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Hong Kong’s first handover to China, in 1997, came with fireworks, lion dances and a mood of cautious optimism that this former British colony would enjoy ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for at least the next 50 years.

Just 23 years later, Hong Kong’s second handover to China—punctuated by a draconian new national security law that proscribes much protest activity and free expression—has seen fearful citizens deleting their Twitter accounts, political parties disbanding, and some activists and ordinary people planning to flee abroad. The optimism of 1997 has been replaced by a sense of foreboding and dread.

In a fitting coda, Beijing’s Communist Party rulers chose the exact anniversary of the handover, midnight on 30 June, to impose their new security law on Hong Kong and unveil its strictures on an unwilling population. After 23 years, China seems to be publicly affirming that the ‘one country, two systems’ experiment has failed and that Hongkongers were not sufficiently imbued with a patriotic love of the motherland and its authoritarian communist one-party system.

Now Hongkongers who had enjoyed a wide range of freedoms and a tiny taste of democracy will be subjected to the same sweeping constraints on their liberties as any Chinese citizen living on the mainland.

Over the past month, the new national security law was drafted behind closed doors in Beijing with no input from Hong Kong officials or citizens, who were not even allowed to see the text until a few minutes before midnight on the day it took effect. There was still some small hope that the law might not be as sweeping as some here feared, perhaps tailor-made for Hong Kong owing to this city’s special history and common-law traditions. Various leaks in the media in recent days appeared designed to assure people that their daily lives would not be greatly affected.

But the final text of the law was more severe and more detailed than the most optimistic here envisaged. Many when they saw it were aghast—shocked, they said, but not surprised.

The law establishes an entirely new infrastructure in Hong Kong to enforce a national security regime. Beijing will set up a national security agency in Hong Kong which will operate independently as it sees fit. China’s agents operating here, with special ID cards, and their cars, ‘shall not be subject to inspection, search or detention’ by local Hong Kong police. They are above the law.

Hong Kong will set up its own separate national security committee, chaired by the chief executive and including a ‘national security adviser’ appointed by Beijing. Its work will remain secret and not subject to judicial review. The law specifies that Beijing’s national security adviser will attend meetings of the committee.

The Hong Kong Police Force will establish its own national security department to collect intelligence and conduct operations. The law gives police wide powers to conduct searches, eavesdropping and surveillance without court oversight and to order people to turn over their electronic communications, and it appears to suggest that internet service providers must cooperate with probes. The law compels suspects to ‘answer questions’ and turn over information, although Hong Kong law gives people a right to stay silent.

The law also says that when there’s a conflict between this new edict and Hong Kong’s existing laws, the national security law takes precedence.

The law sets up a new section in the Justice Department to prosecute national security cases, and trials can be conducted entirely in secret, without a jury, and without the presumption of bail. Serious or ‘complex’ cases can be tried in mainland China.

The law says the Hong Kong government will ‘strengthen public communication, guidance, supervision and regulation’ of national security matters, including those relating to ‘schools, universities, social organisations, the media, and the internet.’

The law vaguely defines four categories of national security offences—secession, subversion of state power, terrorism and collusion with a foreign country. Appearing in Washington DC to advocate for sanctions against Hong Kong or ‘provoking hatred towards the central government’ are all now considered national security law violations.

Penalties for national security offences range up to life imprisonment, although a person who ‘conspires’ with a foreign country ‘shall be liable to a more severe penalty’.’ The Hong Kong justice secretary told a press conference on 1 July that if a suspect were handed over to mainland authorities to face trial, Hong Kong would have no say in whether the death penalty was imposed.

In a sweeping claim of extraterritoriality, the law also says it will cover offences ‘from outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region’.

The vagaries of the law for now leave it to the local Hong Kong police to interpret and enforce it. Their actions on 1 July—the handover anniversary when activists traditionally stage mass protest rallies—showed the police are taking an expansive view, arresting people for carrying flags promoting Hong Kong independence.

Police raised banners warning demonstrators that chanting the slogans and displaying the flags that had become a staple of the last 12 months of protest could now be considered a national security violation.

‘The law is so broadly written it could include almost any form of behaviour, such as waving an independence-themed flag today’, one longtime resident told me.

This is not the end of Hong Kong. It remains a global financial centre, its stock market is still the world’s largest and more capital is set to flow in if Chinese ‘red chip’ companies forced to delist from the New York Stock Exchange decide to relocate here. Multinationals whose business operations focus mainly on China’s massive market would be reluctant to decamp for faraway Singapore. Taipei and Tokyo are making overtures to lure businesses and hedge funds, but neither is as attractive an international English-speaking base as Hong Kong.

