Over the last several years, there has been a decline in Chinese Studies in Australian universities, with falling student numbers, ever-more limited teaching offerings and diminishing research opportunities. At the same time, universities have never been more successful in the international education market and in science research partnerships with China. While the decline of Chinese Studies has been read through national politics, the successes of Australian universities in China suggests that institutional conditions and priorities need to be considered in understanding its crisis.
As well as anecdotal information, hard data on the decline of research training was delivered in the 2022 Australian Academy of the Humanities report on honours and post-graduate Chinese Studies and since then the retrenchment of the field has been acknowledged by the Group of Eight, the national media, and most recently, the Varghese report into Australian defence and security thinktanks.
There is a consensus in all these responses that knowledge of China – which Chinese Studies programs profess to cultivate – is vital for both Australia’s national interests and societal progress. That is, Australia needs knowledge of China to benefit from its economic development and also to foster a post-colonial Australian identity comfortable in the Chinese world. This consensus is part of the decades’ long concept of “engagement”, which aims to institutionalise a dialectical synthesis of Australia’s neoliberal economic integration with Asia through export-oriented trade with progressive and post-colonial Australian nation-building. Its dialectical labour is expressed through its distinctive urgency, as the “should”, “needs” and “musts” of decades of “Asia literacy” policy and political rhetoric.
It is from the progressive side of this dialectic that a cause for the decline of Chinese Studies programs has been found in a counter-progressive anti-China sentiment and a reversion to Anglo-centrism in Australian politics and public life in the last decade.
There are examples of ministerial interference in national research grant awards, including on China, and the national discourse shifted very abruptly from around 2017 to take on issues like foreign interference and China’s military build-up. There have been instances of strident and inflammatory commentary critical of China redolent of the Cold War.
Whether this national discourse could be simply labelled “anti-China” or whether academic fields can be suppressed by that discourse, what is undeniable, however, is that universities themselves have repudiated such sentiments through their institutional commitment to China. Over the last decade, the number of international students from China has reached record levels and the number of partnerships and joint ventures in teaching and research with Chinese universities, almost all in sciences and engineering, has surged.
This success for both commercial international education and China partnerships in the sciences suggests that while Australian Chinese Studies programs have indeed declined, other forms of institutional knowledge of China in universities have actually developed enormously.
As knowledge of China for international education, universities know market trends at the province and city level and at every stage of the student “lifecycle” through real-time data analytics and their in-country networks. Education is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and the sector generates this form of China market knowledge at a scale no Chinese Studies academic could compete with.
Similarly, in hundreds of partnerships in science and engineering across the sector, far more in number than any in Chinese Studies, university faculties and colleges have developed deep forms of China knowledge through research and teaching collaboration. This is China knowledge adjacent or supplemental to the work of science and engineering itself, but crucial to it, developed in an improvisational, pragmatic, personalistic and unsystematic register.
Research outputs from science partnerships drive up university rankings which then feed into international education marketing, creating a nexus of China knowledge that is central to the operation of Australian universities today.
These instrumental and subjective forms of China knowledge are now dominant but they are not forms of academic knowledge and make no claim on disinterested, critical or open inquiry into China like Chinese Studies.
Nonetheless, into the 2010s, university Chinese Studies programs were not only able to sit tolerably alongside them but arguably were even carried forward by them.
Chinese Studies programs could do so because China itself was very different. Teaching and researching China from the late 1990s through to the end of the Hu Jintao era from 2002 to 2012 was documenting China’s modernisation. It produced excellent work through PhDs and profile staff on China’s flourishing contemporary culture and changing social life around themes of urbanisation, consumerism, civil society, globalisation, new media and more.
More traditional voices in the field remained fully attentive to the party and its role in China. Many academics had also taken on the methodologies of cultural studies and “theory” from the humanities and social sciences to develop a “critical” outlook on a range of social categories such as gender, class, nation, youth and so on in China.
But by documenting a China on the reasonable assumption that the depredations of the Maoist and Dengist past could be defined, epistemologically-speaking, as history, Chinese Studies programs could operate adjacent to the fervent university commercial and science commitments and could readily make institutional arguments about their own value.
