’s potential role in resolving the conflict in Ukraine, therefore, requires apprehending the nuances of its foreign policy orientation and its motivation to navigate complex geopolitical landscapes. While international observers remain intensely vigilant of China’s adept diplomatic navigation in this progressively complex situation, it is clear that China’s policy posture in this scenario could play a significant role in shaping its future in the theatre of global geopolitics.

Notes

[1] Yang Yucai 杨育才, and Yuan Yi 袁毅. ‘Meiguo Zhongya zhanlüe tiaozheng ji diqu zhengce zouxiang’ 美国中亚战略调整及地区政策走向. Eluosi Dongou Zhongya yanjiu 俄罗斯东欧中亚研究 2 (2020): 19-37.

[2] See, Yoshihara, Toshi. ‘China’s vision of its seascape: the first island chain and Chinese seapower.’ Asian Politics & Policy 4, no. 3 (2012): 293-314.

[3] Yang Jiemian 杨洁勉, ‘Zhong E Mei Ou zhanlüe hudong tedian he fazhan qushi’ 中俄美欧战略互动特点和发展趋势 [The Characteristics and Development Trend of China-Russia-US-Europe Strategic Interaction], Eluosi yanjiu 俄罗斯研究 [Journal of Russian Studies] 3, 30-50 (2021).

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