But it is the end of Hong Kong as we knew it. I was recently reminded how when I would leave after a lengthy reporting trip in China and cross the border into Hong Kong, I would almost literally feel a breath of fresh air. Unlike the mainland, reporting here was easy. People were willing to talk and express their views strongly. They gave you their names to be quoted. You didn’t have to hide your notebooks or constantly be looking over your shoulder if you pulled out a camera for a photo. Here I did not have to use multiple sim cards and disposable ‘burner phones’ to meet with sources.

That is all now changing. With the new law and the new national security infrastructure, Hong Kong now is becoming like every other mainland city under an authoritarian police state. Citizens scrubbing their social media accounts and scraping pro-democracy stickers off their shops is a sad but telling sign.

The Hong Kong we knew is dead. This is the new normal.

At times of political crisis, the Chinese government has demonstrated a willingness to deploy disinformation and influence operations to achieve its strategic goals. The regime has mobilised a long-running campaign of political warfare against Taiwan, incorporating the seeding of disinformation on digital platforms.

Our September 2019 report Tweeting through the Great Firewall investigated state-linked disinformation campaigns on Western social media platforms targeting the Hong Kong protests, Chinese dissidents and critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

In our latest report, Retweeting through the Great Firewall: a persistent and undeterred threat actor, we note that this campaign is ongoing, has refined its tactics and focus, and has pivoted to incorporate current protests and civil unrest in the US into pro-CCP narratives.

Working from exclusive access to a Twitter dataset of almost 24,000 accounts and 350,000 tweets it has taken down, we analysed the current evolution of this long-running campaign. The operation targeted audiences in Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora more broadly, and was likely trying to exploit the internet’s underground marketplace for stolen social media accounts in order to disguise its attempts to drive engagement around narratives aligning with the interests of the party-state.

Twitter has been quite clear in attributing this operation to the People’s Republic of China. Our analysis of the dataset found that the posting patterns of tweets mapped cleanly to working hours in Beijing (despite the fact that Twitter is blocked in mainland China). Posts spiked between 8 am and 5 pm Monday to Friday and dropped off at weekends. Such a regimented posting pattern clearly suggests inauthenticity and coordination.

The Hong Kong protests and the emergence of the global Covid-19 pandemic from China have created a political crisis for the CCP. Faced with the possibility of domestic social and economic upheaval, the regime cannot afford for the pandemic to negatively impact its rising geopolitical influence and so has launched waves of disinformation and influence operations intermingled with its diplomatic messaging.

There is much to suggest that the CCP’s propaganda apparatus has been learning from the strategies and effects of Russian disinformation campaigns. Its tactics include the coordination of diplomatic and state media messaging, the use of Western social media platforms to seed disinformation into international media coverage, the immediate mirroring and rebuttal of Western media coverage by Chinese state media, the co-option of fringe conspiracy media to target networks vulnerable to manipulation, and the use of coordinated inauthentic networks and undeclared political ads to actively manipulate social media audiences. All of these methods have been deployed by the Chinese government to shape the information environment to its advantage.

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokespeople Lijian Zhao and Hua Chunying have broken with normal diplomatic constraints and, acting in their official capacity, used Twitter to promote disinformation from known fringe conspiracy theory websites globalresearch.ca and thegrayzone.com. Zhao and Hua both tweeted video footage falsely claiming to depict Italians chanting support for China (in response to medical aid).

Chinese diplomats and state media have attempted to use Western voices to counter criticism of China’s handling of the pandemic. State media and multiple diplomatic Twitter accounts, in coordination, repurposed a Facebook post by a Swedish student living in the city of Ningbo that favourably compared China’s response to that of Europe and the US.

Xinhua News Agency distributed an animated video that used similar language to the Swedish student’s post to build on this theme. Xinhua, along with the Global Times, China Global Television Network and China Central Television, ran a series of undeclared political ads critical of US President Donald Trump’s administration on Facebook.

Our report suggests that underpinning this synchronisation of diplomatic and state-media messaging is a layer of covert influence activity, operating at scale. Others are reaching similar conclusions. The US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center has suggested that there are coordinated covert efforts to manipulate global social media in order to amplify PRC diplomats and state media.

