The last time I saw Colin Mackerras was on 2 December 2025 in Melbourne, at the 19th Biennial Conference of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia. Looking back, I remember above all his warmth, his gentle manner and his capacity to remain at ease even when discussing contentious matters. These qualities accompanied a scholarly independence that I admired, including when our views differed.
Our conversation touched on Clive Hamilton’s Silent Invasion, which discusses Colin’s enthusiastic response to Xi Jinping’s 2014 address to the Australian Parliament, his pride in receiving Xi’s praise, and his commitment to improving Australia–China relations. Hamilton places these episodes within a broader argument about Australians whose standing can lend credibility to positions favourable to Beijing. When I recalled this criticism, Colin simply laughed. I was struck by his composure and his refusal to let controversy overshadow the conversation. That encounter also brought into focus a question that remains important for Chinese studies: how can scholars preserve their independence when their work is increasingly interpreted through the lens of geopolitical competition?
My own engagement with Colin was principally professional, through conferences, workshops and conversations about our research. Whenever I invited him to contribute, he responded with the generosity and seriousness of a committed colleague. On 23 November 2009, I organised a workshop on Tibetan studies in Australia, attended by scholars including James Leibold of La Trobe University, Mark Stephenson of Victoria University, Gillian Tan, and many others. Colin subsequently published ‘Tibet Studies in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore’, an article that reflected his sustained interest in the development of the field.
I also invited him to the Fulbright conference on Australia–US relations and the rise of China, held in Melbourne on 11–12 August 2011. He brought a valuable historical perspective, and his paper subsequently appeared in the 2014 special issue of Asian Survey. His discussion of the Keating government was particularly instructive. He argued that Australia had sometimes exercised greater independence from Washington on China policy than conventional accounts allowed, including when it helped persuade the Clinton administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and trade in 1994. His historical scholarship reminded us that Australia retained choices in its relations with China and the United States; policy did not follow inevitably from alliance commitments. His position is consistent with the model of ideological coexistence.
Colin’s gentleness was especially evident in disagreement. I remember a long conversation about minority issues in China. My work drew on Will Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights and explored its possible application and adaptation in Asia and China. Colin raised serious questions but did so without making our exchange adversarial. ‘I don’t agree with your liberal friend,’ he said, expressing his reservations about my approach through a courteous reference. His manner allowed disagreement to deepen a conversation rather than bring it to an end.
He was, however, very supportive of my research on deliberative democracy, particularly my emphasis on dialogue as a way of addressing difficult political questions. In his article on Tibetan studies, he described my work as developing independent policy analysis directed towards solving problems and suggested that its influence could grow among Chinese readers, including those in China itself. I valued that encouragement. It demonstrated his willingness to recognise the contribution of an approach whose theoretical foundations he did not entirely share.
That openness also helps explain the value of his scholarship on China’s ethnic minorities. His three books, China’s Minorities (1994), China’s Minority Cultures (1995) and China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation (2003) approached minority questions through historical change, cultural identity, modernisation and integration. Rather than organising his studies around a normative theory of minority rights, Colin sought to understand the histories and circumstances through which minority communities experienced their relationship with the Chinese state and wider society.
One of his principal strengths was comparative synthesis. By studying several minority populations together, he brought out differences obscured by treating ‘China’s minorities’ as a single, undifferentiated category. His repeated visits to ethnic minority regions and his interviews, conducted primarily in Chinese, grounded his scholarship in firsthand observations and a sympathetic understanding of the complex realities on the ground in China. This sympathetic approach also laid the foundation for his advocacy of strategic empathy, which will be explored below. From a minority-rights perspective, his emphasis on integration and development remained open to criticism. Yet even where one questioned his conclusions, his work demanded engagement with historical context and the diversity of minority experiences.
It is his later writing on Australia–China relations that I particularly wish to highlight here. I read this work as making a substantial contribution to the advocacy of strategic empathy, although Colin did not use that term as an explicit theoretical concept. By strategic empathy, I mean the effort to understand another actor’s fears, perceptions and circumstances, and to allow that understanding to inform one’s own judgement and conduct.
Colin brought intellectual courage and historically informed judgement to this task. He was prepared to challenge influential Australian accounts of China and to ask uncomfortable questions about Australia’s contribution to deteriorating relations. His arguments were sometimes controversial, but the underlying invitation was important: before judging another country’s conduct, consider how that country understands the situation and how it interprets our own behaviour.
In ‘Australia–China Relations in Decline: An Alternative Viewpoint’, Colin argued that Australia had played a greater role in damaging the relationship than mainstream Australian commentary generally acknowledged. His account frequently presented Chinese actions as responses to Australian initiatives. Whether or not one accepts that allocation of responsibility, the empathetic move is clear. Australian readers are asked to reconsider how their government’s conduct appears from Beijing. Measures Canberra presents as defending sovereignty or upholding international principles may be perceived by Beijing as efforts to obstruct its international role.
