Former diplomat Graham Fletcher offers a blunt analogy for how Beijing would like its relationship with Australia to pan out given half a chance.
Beijing: From his home in Canberra’s red-brick inner north, former diplomat Graham Fletcher offers a blunt analogy for how Beijing would like its relationship with Australia to play out given half a chance.
“In an ideal world, China would like Australia to be an Antipodean Cambodia,” he says, referring to the South-East Asian nation that has become so economically and politically dependent on Beijing that it is considered a client state.
“But that’s never going to happen”.
It’s been more than 2½ years since Fletcher’s stint as Australia’s ambassador to China ended. His time there coincided with the most protracted crisis in bilateral relations since Gough Whitlam established diplomatic ties in 1972.
He is adamant that Australia’s relationship with China has been forever changed by that period, and that the policy of stabilisation pursued by the Albanese government to put a floor under the volatility should not be mistaken for a reset.
“China would call it a reset tomorrow if we agreed to. We don’t call it a reset because we don’t want people to say, ‘Let bygones be bygones. Let’s just go back to square one’,” he says.
“We’re not [going back]. It’s a different relationship now. It’s basically a self-interested partnership on both sides.”
China, he believes, is engaged in an all-out effort to challenge America’s global dominance and, despite Beijing’s claims to the contrary, will use its power to reshape the international order in its favour.
While Australia should be concerned, he says, there’s a gulf between Beijing’s ambition and its capacity to pull it off, even as US President Donald Trump pivots America into an anti-internationalist gear and retreats from its traditional leadership role.
“China is growing in its power and influence. That is undeniable,” he says. “It wants to be the big boy in Asia, but it’s going to have to work a lot harder to acquire that leadership role, which it simply doesn’t have.
“It can throw its weight around and sail ships here, there and everywhere. But so what? They’ve been doing that for a while. The United States also is doing that and has much more presence in places that matter.”
Australia can expect the region to become more contested, but China’s neighbours won’t be pushovers, he says, pointing out that India, Japan, Korea and Vietnam would all have concerns about expanding Chinese power and influence.
Speaking via video call from Canberra to Beijing, the line periodically freezes as the VPN battles to escape the chokehold of the Chinese government’s so-called Great Firewall, which cuts off access to the Western internet.
The call itself is something of a full-circle moment. Three Australian media outlets have reopened their China bureaus since late 2024 (this masthead returned in February), something Fletcher helped advocate for in his final months as ambassador.
For many Australian career diplomats, giving interviews to the media tests their comfort zones. They are skilled in the art of working a room, intelligence gathering, analysis and background briefings, but tend to baulk at seeing their names in print. Such is the conditioning of a job in which public commentary is typically the preserve of elected officials.
Fletcher maintained a low profile on his return to Canberra, shunning the media spotlight even after calling time last year on a 40-year career in the public service. He spent much of it at the coalface of the Australia-China relationship in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, including three postings to Beijing and two stints as the head of the North Asia division before becoming ambassador, making him one of the country’s top China policy minds.
Now, after a year as a private citizen, he has stepped into the think tank world as a non-resident fellow with the Lowy Institute, publishing some of the frank insights once reserved for government ears.
“China plainly wants to win, in everything, and displace (if not actually replace) the United States from its global leadership role,” he wrote in a piece titled Yes, China does seek hegemony, which was widely shared among China watchers.
In a report published this week, he concluded that Australia and China had found a fragile but “good enough” foundation to anchor a long-term working relationship.
There’s a tendency in the Sino-analysis sphere to place experts on the dove-hawk spectrum, running from so-called “soft on China” advocates who favour prioritising engagement and economic ties, to national security hardliners who want Australia to take a more confrontational stand against Beijing’s military expansionism and human rights breaches. Fletcher would probably find critics in both camps.
He believes the stabilisation policy has worked by acting as a circuit breaker that gave Beijing a face-saving off-ramp from its campaign of economic coercion against Canberra, which in turn gave no ground on any national security issues.
The trade-off, hawks argue, is that the Albanese government has turned down the volume on major friction points that should be loudly called out, but Fletcher gives short shrift to this view.
“Great powers do not admit error, and the idea that we can name and shame and get them to apologise and admit that they overreached is not going to happen,” Fletcher says.
The Australian government raises public objections selectively. Foreign Minister Penny Wong spoke out forcefully after China’s nuclear-capable missile test in the Pacific last month. But other flashpoints, such as confrontations in the South China Sea and dangerous jet intercepts, tend to be dealt with by press release, noted in speeches, and raised behind closed doors, but not dwelt on publicly.