ASPI’s internal data analytics platform, the Influence Tracker, has noted unusual patterns in the retweet reach of particular diplomatic Twitter accounts. A study by the Digital Forensic Center identified a rapidly growing network of automated social media accounts praising the PRC’s distribution of medical aid to Serbia, unfavourably contrasting it with the response of the European Union.

A similar study noted analogous bot-driven inauthentic activity attempting to drive pro-China and anti-EU sentiment on Italian social media, including artificial boosting of the Twitter account of the PRC’s Italian embassy. In another investigation, ProPublica analysed a network of more than 10,000 stolen and fake Twitter accounts that were pushing messaging strongly aligned with PRC interests.

There has been some pushback from Twitter on aspects of these assertions. Part of the challenge is in attributing influence operations as state-directed. Making high-confidence judgements about attribution requires assessment of narrative framing, behavioural patterns, technical signals, targeting and intent. There’s a growing influence-for-hire shadow economy to which state actors can outsource to obfuscate involvement.

Further muddying the waters is the scale of pro-China patriotic trolling on social media. Much of this activity may have some degree of authenticity while also amplifying patriotic narratives, harassing regime critics and demonstrating behavioural traits consistent with the inauthentic coordinated networks deployed by state-driven influence operations (like the use of bot networks and coordinated posting patterns). We have previously reported on a range of pro-China, anti-Taiwan trolling campaigns that have echoed CCP interests and spiked during periods of geopolitical tension.

As the Chinese state expands its use of Western platforms, it seeks opportunities to mobilise supporters from within the Chinese diaspora. This mobilisation is a fundamental tenet of the party-state’s view of security and is calculated to exploit the capacity of diaspora communities to extend the party’s influence overseas.

This effort to influence global public opinion is ongoing and is unlikely to relent. The Chinese party-state is invested in information management as a fundamental pillar of its global engagement. The CCP places enormous importance on propaganda domestically and is projecting this approach in its global engagement in an attempt to secure strategic positioning on its own terms.

The United Front … is an important magic weapon for strengthening the party’s ruling position … and an important magic weapon for realising the China Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.

— Chinese President Xi Jinping, Central United Front Work Conference, 2015

The Chinese Communist Party is strengthening its influence by co-opting representatives of ethnic minority groups, religious movements, and business, science and political groups in China and overseas. It claims the right to speak on behalf of those groups and uses them to claim legitimacy. These efforts are carried out by the united front system, which is a network of party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the party, particularly those claiming to represent civil society. It manages and expands the United Front, a coalition of entities working towards the party’s goals. The CCP runs these activities, known as united front work, but its role is often covert or deceptive.

In recent years, groups and individuals associated with the United Front have attracted an unprecedented level of scrutiny for their links to political interference, economic espionage and influence on university campuses. In Australia, businessmen who were members of organisations with close ties to the United Front Work Department (UFWD) have been accused of interfering in Australian politics on China’s behalf. In the US, at least two senior members of united front groups for scientists have been taken to court over alleged technology theft. Confucius Institutes, which are overseen with heavy involvement from the UFWD, have generated controversy for more than a decade for their effects on academic freedom and influence on universities. Numerous Chinese students and scholars associations, which are united front groups for Chinese international students, have been involved in suppressing academic freedom and mobilising students for nationalistic activities in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted overseas united front networks. In Australia, Canada, the UK, the US, Argentina, Japan and the Czech Republic, groups mobilised to gather increasingly scarce medical supplies from around the world and send them to China. Those efforts appear linked to directives from the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, a united front agency. The party’s Central Committee has described the federation as ‘a bridge and a bond for the party and government to connect with overseas Chinese compatriots’. After the virus spread globally, united front groups began working with the CCP to donate supplies to the rest of the world and promote the party’s narratives about the pandemic.

Regardless of whether those activities harmed efforts to control the virus, they appeared to take governments by surprise and demonstrate the effectiveness of united front work. The CCP’s attempts to interfere in diaspora communities, influence political systems and covertly access valuable and sensitive technology will only grow as tensions between China and countries around the world develop. As governments begin to confront the CCP’s overseas interference and espionage, understanding the united front system will be crucially important.

My ASPI paper, released today, dissects the CCP’s united front system and its role in foreign interference. It describes the broad range of agencies and goals of the united front system and examines how the system is structured, how it operates and what it seeks to achieve. It reveals how dozens of agencies play a role in the united front system’s efforts to transfer technology, promote propaganda, interfere in political systems and even influence executives of multinational companies.

