Research reports

On June 18 2017 senior economists, policy specialists, business representatives and diplomats from Australia and China gathered in Beijing for the inaugural Australia-China Think Tank Annual Economic Dialogue, co-hosted by the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) and the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation (CAITEC).

Executive summary

The Australian public is lukewarm in its overall support of foreign investment. However, its contribution to local employment is widely regarded positively. This is particularly important at a time when Australia’s labour market is softening and wages are growing at their slowest pace on record. This paper conservatively puts Australian employment currently supported by foreign investment at around 1.9 million, or one in six of all jobs.

In a 12 month period between December 2014 and December 2015, Australia clinched free trade agreements (FTAs) with Korea (KAFTA, enacted December 12 2014), Japan (JAEPA, enacted January 15 2015) and China (ChAFTA, enacted December 20 2015). A decade earlier, Australia had sealed an FTA with the US (AUSFTA, enacted January 1 2005). The combination means that Australia now has FTAs with its four biggest overseas customers.

On February 10-11 2017 the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney in collaboration with the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore co-hosted a conference on the South China Sea (SCS).

Among policymakers, media and the broader public, confusion reigns supreme when it comes to Chinese corporations. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are assumed to be blindly following Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or security service orders with little concern for their own commercial interests. And private Chinese firms are conflated with SOEs and viewed as pawns in the CCP’s regional expansion strategy, despite the enormous growth of the Chinese private sector over the past two decades.

On September 8 2016 the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney released an independent report on Chinese-language media in Australia.    

The report is authored by Wanning Sun, a Professor of Media and Communication at UTS with a decade of experience conducting academic research into the sector.

Professor Sun details a rapidly changing media landscape that outsiders on the one hand find inscrutable but also regularly place at the heart of the Chinese government’s attempts to exert soft power.  

On August 30 2016 the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney presented the fourth instalment of our ‘Prime Ministers Series’ devoted to the China policies of Australian Prime Ministers. Paul Keating was Treasurer from 1983 to 1991 and Prime Minister from December 1991 until March 1996. One of Mr Keating’s key priorities both as Treasurer and then Prime Minister was improving the competitiveness of Australia in a global market.

A report commissioned by the Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI), written by Dr Jane Orton, reveals the lack of Australian students enrolling in Chinese language study.

- Since 2008 the number of students learning Chinese in Australian schools has doubled to 172,832 – this is 4.7 percent of total school student numbers.

- There has been an overall drop over the past eight years of some 20 percent in the number of non-background classroom learners taking Chinese to around just 400.

The UK was the first western country to sign up to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). It aims to become the world's leading RMB trading hub. In 2015 President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister David Cameron signed more than 40 billion pounds worth of deals.

The report finds that the UK is running a decidedly pragmatic China policy based on its national interests, aimed at securing the economic opportunities China presents.

Author: Kerry Brown, Director of the Lau China Institute and Professor of Chinese Studies, King's College London