When the fresh intake of Australian teenagers arrives at university campuses next year, the first crop of students born in 2008 will be among them.

It’s a milestone to be clocked with concern by those who care about Australia’s declining reservoir of China expertise which, frankly, should be everyone, but especially our policymakers.

Few students are enrolling in Chinese Studies, including the language. Credit: Matthew Absalom-Wong

As far as symbolism goes, the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics marked the moment China stepped on the global stage as an ascendant great power. It was galloping towards economic liberalisation with such promise that many hoped – naively, as it turned out – that it was on the cusp of a new era of political freedom.

Since then, as Beijing has taken a sharp authoritarian turn under leader Xi Jinping and massively expanded its military machine, the China story has only become more important.

Across the Indo-Pacific, Beijing is aggressively exerting its influence to the extent that Foreign Minister Penny Wong sees Australia as locked in a “permanent contest” with China to remain the region’s top security partner. A “knife fight” is how one minister described it to me recently. At the same time, Australia’s economy is as reliant as ever on China buying our goods.

And yet, not nearly enough of 2026’s new undergraduates and their successors will be specialising in Chinese studies for Australia to be sufficiently equipped to understand its greatest strategic threat and biggest trading partner in the years to come.

That’s the message coming directly from Australian universities and China experts, who are sounding the alarm on a declining across-the-board interest in Asia studies.

“It’s worrying because at a time when our focus on the region needs to increase, our capabilities are dropping,” former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Varghese tells me.

In a

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