The united front system has nearly always been a core system of the CCP.  For most of its history it has been led by a member of the Politburo Standing Committee—the party’s top leadership body. However, General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasised united front work more than previous leaders, pushing it closer to the position of importance that it occupied in the party’s revolutionary era by elevating its status since 2015.

The scope of united front work is constantly evolving to reflect the CCP’s global ambitions, assessments of internal threats to its security, and conception of Chinese society.

The fact that the United Front is a political model and a way for the party to control political representation—the voices of groups targeted by united front work—means its overseas expansion is an exportation of the CCP’s political system. Overseas united front work taken to its conclusion would give the CCP undue influence over political representation and expression in foreign political systems.

Xi’s reinvigoration of this system underlines the need for stronger responses to CCP influence and technology-transfer operations around the world. However, governments are still struggling to manage it effectively and there is little publicly available analysis of the united front system. This lack of information can cause Western observers to underestimate the significance of the united front system and to reduce its methods into familiar categories. For example, diplomats might see united front work as ‘public diplomacy’ or ‘propaganda’ but fail to appreciate the extent of related covert activities. Security officials may be alert to criminal activity or espionage while underestimating the significance of open activities that facilitate it. Analysts risk overlooking the interrelated facets of CCP influence that combine to make it effective.

Governments should disrupt the CCP’s capacity to use united front figures and groups as vehicles for covert influence and technology transfer. They should begin by developing analytical capacity for understanding foreign interference. On that basis, they should issue declaratory policy statements that frame efforts to counter it. Countermeasures should involve law enforcement, legislative reform, deterrence and capacity building across relevant areas of government. Governments should mitigate the divisive effect united front work can have on diaspora communities through engagement and careful use of language.

Law enforcement, while critically important, shouldn’t be all or even most of the solution. Foreign interference often takes place in a grey area that’s difficult to address through law enforcement actions. Responses to united front work must engage civil society, media and ethnic Chinese communities. They should seek to couple punitive measures for agents of interference with a positive agenda of support for and engagement with communities affected by united front work. Effective efforts to counter foreign interference are essential to protect genuine participation in politics by ethnic Chinese citizens.

As the world remains focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party has set about boiling two frogs. Beijing has turned up the heat on Hong Kong. It’s also stepping up its attempts to isolate and coerce Taiwan.

Both situations present opportunities for Australia and other countries to act to support the freedoms of people in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The reasons to do so are moral and practical: it’s the ethically right thing to do in the face of Beijing’s coercion, and maintaining such freedoms is critical to our own society because it helps create the type of world we want to live in.

The rubber stamp of the National People’s Congress has come down on the hastily produced new national security legislation that Beijing is imposing on the people of Hong Kong. It was done with an unsurprising lack of debate, followed by a mandatory ringing endorsement. But only in Beijing.

When these new national security laws are enacted in Hong Kong, criticism of the Chinese government, acts of public protest, strikes, not singing the Chinese anthem and abusing the Chinese flag will be criminal acts. Protests will be able to be characterised as terrorism and mild criticism of Chinese leader Xi Jinping as sedition, with lengthy jail terms the result.

It also appears that mainland security agencies—like the People’s Armed Police and the ministries of state and public security—will establish formal presences in Hong Kong and enforce the new laws (no doubt using Hong Kong police and authorities as proxies where necessary).

We’re being told that this is all in response to the protests in Hong Kong. What a short memory Beijing is banking on the world having. It can’t be too hard to remember the rolling protests in Hong Kong starting in March last year, some of which involved around 2 million people, or nearly a quarter of the city’s population. These numbers make it impossible to believe that these mass public protests are the work of terrorists or foreign agents. It’s exactly the kind of mass movement for political change that Beijing fears.

It also can’t be too hard to recall that the reason for this mass public movement was a previous effort by Beijing to limit Hongkongers’ freedoms, which the People’s Republic of China guaranteed would remain unchanged for 50 years from 1997 when the UK ceded control of its former colony. That attempt was in March 2019 when Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam worked to put an extradition law into effect so that Hongkongers could be tried in mainland China.

That turns out to have been a mild, soft play by the Chinese authorities and internal security apparatus compared with what Beijing has now begun.

Beijing’s intent is clear and aligns with Xi’s mindset that the ruling party is engaged in an endless struggle to maintain its power. That struggle is partly an internal one; an example is Xi’s anti-corruption campaign that has also cemented his supporters within the CCP. But it’s also a struggle against the Chinese people, against ‘separatists and terrorists’ whether in Tibet or Xinjiang (and now Hong Kong), and against other systems of government—particularly democracy, which cuts at the heart of CCP rule.