Indeed, they performed a specific institutional function. By accounting for a modernising China, they validated universities’ dialectical reconciliation of both their commercial goals in China and progressive post-colonial Australian mission under the rubric of “engagement”.
From 2012, however, it became clear that the past was not history when the People’s Republic of China took a hard revisionist turn under the leadership of Xi Jinping.
With Xi as the “core”, the party-state reasserted its nature as a totalising Leninist system with now well-understood consequences for China’s human rights and minorities, economic policy, militarisation and its management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There were a number of Chinese Studies academics in Australia who understood immediately what Xi Jinping meant for China. Together with other sites of China knowledge in journalism and policy-analysis, the field has produced excoriating accounts of re-education programs in Xinjiang, the political crisis in Hong Kong, the crushing of China’s nascent civil society and much else.
For Australian universities as institutions, however, the truth about Xi-era China has broken the structure of their commitment to China. They can no longer use China to reconcile their commercial international education and science partnerships goals with their professed progressive values when China offends those values.
Yet, instead of recognising this dilemma and developing a critical response drawn from robust scholarship, to maintain the logic of their “engagement” concept Australian universities have chosen to deny the reality of the Xi era altogether. As the Xi era has entrenched, the level of denial required has deepened.
This could be described as a form radicalisation of university corporate and science leadership. When Vicki Thompson, CEO of the Group of Eight wrote in 2023 that “Learning, education and knowledge can and does change our understanding, our relationships and the world. We need to know China more, not less”, it was a radical demand to work ever harder to occlude the truths about the Xi era that test university values so as to maintain both a progressive corporate aesthetic and commercial relationships under the concept of “engagement” with China at any cost.
For Chinese Studies programs, the outcome of the Xi era has been to break the bargain between its academic China knowledge and the corporate university.
Whereas once they could reconcile with institutional goals because there was a modernising China story to tell, now academics within Chinese Studies are presented with increasingly stark choices.
Chinese Studies teachers and researchers could still try to displace the party-state and study underground punk rock bands or the reception of Korean dramas or sci-fi literature or other interesting topics that were animated by the idea of a rising, urbanising China. There is optimism in continuing to focus on those ever-diminishing but still dynamic and creative voices in the Chinese system. Or they could put the reassertion of a total party-state system and China’s revisionism at the centre of the Australian Chinese Studies project. In the face of the universities’ undimmed commitment, this makes Chinese Studies programs sites of dissent.
In practice, Australian Chinese Studies is unsure of where it should go: co-option or dissent are both moral choices in a field of knowledge in which moral purpose is not central to its purpose and which is difficult to institutionalise in modern university.
Chinese Studies has lost a centre, or an agreed set of ideas about what knowledge of China is and what it is for. Without that centre, the field is fragmenting and its expertise being pulled into broader disciplinary groupings like economics or security studies or cultural studies where China is an important topic but not a field in itself and does not require the key skill of Chinese language.
A field unsure of its purpose within institutions radically committed to not-knowing has left Chinese Studies programs with limited appeal to students and unable to defend itself against the typical churn of program review and restructuring in university life. Universities themselves demonstrate every day to undergraduate and postgraduate students that, in the Xi era, knowing China through an academic field committed to critical or disinterested inquiry is a barrier, not an advantage, to career advancement.
One can be consoled by the knowledge that China as a great power means that Australian universities will eventually have to fully accept its truths whether they like it or not. This could mean that Australia’s academic capacity on China will never return as universities abandon any liberal or progressive pretence, gradually delete their Chinese Studies programs as unprofitable and contrarian and fully embrace an approach to China akin to Australia’s resource extraction industries with which they already share a great deal.
Alternatively, it is possible that university leaders and peak bodies could redefine the concept of “engagement” and actively create and defend a genuinely liberal institutional space in which Chinese Studies can understand and critique revisionist China as part of a broader commitment to the values that make such scholarship possible in a global era of democratic retreat.
For now, it is easier to assert that the problems of the field are a failure of Australian progressivism to tell China’s story well, as Xi Jinping would say, than address such fundamental questions of values and purpose. This means the continuing decline of Chinese Studies caught between a commitment to the truth and universities that refuse to see it.
This paper is adapted from the Louis Green Memorial Lecture, State Library of Victoria, October 2023.
Image: Photo by wang binghua on Unsplash
