The political performance of contestation and adaptation in Australian-Chinese relations

Abstract

Australia’s neighbour to the north, China, has posed a series of complex challenges to the identity politics of Australia throughout the Twentieth Century and continues to do so today. Paranoias include those regarding Chinese investment into local property and its supposed impact on increasing property prices (Rogers et al. 2015), Chinese investment into Australia’s agricultural and mining infrastructure industries (McCarthy and Song 2018), Chinese migration (Forrest et al. 2017), the potentiality of a Chinese military threat (Glaser and Szerlip 2011), and more recently Chinese infiltration into Australian politics (Head 2018). The Chinese question for Australia is therefore multifaceted and ranges from concerns about identity politics to economics, defence and security, and in turn, becoming a useful “issue” for performative politics for a voting public.