Chinese whispers

Beijing would have us believe that Australian politicians cannot speak openly and honestly about China’s geopolitical ambitions without fear of losing Chinese-Australian voters. Don’t fall for it: Chinese-background voters are as divided and cantankerous as the rest of us, but brand them traitors and they come together fast.

Chinese-Australian voters’ rejection of the Liberal Party in the 2025 federal election was comprehensive and unambiguous. Much the same could be said of the 2022 election that brought Scott Morrison’s government down. A Liberal review of losses in that earlier election found that, in the 15 electorates with the largest Chinese-Australian populations, the swing against the party on a two-party-preferred basis was double that of other electorates.

The 2025 election saw the Labor Party holding onto those earlier gains and capturing further Liberal strongholds with large resident Chinese-Australian populations, including Menzies in Victoria.

Still, the sentiments driving this shift in voting behaviour are unclear. Bread and butter issues aside, are Chinese-Australian voters primarily concerned with what the parties say about China, or what they say about Chinese Australians?

The most telling moment in the campaign for the 3 May 2025 election came when Liberal Senator Jane Hume said on national television that ‘Chinese spies’ were assisting Labor in the campaign. She was presumably referring to local electoral volunteers. Within 24 hours, Hume’s comments were viewed up to 500,000 times on Chinese-language media platforms. That’s a lot of people to get offside.

The comment was clearly levelled at Chinese Australians, not at China, and the numbers show that they were deeply affronted to find their loyalty brought into question. Hume implied that one group of electors was spying for a foreign country. No Australian citizen and no Australian community would take that lying down.

Where is the evidence that geopolitics and alliance politics determine the political preferences of Chinese-Australian voters? On stated defence and security policies, Labor and Liberal are all but indistinguishable, including on issues such as the US alliance, increased defence spending and downgrading defence ties with China while increasing those with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Both parties want to maintain strong commercial ties with China. They certainly differ in the way they frame their common goals but policy-wise they are bib and bub.

What do Chinese-Australian voters make of this? The best available source on geopolitical and civic sentiments among them in recent times is Being Chinese in Australia, a series of Lowy polls probing the attitudes of Australian residents of Chinese descent in the early 2020s across a host of issues. But these polls weren’t designed to track voter sentiments. From a methodological perspective, they are poorly designed to say anything clearly about the attitudes of Chinese Australians: the survey groups include visiting students and temporary workers from China in addition to long-term resident and citizens, and responses are not broken down by category of respondent.

National census data is no more helpful than Lowy polls for probing voter sentiments, but it offers far more accurate figures on the size and diversity of Chinese-heritage populations. According to 2021 national census data, there are 1.4 million people in Australia who identify as having Chinese ancestry, among whom about 400,000 were born in Australia and 1 million overseas. Among those born overseas, 536,000 were born in China and the remainder elsewhere, including Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

Not all are eligible to vote as citizens. As of June 2022, just 36.5 percent of permanent residents born in China who arrived since 2000 were eligible to vote as Australian citizens. So even excluding the temporary students and workers captured in the Lowy sample, relatively few permanent residents from China have chosen to become eligible voters in Australia in the past 25 years.

Size and diversity matter for several reasons. In my experience, Australian permanent residents and citizens born in China have a different perspective on foreign and defence policy to those born in Australia or elsewhere in Asia.

There is no conspiracy here. Since the 1990s, Australian immigration policy has favoured business and professional elites, many of whom retain strong commercial and political ties with their places of birth. Today, the approach of Chinese Australians born in China mirrors that of business and professional elites generally: they may not like Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party, but they don’t like to see their ties to China jeopardised by political stumbles in Canberra, either. Ask any vice-chancellor or Western Australian Premier and you will get much the same answer.

Recognition of this diversity matters because the CCP runs United Front programs seeking to mobilise those born in China to participate in Australian elections with a view to securing its wider geopolitical objectives. This is China’s doing, not something trumped up in Australia, nor indeed confined to Australia. CCP and government agencies in Beijing interfere in diaspora communities globally to pressure parliaments to meet their political and geopolitical demands.

A case in point is China’s demand for other countries to recognise its unlawful claims and militarisation in the South China Sea. Between 2014 and 2020, scores of Australian media workers, corporate communications personnel, political party staffers and SBS and ABC employees were hosted in China to participate in CCP Chinese-language media-training programs. These were designed to bring participants up to speed on supporting China’s seizure and militarisation of contested territories in the South China Sea, among other demands.