Back in late 2017, Xi had warned the party that the future held a period of ‘tireless struggle’, although he can’t have known quite how much truth he would wind around this notion in just 30 months. Right from the start, the CCP’s reaction to the pandemic has been flavoured by the struggle for control—in the narrative war with its own people and the wider world and in the enormous economic and geostrategic challenges that China faces as a result.

There has been a strange lack of focus in analysis of Beijing’s pandemic misinformation campaign on the leadership’s drive to stop widespread criticism within China of the party’s response, notably during the early months in Wuhan. Yet Hong Kong needs to be understood in this light.

To the CCP, Hong Kong is all about mainland China. Xi’s actions to repress Hongkongers’ freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom to strike are aimed at preventing the political contagion of freedom from spreading inside mainland China. Freedom of speech could reignite widespread public criticism of the party over the growing problems created by the pandemic.

The Chinese government does not want a vibrant example of political freedom showing its 1.4 billion citizens that there’s an alternative to the authoritarian rule they live under, particularly when that alternative is a part of their own state. So Beijing has decided that now is the right time to engage in that struggle with the people of Hong Kong.

What should the world do? This is a Tiananmen moment for the rest of us. The new laws, and the enforcement and implementation action that Beijing will take as a result, are inflicting tragic human rights abuses on 7.5 million people. It’s possible to prevent at least some of the courageous people of Hong Kong from spending years in Chinese jails for acts (and thoughts) that are guaranteed in the commitments the PRC made before the world in 1997, just as it was possible to save thousands of Chinese citizens from arrest and arbitrary detention in the aftermath of the PLA’s massacre on the streets of Beijing back in 1989.

Doing so involves governments—including Australia, Canada, EU member states, the UK and the US —opening paths to citizenship for Hongkongers fleeing the territory, as Prime Minister Bob Hawke and other leaders did for Chinese citizens fearing a return to the PRC after Tiananmen in 1989. It also involves the nations with Magnitsky-type laws imposing targeted sanctions against individual decision-makers and officials in Beijing and Hong Kong who are putting these repressive, abusive measures into effect.

For Australia, that means fast-tracking the results of the parliamentary inquiry into such a law and then having the courage to act with other international partners by using it. The EU, Canada, Australia, the UK and the US, as well as New Zealand and Japan, have already shown alignment in condemning Beijing’s proposed laws.

Whether it is the right approach to follow potential US action to restrict economic engagement with Hong Kong because the Chinese government is restricting freedom in the territory is another matter. It probably makes more sense to target the sources of the repression—officials in both Beijing and Hong Kong—than it does to cause Hongkongers economic pain along with the physical and psychological pain from Beijing.

And we need to think beyond our noses, and beyond Hong Kong to where Beijing turns next. Having boiled one frog, Beijing is already turning up the heat on another, and we can expect heightened steps to isolate and coerce Taiwan. That’s because Taiwan is the other radioactive demonstration that the CCP’s claim to be the only option as ruler of China is not just self-serving but simply wrong. Taiwan is a physical and political demonstration of this deep untruth, and so must be ‘reunified’ and subjected to party control.

So, while we act on Hong Kong, it’s also an urgent challenge for Australia and other democratic nations to act to reverse the growing isolation of Taiwan and forestall Beijing’s efforts to boil this second frog. What’s possible here are actions like supporting Taiwanese participation and membership in international organisations like the World Health Organization, and a deepening of officials’ contacts and cooperation, as well as enhanced people-to-people and economic partnerships.

We can’t be bystanders in our own world and region, so we must use the tools and paths we have.

Bad assumptions make for bad policies and poor investment decisions. One big one we need to test is the notion that China’s post-pandemic economy is going to rescue the world.

That assumption is flavouring much of the Australian debate on our economic future—and on how we should deal with trade threats from Beijing.

An example is talking about $600 million in ‘lost’ exports to China because of the 80% tariff Beijing has imposed on Australian barley. That $600 million figure is an illusion. It’s based on the amount of barley exported in 2019, which was driven mainly by sales of high-end barley used in brewing beer.

And here’s the problem with that: Chinese consumer demand, especially among the middle class, has plummeted as a result of the pandemic, so prices and sales volumes of many commodities are falling. This is true of Chilean grapes, Egyptian oranges and Peruvian avocados, and it will probably also be true over coming weeks and months of ‘luxury’ commodities bought by China’s middle class—wine is an example that comes to mind.