His concern extended beyond relations between governments. He connected hostile political and media narratives with Sinophobia, the experiences of Chinese students and the weakening of people-to-people relations. This attention to the social consequences of antagonism gave his argument a human dimension. A deteriorating bilateral relationship affects people whose lives, work and attachments connect the two societies. His article therefore encouraged reflection both on Australia’s contribution to conflict and on the injuries that confrontational narratives could produce.
The argument became more explicitly reciprocal in his 2023 chapter, ‘The Role of National Security in Australia–China Relations’. Its abstract states: “Neither side has shown any sympathy for the national security concerns of the other.” His conclusion similarly suggests that both countries take their own security concerns seriously while giving insufficient weight to those of the other. Here Colin identified a persistent obstacle to mutual understanding: each side assumes that its own fears are self-evidently legitimate, while interpreting the other’s fears as a pretext for objectionable conduct.
His discussion of Hong Kong and Xinjiang illustrated the collision between different interpretive frameworks. Australian governments have principally presented these issues in terms of human rights, democracy and individual freedom; Beijing has principally framed them through territorial integrity, separatism, terrorism, foreign interference and regime security. Colin asked Australian readers to consider why criticism presented as the defence of universal values might be interpreted by Chinese leaders as part of a broader challenge to their political order. In the case of Hong Kong, he was particularly critical of the unwillingness of Australian government and media commentary to understand China’s national security concerns. In discussing Xinjiang, he recognised a counterterrorism concern while also acknowledging human rights abuses and restrictions on Islam that he regarded as excessive.
Colin also used a form of role reversal to examine regional security. If Australia defends its right to operate in waters near China, how should it assess Chinese involvement in the South Pacific? What assumptions lead Australian policymakers to regard one country’s regional presence as legitimate and another’s as inherently threatening? He drew attention to Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s objection that Australia expected consultation over his country’s agreement with China while not consulting Solomon Islands over AUKUS.
The following extended quotation illustrates both his intellectual courage in challenging prevailing Australian perspectives and his empathetic approach to understanding China’s position and strategic concerns:
‘Australia’s assumption that China has no right to expand its influence into the South Pacific seems totally flawed to me. The suggestion that this automatically constitutes an actual or potential ‘threat’ to Australia seems to me misplaced. As Sogovare pointed out, Australia had not consulted with him over AUKUS, though Australian nuclear-powered submarines most certainly did affect his country, so why should it assume he should consult with them over a security agreement with China?’
Colin also recognised that Australia and China occupy different strategic positions. Australia may regard China itself as a major security concern, whereas Beijing principally views Australia through its place in the US alliance system. Reciprocal empathy therefore requires understanding how differences in power, geography and alliance relationships shape their interpretations of the same events.
Read in this way, Colin’s later work makes several lasting contributions. It challenges accounts that attribute responsibility for deteriorating relations entirely to the other side. It draws attention to the danger that treating China as an enemy may help produce the hostility that such treatment is intended to contain. It also shows why an empathetic understanding of a country’s security concerns is critically important. These insights remain valuable today and in future.
There are, nevertheless, limits to the reciprocity of his analysis. Colin reconstructed China’s concerns sympathetically but gave less sustained attention to why Australian policymakers might sincerely fear telecommunications vulnerabilities, economic pressure or a future Chinese military presence in the Pacific. His work is consequently stronger as a corrective to dominant Australian discourse than as a fully developed account of mutual strategic empathy. Moreover, strategic empathy needs to encompass Hong Kong protesters, Uyghurs, Chinese Australians and the diverse communities and political leaders of Solomon Islands. It also requires institutions and practices through which understanding can be tested, sustained and translated into credible reassurance. Colin’s work offers a powerful invitation to undertake that task, rather than a complete answer.
I regard these questions as reasons to continue the conversation he helped make possible. His scholarship asked Australians to look beyond familiar assumptions, acknowledge their own country’s agency and consider the costs of refusing and/or failing to understand China.
When I think again of our last meeting in Melbourne, it is the connection between his manner and his scholarship that stays with me. He could disagree without hostility, accept criticism without losing his composure, and encourage an empathetic understanding grounded in a complex world. I experienced these qualities firsthand, and I believe they offer valuable lessons for diplomacy, particularly in fostering mutual understanding, managing differences, and promoting strategic empathy in Australia–China relations.
Colin has left us, but his work will continue to provoke thought and disagreement. I will remember a generous colleague whose intellectual courage was accompanied by gentleness, and whose scholarship kept open the possibility of a more empathetic understanding relationship between Australia and China. In an uncertain world, his insistence that we try to understand one another remains a legacy worth carrying forward.