An aim of these training programs was to swing elections to favour China’s position on the South China Sea through Chinese-language media agitation. One of the tactics employed was reminding visiting Chinese media workers that, wherever they were registered abroad, they owed loyalty to Beijing. In a mid-2016 blog post from Beijing to readers in Australia, one Chinese-Australian trainee urged China to build up its military defences to press its territorial claims against the Philippines, and then turned attention to Australian elections:

“We are certainly a minority in our country of residence, and yet we have this advantage, that our million strong can vote in elections. This is not something to be dismissed. We can forge a united voice through public opinion targeted at social organisations and overseas Chinese leaders, and promote our unified voice to government and to local parliamentarians, and through this route achieve our aims.”

Between elections, the CCP signed propaganda deals with leading Australian media players.

As early as 2011, Melbourne-based Pacific Media entered into a commercial partnership with Beijing-based China News Service, the United Front arm of the party’s global propaganda network. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in favour of the Philippines regarding its claims in the South China Sea, invalidating most of China’s claims. Pacific Media printed placards for distribution to the party’s contrived community associations rallying in central Melbourne to protest against Australia’s endorsement of the court’s ruling.

Shortly before the ruling on the Philippines case, Chinese media outlets and their Australian counterparts, along with the Australia China Relations Institute of the University of Technology Sydney, signed six agreements. The agreements were regarded so highly in Beijing that the head of the CCP’s propaganda department flew to Sydney to attend the signing. The inaugural supplement inserted in Fairfax newspapers arising from these agreements carried a full-page article affirming China’s claims to contested islands in the South China Sea under the title ‘Manila has no leg to stand on’.

Around this time, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Chinese-language media team compromised fundamental editorial principles on the South China Sea issue. The ABC’s Mediawatch program found that, when the team reported on prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s visit to China in April 2016, it censored statements in which he voiced government concerns over China’s maritime claims. In the relevant English-language report, for example, Turnbull is said to have ‘urged a peaceful resolution of territorial disputes with the five other nations that make overlapping claims.’ In the Chinese-language version of that same ABC report, the five nations with overlapping claims are not mentioned.

These accomplishments of the propaganda department, including the commercial agreements with universities and media outlets and extensive media training programs, help explain the confidence with which China’s national security chief, Meng Jianzhu, warned Labor opposition leaders of the likely electoral costs of failing to support Beijing’s position on bilateral matters during a 2017 visit to Australia. Meng is reported to have said ‘it would be a shame if Chinese government representatives had to tell the Chinese community in Australia that Labor did not support the relationship between Australia and China.’  The party’s national security chief believed CCP propaganda arms in Beijing were in a position to ‘tell’ Chinese communities in Australia how to vote with the help of local Chinese-language media and university centres.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The CCP’s presumption is staggering on several counts. It assumes that the primary loyalties of Chinese Australians lie with China rather than with Australia. Further, it assumes that the targeted electors are incapable of making rational electoral choices without prompting from Beijing. It also presumes that China’s leaders can intimidate democratic political parties contesting hard-fought elections into yielding to Beijing’s demands on the specious grounds that these demands drive the voting choices of Chinese Australians.

These assumptions are not just wrong; they are damaging, as they originate in China and serve the stated purposes of the Chinese government. They can also be debilitating if, as some have suggested, fear of losing the support of this important constituency is emerging as  a major factor in framing China policy in Canberra.

In fact, Australian political leaders can speak frankly about China’s military and political activities in South China Sea and elsewhere without fear of a voter backlash, and they must do so if only to show that Beijing cannot play around in Australian electoral politics without penalty.

Australia is home to diverse Chinese-heritage communities, and their views and sentiments are as varied as their places of birth and their professional and personal inclinations. What unites them is not their partisan politics or eagerness for friendly relations with China—they are divided on both counts—but a determination to be accepted as equals in Australian society and to resist signs of resurgent anti-Chinese or anti-Asian racism in Australia. Political parties and candidates that place them under suspicion or discriminate against them will be punished at the ballot box—as well they should be.

Australia may have good reasons to recalibrate its foreign and defence policies in the era of Donald Trump but these don’t include fearing that most Chinese Australians would fail to support Australia standing up to China as and when it must. The lesson of the 2025 election is not that people should be careful when they speak about China but, rather, that they should be careful of what they say about Chinese Australians. Australia’s political, business and media elites should stick to their geopolitical knitting and hold fast to the old adage: mind your tongue.

This article was published by The Strategist.