So, the economics of the pandemic tells us that market projections and sales data from before Covid-19 for a wide range of products—including barley—are not guides to the future. On top of this, businesses must now take into account the realised risk of coercive action by the Chinese government, with barley as Exhibit A.

Back in the heady economic times of mid-2019, McKinsey Global Institute forecast a buoyant consumer market in China ‘on the back of rising incomes’, mainly of the middle class. That’s not the situation now, so resetting our assumptions is critical.

The global financial crisis started in the US and was centred on the international finance system. The Chinese economy was affected by it, but China was not the source of the crisis. And China’s economy and state-driven finance system were in a position to pump-prime their own development and so suck in imports. After a brief, sharp downturn in 2008, China’s economy grew by 8.7% in 2009 and 10.4% in 2010.

Fed by large volumes of our competitively priced iron ore, gas, coal, food and services, China’s economy, along with Australia’s, emerged in comparatively good health.

This time it’s different. China is the place where the pandemic began and, for all the triumphalism from Beijing, the Chinese economy is in no way back in business. The stimulus tools available during the GFC—cheap money from a shadow finance sector and large-scale infrastructure spending—don’t make sense this time because the finance sector is now its own source of risk, and infrastructure oversupply won’t deliver a healthy economy.

More significantly, Chinese consumer confidence is broken. Just like in other countries, government policy is big in China, but consumers’ perceptions of their economic future are bigger. Chinese consumers know that China’s two sources of growth—domestic consumption and global exports—are both undercut by the pandemic.

Along with that, the pressures to alleviate poverty and avoid social unrest are growing. Managing them will drag on growth. The Economist reports that only about a quarter of China’s 800-million-strong workforce is eligible for unemployment insurance, and the number of people left unemployed by the pandemic is perhaps as much as 80 million—nearly 20% of urban workers. Much of the suffering is concentrated in China’s 300 million ‘migrant workers’—Chinese citizens living and working in locations different to their place of registration. Under Beijing’s rules, they are not entitled to government benefits.

Social unrest is an abiding and primary concern for the Chinese Communist Party because it fears the political change it could drive. It’s the reason Beijing spends more on internal security forces than on the Chinese military. It’s also why Beijing continues to repress protests in Hong Kong: political freedom there is dangerous for the CCP on the mainland. These anxieties will be heightened by the suffering of migrant workers.

So, Beijing has to manage unemployment, along with reluctant consumers and an economy dislocated by the pandemic and continuing control measures.

It’s not surprising, then, to find Chairman Xi Jinping doing ‘self-inspection’ tours urging industry and commerce to get the economy up and running. Given the troubled economy, he’s been talking up poverty alleviation and talking down his previous goal of achieving an affluent society. He has also been pushing to reduce ‘dependence on traditional industries like coal and steel’.

China is not the global growth engine it was projected to be in many businesses’ plans.

That raises an urgent question about the extent to which businesses in any sector—not just tourism, tertiary education, beef, barley, wine, and even iron ore and coal—should risk their futures by banking on secure, growing markets in China. The very real business risk from coercive Chinese government behaviour is an additional element that makes this something every company director and shareholder is right to question and test.

The optimal balance for Australian trading sectors will take time to establish. Like with the China market, developing a greater share in other global markets will take time and commitment.

But it’s smart not to fall into the dangerous and lazy trap of thinking that the economic path out of Covid-19 is the same as it was for the GFC and leads through Beijing.

None of this means ‘shutting the gate in respect of China’, as some of the more outlandish characterisations of the debate have claimed. There’s still a foundation of mutual benefit in the economic relationship. And Beijing’s concern around the political implications of its domestic economic weakness may moderate its willingness to inflict further self-harm through further coercion of Australian and other businesses.

We need to be clear-headed when making fundamental economic decisions and bring to those decisions an understanding of the actual economic pressures China faces, as well as of the Chinese government’s role and nature. The good news is this seems to be the path that Prime Minister Scott Morrison is on, with the support of the federal Labor Party. The Australian public understands this, although some business leaders and state politicians have some catching up to do.

Beyond China, it’s also smart to consider what new value our customers and partners will place on trade with Australian businesses because of the safety and reliability we’ve shown during the pandemic. For example, there’s an important opportunity for Australian farmers provided by rising global food insecurity. Partnerships between government and industry can help grow these other markets as we all recover.

Along with assessments of China, the potential to grow new and existing markets is another assumption to test as we work towards building a place for Australia in the world after Covid-19.