PERSPECTIVES | Beyond securitisation: The exceptionalisation of China knowledge in Australia

This article appeared in UTS:ACRI's Perspectives on November 9 2026. Perspectives is the commentary series of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), offering research-informed viewpoints on developments and debates in the Australia-China relationship.

It is hardly a secret that China studies in Australia have been under growing pressure amid intensifying geopolitical tensions and great power competition. A researcher working on China today moves through a landscape that increasingly seems censored, monitored and exceptionalised. The difficulty lies in determining by whom and through what mechanisms.

In May 2026, Education Minister Jason Clare blocked 13 Australian Research Council (ARC) grants on grounds relating to security, defence or international relations. There are legitimate reasons for universities to exercise greater caution over international research collaboration. But how can they respond proportionately when the grounds for individual decisions remain undisclosed?

In my recent article in the Asian Review of Political Economy, I examine how the security treatment of an issue crosses from public argument into something much harder to contest. It is not to say that the risks themselves are invented – risks are real. The question is what happens to ordinary administrative and academic rules once such risks have been invoked without a transparent process through which particular decisions can be scrutinised or challenged. Securitisation describes the process through which an issue is framed as an existential threat, legitimising extraordinary measures. Australia's experience suggests that we need to distinguish between three layers of this process.

The first is discursive. From about 2017, intelligence officials, politicians and journalists formed what might be called a securitising coalition, and concern about specific Communist Party activity widened into a broad category of ‘Chinese influence’. Distinctions between the Chinese party-state, Chinese universities, Chinese-Australians and international students were at many times blurred. Persuasion does the work at this layer, and claims can be attributed and answered. ANU Associate Professor Amy King told a 2024 conference that Australia had ‘conflated a deep understanding of China’ with the fear that such understanding implied agreement with, or having been bought off by, Beijing.

The second layer is administrative, where the discourse and narrative were translated into policy and institutional practice. From the late 2010s onwards, a succession of policy instruments reshaped the conditions for academic exchange, including through the University Foreign Interference Taskforce in 2019, the Foreign Relations Act in 2020 and, in 2024, a visa criterion concerning unwanted transfers of critical technology. The door remains open, but the corridor has grown long.

The third layer is what my article in the Asian Review of Political Economy terms ‘exceptionalisation’, the point at which an issue leaves ordinary procedural judgement altogether. Here the category is judged before the individual case. The institutional affiliation or nationality can become a basis for exclusion before the particular research is assessed.

For instance, the China Defence Universities Tracker, launched by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, rated 92 Chinese entities ‘very high risk’. Its authors urged governments to use it when vetting visas and funding. ARC officials later told Senate Estimates that their checks on grant applicants included links to listed institutions. The Tracker is intended to inform due diligence, not impose a blanket prohibition. But when institutional ratings substitute for individual assessment, a tool designed to identify risk can become a mechanism of anticipatory exclusion.

A more direct example emerged in 2024 when UNSW Canberra ended Chinese academic visits to its Australian Defence Force Academy campus and advised staff that research collaborations involving academics affiliated with Chinese universities would not be supported, although exceptions remained possible through approval.

In August 2026, Foreign Minister Penny Wong used powers under the Foreign Relations Act to terminate an Australian National University joint program with Shandong University. The decision followed Shandong’s inclusion on a US blacklist of foreign institutions. More recently, the University of Tasmania decided not to renew its longstanding marine science program with the Ocean University of China (OUC) beyond 2028. The decision followed scrutiny of OUC’s inclusion on the US Department of Defense’s Section 1286 list, although reports also point to a proposed change in teaching arrangements.

These cases help illustrate how China studies, whether in critical technologies or the humanities, face shrinking room and increasing regulation. From a May 2024 open letter to the ARC led by Professor David Goodman to the recent parliamentary report, Security and Prosperity is Asia: Building Australia’s Asia Capability, there is a mounting recognition that Australia's capacity to understand China is under serious strain. The parliamentary inquiry described the broader pipeline for developing Asia expertise as being in crisis.

Why, given that we recognise the loss of China knowledge as a major weakness in Australia’s sovereign capability, does exceptionalisation continue? The political structure may offer an explanation. Intelligence assessments, ministerial discretion, compliance offices and cautious university managers converge on similar outcomes. As research security scholar Brendan Walker-Munro observed, the ARC has identified 11 different laws and policies governing research security across five ministerial portfolios. Academia has every right to be confused. Unlike the more explicit prohibitions found in parts of the US framework, Australia's restrictions often emerge through smaller, technical decisions that are individually reversible in principle. Their cumulative effect is much harder to reverse because responsibility is dispersed across institutions.

The consequences of this fragmented system are difficult to isolate, but the broader erosion of China expertise is well documented.

The Australian Academy of the Humanities dates the decline in national China capability to about 2002, well before the intensification of security concerns after 2017. It found that only 17 Australians completed Honours in Chinese studies with language at six universities between 2017 and 2021, while ARC funding for China-focused research falling from more than $11 million in 2010 to under $4 million in 2021. Some young professionals told the Academy that concealing their China knowledge was now better for their careers.

UTS:ACRI professors James Laurenceson and Wanning Sun report that the share of ARC STEM grants involving China has halved since 2019.

China Matters, an independent policy institute, lost its government funding in 2020 and closed in 2024. Peter Varghese, whose 2024 review of national security research funding called the defunding ‘so regrettable’, had earlier remarked that ‘to understand China is not to endorse its policies’.

Not all these developments can be attributed to securitisation. Funding pressures, changing student demand and institutional priorities also matter. But the security environment risks accelerating a decline that was already underway.

We may find an unsettling explanation in Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. Schmitt defined the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’, a proposition central to his theory of ‘decisionism’. His logic is straightforward. Whoever holds the power to suspend normal conditions and declare a state of exception is sovereign. In this account, what matters is not simply the content of a decision, but who possesses the authority to decide when ordinary rules no longer apply. When normal governance is suspended and the survival of sovereignty moves to the centre of politics, exceptionalisation and decisionism become the most effective political tools and the clearest display of power at work. Although Schmitt's theory is associated with authoritarian states, its logic can also illuminate how exceptions emerge within liberal democracies. In Australia's China research environment, the power to decide appears not in a single declaration, but through dispersed institutional decisions whose cumulative effects are difficult to challenge.

Exceptionalisation may reduce some forms of exposure. It also risks feeding a spiral in which thinner expertise produces cruder threat assessments, and cruder assessments justify further restriction.

A formally declared emergency has an identifiable author and, at least in principle, a point at which its justification can be reconsidered. An exception produced through dispersed institutional decisions is harder to identify, challenge or reverse. Australia now faces a troubling paradox. In seeking to protect itself from China, it risks becoming less capable of understanding it.

Author

Dr Guangyi Pan is a Lecturer in International Political Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW Canberra. His research primarily focuses on asymmetric politics, China's alliance and military policy, Indo-Pacific security and the neoclassical realism of International Relations.

Guangyi has published journal articles, media reports, and analytical pieces in areas of Indo-Pacific politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, and Cold War history. His recent articles appeared in International Affairs, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, International Relations of Asia-Pacific, Pacific Review, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Australian Journal of International Affairs etc. He is the author of The US Covert Operation in Poland in the 1980s (Nanjing University Press, 2023) and National Role Conception and Neoclassical Realism: A Synthetic Exploration into the Sino-Soviet Alignment (Routledge, 2025). He received his PhD in International Politics from UNSW Sydney in 2024. Previously, he studied at Nanjing University and worked at UNICEF China.