We say we want to understand China. Then we glance past a million Chinese speakers at home and start counting somewhere else.

A repost from 17 October 2025

T__he Australian Financial Review and P&I recently lamented that fewer than five Australians a year graduate with honours degrees in Chinese studies, warning we’re losing the expertise to manage our most complex foreign relationship. But if that’s true, we’re not looking in the right places. The report focuses on a narrow stream of non-heritage graduates while brushing past the bilingual Australians already doing the work.

It draws a distinction — sometimes implicit, sometimes stated — between language exposure and policy relevance. Chinese-Australian citizens, residents, and international students are acknowledged, briefly, then quarantined. Their language skills are noted but doubted: not automatically “capable”.

Here’s the paradox: we have some people studying Chinese to keep university programs running and a million who speak Chinese at home. What it lacks is the willingness to count them in. The same people sustaining Chinese studies departments and our multicultural social fabric are implicitly written off as strategically unreliable.

We say we need China hands – just not those ones.

And that attitude has consequences. In her 2021 report for the Lowy Institute, Chinese Australians in the Australian........

© Pearls and Irritations