This volume makes a critical contribution to understanding how China fits into that broader narrative of Australian “soft power.” There are over 40 Australian studies centres dotted around China, making it the largest community of Australian studies anywhere in the world. But numbers, as so many of the contributors point out in the book, reveal only part of the story. For while few can doubt the quantitative success – measured in the number of conferences, exchanges, articles published and dialogues conducted – there remains a persistent limit to the scope of knowledge about Australia in China and a question mark over how the centres can be better used to breach enduring and stubborn stereotypes about each other, particularly Chinese views concerning Australia’s foreign policy. In recent years the centres have been particularly tested by the downturn in the bilateral political and diplomatic relationship. All this, however, must be balanced against the real and important achievements of those who tilled this particular academic soil. The effort, it must be stressed, remains in its early stages, but it is ongoing. Diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China are only just over half a century old, and the centres themselves were established only from the early 1980s.
The volume provides then an indispensable guide to how both Australian and Chinese scholars have tried to overcome the legacy of a long period of mutual incomprehension and ignorance during the Cold War. It contains a mix of methodical analyses of the origins and evolution of the centres, the courses taught to Chinese students, as well as personal reminiscences from those who pioneered the field in their respective countries.
Four parts divide the book. The first, concerned with an analysis of how the community came into existence and a consideration of how Australia is studied in China and Taiwan, is primarily focused on the teaching, research and scholarly output that constitute the intellectual substance of the centres. The chapter by Diane Hu and Ying Li shows that the attempts to diversify the disciplinary patterns and outputs of Australian centres have had only limited success: they remain dominated by the study of Australian literature. Part two, “Ambassadors, Agencies and Channels,” looks at those who form the sinews and arteries of the community both in China and Australia. Of particular note here is the story of the so-called “Gang of Nine”: the nine Chinese scholars who arrived in Australia in 1979 to study at Sydney University and who returned to China to offer new courses in Australian culture and linguistics. Indeed, the period after their return saw a rapid increase in the number of Australian studies centres across China, and during Australia’s bicentennial year in 1988 the First International Conference on Australian Studies was held at Beijing Foreign Studies University. The experience was more than just an entrée to Australia, however, as Guanglin Wang explains, “it was a window to Western cultures” where “they opened their eyes and benefitted greatly from their education, especially in critical thinking and critical writing” (p. 50).
David Carter, looking at the role of the Australia–China Council, is intrigued by the pride and optimism of its annual reports in the early 1980s, reflecting the bipartisan enthusiasm in Canberra for growing the relationship across the domains of trade, culture and tourism. But he notes even then the “emphasis on the persistent need for further understanding on both the Chinese and Australian sides and the warning that relations would not necessarily stay in the present honeymoon phase” which could be “easily rattled or disillusioned by temporary setbacks” (p. 59). And the setbacks certainly came, but Andrew Podger, a former senior Australian public servant, reveals in chapter six how China’s economic transformation from the late 1970s has been characterized by the adaptation of selected Western public sector approaches to its own institutional framework. The China–Australia dialogue on Public Administration allowed space for Australians to think differently about intergovernmental relations and for the Chinese, about accountability and the potential role of People’s Congresses. Like most other areas of the community of Australian studies centres in China, this aspect was affected by the strains in the bilateral relationship since 2016.
The third section, covering translation and disciplinary development, opens with a reflective piece by Colin Mackerras, who notes that the lack of engagement between the two countries during the 1960s, especially at a time when Australian troops were fighting with the US in Vietnam, “was reflected in the comparative lack of interest in each studying the other” (p. 85). Speaking from a contemporary perspective, he laments the ill-feeling of Chinese students towards Australia as a result of the diplomatic breakdown in relations. “They might still want to study” in Australia, he notes, “but their image was of a country far too subservient to the country with which China found itself in competition, namely the United States” (p. 89). At the same time, successive surveys by prominent Australian think tanks show just how much more negative Australians have become towards China. Such negativity inevitably reveals the limitations of the Australian studies community to either provide the necessary ballast when the political relationship sours or the antidote to popular presentations of Australia as an American lackey. Mackerras’s observations are followed by chapters dealing with the teaching of Australian children’s literature in Mongolia (by Wuyungaowa), the efforts by Chinese translators to bring Australian literature to local audiences (by Li Yao and Meili Yi) and the rise of area and country studies (by Chengyi Wu and Chunyu Ding).
The final section, “Chinese Studies with Australian Characteristics,” opens with a chapter by Jocelyn Chey on the role of the Australia–China Council. Chey was its first executive director and served in the first Australian embassy in Beijing under Ambassador Stephen Fitzgerald. Established in 1979, by the mid-1980s, Chey says, in Australia the “understanding of China had grown markedly and previous dogmatic anti-communist and anti-China feeling waned” (p. 142). The sense that this was all one-way traffic, however, still gripes. As Chey notes with a certain acerbity, “very little of this change can be credited to China” (p. 142). Nevertheless, what former Foreign minister Andrew Peacock wrote in 1980, that the Australia–China relationship was a “thin veneer of goodwill covering a vast gap in culture and understanding” was brought to bear in more recent times, when a slew of older images about China in the Australian imagination, from fear of invasion to the “yellow peril,” were dusted off and deployed in the Australian political debate. A lingering question also remains as to why closer economic relations between the two countries have not in any serious way diluted the deep and underlying suspicion that each retains of the other. The scholar Chengxin Pan, writing some years ago, contends that it comes as “no surprise that Australia’s close economic ties with China have not been able to sway its historical mindset” (‘Getting Excited about China’, in David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 2012, p. 252). If anything, he suggests, “this geo-economic proximity seems to have aggravated that anxiety” (ibid). This is a critical question for future scholars engaged in the work of Australian studies centre in China, and in Australia itself.
