Australians see benefits of strong China ties but want Chinese apps banned, survey finds

A majority of survey respondents said they saw the advantages of bilateral relations, but most are also in favour of banning WeChat and TikTok
More than half also said they supported more defence spending amid China’s growing military might, and see China as a security threat to Australia

China-Australia relations

Su-Lin Tanin Singapore

Published: 4:30pm, 11 Jul, 2023

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Australians remain wary of the security threat China may pose, even as they back efforts by the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to stabilise ties with Beijing, a new survey has found.

Many in Australia continue to show “a mixture of apprehension and ambivalence” towards China, according to the April survey of 2,000 people by the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) and the Centre for Business Intelligence & Data Analytics (BIDA) at the University of Technology Sydney. Nearly 40 per cent of those surveyed say the current government is managing Australia’s relationship with China well, a five-point increase from 2022.

It also found that 63 per cent of respondents saw the benefits of Australia’s relationship with China – a three-year high – but a majority also wanted to ban Chinese social media apps WeChat and TikTok, supported more defence spending amid the growing might of China’s military and said they saw China as a security threat to Australia.

“The Albanese Labor government’s policy of ‘stabilising’ the relationship with Beijing appears to be aligned with public sentiments,” said ACRI’s Elena Collinson and BIDA’s Paul Burke, the authors of the report.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. His government’s policy of “stabilising” ties with China “appears to be aligned with public sentiments”, the ACRI/BIDA survey found. Photo: AP

“The Australian Labor Party is gaining domestic political advantage from being seen as the better party to manage the relationship, and statecraft is perceived as preferable to megaphone diplomacy in terms of how the relationship is conducted in public.

“At the same time, there is no real groundswell of support for much movement in the relationship beyond stabilisation.”

Constituencies with higher concentrations of Chinese-Australian voters swung away from the Coalition government of former prime minister Scott Morrison during last summer’s federal polls, a December review by his Liberal Party of its failed election campaign showed.

The Morrison government’s criticisms of China’s Communist Party were seen to include “the wider [ethnic] Chinese community generally”, the report said.

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Its push for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and call for “UN weapons-style inspectors” to visit Wuhan in 2020 were some of the lowest points in deteriorating China-Australia relations.

The Albanese government, which came to power in May last year, has toned down the rhetoric on China – employing a formula of “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in the national interest”.

About one in three respondents to the ACRI/BIDA poll said that they believe bilateral relations “will improve in the next three years”, representing an increase from the previous two surveys.

About six in 10 Australians also continue to support the country having a strong relationship with China, according to the ACRI/BIDA poll – a proportion that has remained unchanged over three annual surveys.

Yet negative views of China similarly persist, even though there have been slight declines in certain views. Concerns about Australia’s relationship with China saw a decrease of six percentage points, while about 70 per cent of Australians said they don’t trust the Chinese government – down from 73 per cent last year. The proportion of Australians supporting a harder line in dealings with China also dropped to 55 per cent, from 58 per cent the year before.

Older Australians who backed former prime minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition government tend to have the most negative views of China, the survey found. Photo: AFP

Australians who backed Morrison’s right-wing former Coalition government, especially those who are 55 and older, tended to have the most negative views of China, the survey showed.

It found that about three-quarters of all respondents were supportive of Australia’s recent move to ban TikTok on government devices, with a similar proportion of older Australians saying they would back a complete nationwide ban on both that app and WeChat. Overall, about 61 per cent of those surveyed were supportive of a countrywide ban on the apps, up 14 percentage points from 2022.

Nearly eight in 10 also said Canberra was right in February to remove more than 900 Chinese-made security cameras from Australian government buildings.

The ACRI/BIDA survey further found that anxiety about foreign interference – and that “the Australia-Chinese community could be mobilised to serve Beijing’s ends” – remained “a live issue”.

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Australia introduced new foreign interference laws in 2018 under the government of Malcolm Turnbull, which he later admitted were aimed at China – though there has been little evidence provided to show what, if any, interference occurred.

Meanwhile, a hearing of Australia’s Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media began on Tuesday in Canberra.