“If you look at the frequency of how many times we go on the 6.30pm news and say, ‘Bad China’ – yes, that’s not happening to the degree that some of the hawks want. But I say: ‘So what happens when you do that?’ Well, you poison the atmosphere of the relationship. Public hostility. They start not answering the phone, and then what do you do?” Fletcher says.
“Some countries are more prone to taking offence than others, and you have to factor that in.”
The implosion
By the time Fletcher clocked on as ambassador in August 2019, the bilateral relationship was already under serious strain. Australia had woken up to the threat of Chinese foreign influence and taken a series of measures that enraged Beijing, including banning Chinese telco giant Huawei from Australia’s 5G rollout and passing foreign influence laws.
By the end of his first year, the relationship had imploded.
The detonating event was the Morrison government’s decision in April 2020 to call for an independent international inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins and China’s handling of it – an idea first floated by then-foreign minister Marise Payne on the ABC TV’s Insiders program before Australia had rallied support of partners behind the scenes.
To some, it was a fair enough call that would go on to expose China as a glass-jawed bully. To Fletcher, it was an injudicious way of dealing with a capricious power that loathes public humiliation and has a track record of retaliatory conduct.
“I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t know that it was coming,” he says of Payne’s proposal.
“If you’ve got a good idea and if you want to prosecute something, you don’t announce it on TV, and then think, ‘Oh, so how are we going to implement this?’”
In a feat of diplomatic wrangling, Australia would go on to secure support for a World Health Organisation-convened probe. But the Chinese fury at Canberra’s call was swift, and the first salvo of beef restrictions and barley tariffs followed soon after in a punitive campaign that took years to unwind and harmed China’s public image in Australia.
By the end of 2020, China had slapped $20 billion of trade sanctions on Australia’s exports, frozen ministerial-level communication channels and detained Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng Lei, prompting Australian media outlets to close their offices and recall their correspondents.
Fletcher and his team played a critical role in rushing the ABC’s Bill Birtles and Australian Financial Review’s Mike Smith out of the country in September 2020.
Meanwhile, Australia challenged China’s conduct at the World Trade Organisation and, on home turf, security services conducted raids on four Chinese state media journalists whose visas were later revoked.
All of this took place as the coronavirus spread rapidly from Wuhan, and as Australia became one of the first countries to pull down the shutters on Chinese students and travellers.
The thaw
Only with a change of government in 2022 did hostilities begin to thaw. Perhaps the brightest moment came in the final months of Fletcher’s posting when he received word that journalist Cheng would be freed after more than three harrowing years in detention in Beijing.
“It was a very, very good moment,” says Fletcher, who saw Cheng in jail about 10 times – via video call and in-person – and accompanied her on the repatriation flight to Melbourne in October 2023.
It capped off a long campaign by the Australian government and Cheng’s friends and family for her release after she was detained and eventually convicted on national security grounds for breaking a news embargo by mere minutes while working for state broadcaster CGTN.
Still, Fletcher remains less certain than others – including Cheng herself – that her ordeal was an act of political malice by the Chinese state hellbent on punishing Australia.
“I honestly don’t know whether that was a bilateral political thing or whether it just was there, sitting on its own,” Fletcher says, noting China’s intolerance of information leaks and past practice of meting out harsh punishments for them.
It is possible, he says, that she would have endured the same result in the absence of a disintegrating bilateral relationship.
For her part, Cheng noted in her memoir that Chinese state security began surveilling her within days of Payne’s COVID-19 inquiry call, and she believes it was looking for a pretext to detain her. Her treatment in prison, including access to phone calls with her two children, improved only after Labor won the 2022 election.
Status quo on Taiwan
As for the small island democracy facing the increasingly belligerent threat of conquest by Beijing, Fletcher sees the status quo holding in Taiwan until the 2030s.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has tied his legacy to seeing Taiwan “unified” with the mainland, but any conflict would be a gamble of the highest stakes.
“He’s got to be absolutely certain he’s not going to fail, and no one can tell him that it’s going to work at the moment because there are so many variables,” says Fletcher, putting himself in the camp of analysts who believe Xi will prioritise some kind of political deal to control Taiwan before using military force.
“So we will see everything else attempted first,” he says.
Canberra, he says, should cling to preserving the status quo for as long as possible, but ultimately the key decisions won’t be made there.
“They’ll be made in Washington and Beijing, and Taipei to a certain extent,” he says.
And if Washington makes a call to intervene to defend Taiwan, where does that leave Australia?
“With an important choice,” he says.
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