For the government of China, diplomacy is more than simply a means of cultivating international relationships and advancing national interests. It is also an instrument of regime maintenance. In this capacity it can take the form of coercive interventions in the domestic affairs of other states with the aim of suppressing conduct or critique considered hostile to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Deploying diplomatic agents to secure compliance with CCP objectives is in fact a significant feature of China’s subnational relations with local governments and communities in Australia.
During Xi Jinping’s first decade as CCP general secretary and chairman of state, Beijing’s approach to Australia grew increasingly blunt and confrontational, a style known as “wolf warrior diplomacy.” More recently, Chinese diplomats have shifted to a quieter, more self-assured form of subnational diplomacy. In contrast to the bluster of the wolf warrior era, this approach is largely conducted behind closed doors and has become more evident since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s July 2025 visit to China.
The election of the Albanese government in 2022 early signaled a thaw in what had been an icy bilateral relationship between Australia and China under the preceding Coalition governments of Malcolm Turnbull (2015-18) and Scott Morrison (2018-22). On his second visit to China as prime minister, Albanese spent a week “stabilizing” relations through renewed business, trade, educational, cultural, and inter-governmental initiatives.
Among the knock-on effects in Australia was a flurry of Chinese diplomatic initiatives at the local level. Consular staff in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth now plainly assumed they were licensed by Albanese and his business entourage to press for local Australian compliance with their own demands on a range of issues. In meetings with local governments and peak community bodies, they carried a message: tolerating comments or events that displeased or offended the Chinese state or CCP would embarrass not just China or its ruling party, but the government of Australia.
This was new. Rather than howling into the void, China’s diplomats were framing their demands in the Australian government’s own idiom. Wolf warrior diplomacy was giving way to “wolf warrior in sheep’s clothing diplomacy.” China’s officials were adopting the language of their hosts to press their demands upon local governments and communities. On evidence, to date the new approach is relatively effective but it carries risks for all parties.
The Evidence
A consular initiative in Melbourne undertaken shortly after the conclusion of Albanese’s trip to China shows the strategy in action. In August 2025, China’s consul general in Melbourne requested a meeting with an independent non-profit organization that will remain unnamed. Its board welcomed the approach. This was not a low-key visit. The cluster of consular colleagues accompanying the consul general almost outnumbered the hosts around the table.
During the formal presentation, the consul general reviewed Australia-China ties since 1972 and Melbourne’s consular opening in 1986. Past difficulties were behind us, he said. The Albanese government had corrected the errors of its Coalition predecessor. Canberra was restoring stability through trade, regional development, and people-to-people partnerships while recognizing China’s core interests – code for CCP rule and China’s claims over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea, among other claims.
The consul general then urged the board to read a recent article by iron-ore tycoon Andrew (Twiggy) Forrest, who predicted a bright future if everyone came on board the China boat. But, Forrest also warned: “Treat a friend like an enemy, and one day they may well become one.”
A few locals around the table recalled hearing a similar warning five years earlier, when a Chinese diplomat presented a Canberra journalist with a list of 14 grievances, accompanied by the statement: “If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy.” Most of those grievances presented in November 2020 concerned Canberra’s efforts to limit Chinese government engagement with subnational entities, on the one hand, and its failure to restrict independent Australian institutions critical of China and the CCP on the other. China’s representatives in Australia appeared to be agitated not so much by the Coalition government’s external relations as by its domestic political arrangements governing the states and its failure to suppress commentary on China and its ruling party in Australia’s media, think tanks, and civil society.
The public backlash to the “14 grievances” prompted China’s local representatives to park their threat for the time being. Events proved that they could afford to wait because the same warning would be reiterated by Forrest, one of Australia’s leading businessmen, in wake of Albanese’s visit.
Having invoked Forrest, consular officials came up with a pointed request for the Melbourne board to cancel an event it was hosting with Australian journalist Cheng Lei. Cheng had been recently repatriated following three years in a Chinese jail for alleged spying activities. Giving her a platform to discuss her imprisonment, the Chinese diplomats implied, would undo all the good work of Albanese and his business team.
Despite the consul general’s request, Cheng’s talk went ahead. Nonetheless, China’s coercive interventions around her activities continued. Six months later, her play “1154 Days,” which recounted her solitary confinement and imprisonment in China, was dropped from Melbourne’s premier arts festival. “I feel like I’m back in China,” Cheng Lei told The Age.
Her concern was justified. The play had received a provisional place on the arts festival program, normally a routine step toward inclusion, but the board – not the festival’s creative staff – ruled against it. The RISING arts festival is funded through Creative Victoria and managed through the City of Melbourne’s Arts House, placing the festival program in a classic pincer movement between state and city governments known for their habit of surrender under consular pressure.
Chinese government meddling in Victoria’s school textbooks, community organizations, Chinese-language media, and local government deliberations had been thought things of the past following the introduction of new federal laws around foreign interference in 2018 and legislation limiting state government overreach in foreign relations in 2020. Not so.
Interviewed for this article, Cheng said that City of Melbourne officials received several consular calls and a personal visit urging them to avoid her play. More curious still, Arts House paid the artists the agreed performance fee, even though the performance was disallowed. The problem was not costs but the risks to the city and state governments’ relations with the local consulate.
Cheng’s play was performed off-festival with support from a venue outside the City of Melbourne’s jurisdiction. There is a curious historical parallel here. In 1936 an anti-Nazi play was banned from city theaters in Sydney and Melbourne following representations from the German consulate, then under the direction of the Nazi Party. To their credit, the players found a way around the ban by performing on the back of a truck.
For the fleet of Chinese consuls sailing in the wake of Albanese’s China visit, Melbourne was just one port of call. The Victorian consular team sought meetings with civic institutions and officials in Bendigo, Ballarat, Frankston, Geelong, and also Hobart in Tasmania, as well as with university executives and cultural institutions, including Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History. Consular officials based in Western Australia met up with local government officers in Perth, Joondalup, Cockburn, Gosnells, Geraldton, and Swan; Queensland-based ones visited Brisbane, Rockhampton, Mackay, Toowoomba, the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, and Southern Downs. The South Australian consulate paid visits to the local governments of Adelaide, Murray Bridge, and Clare Valley. In each state, consular officials also met with civic and community bodies.
In contrast to earlier consular tours, the nationwide consular outreach following Albanese’s visit drew little public attention. Not long beforehand, the Sydney consular team suffered public embarrassment when local newspapers reported on the consul general’s meeting with the mayor of Newcastle. At that meeting, the consul warned the mayor against the possibility of an AUKUS nuclear-submarine squadron possibly being based nearby, saying that this would harm China’s strategic interests. The mayor was reportedly taken aback to have been challenged on Taiwan, Tibet, and nuclear submarines – topics well outside the scope of Australian local government diplomacy – during a routine meet-and-greet with Chinese consular officials.
On Albanese’s return, consular teams adopted a quieter subnational style aligned with Canberra’s own “calm and measured” international diplomacy, which was explicitly contrasted with the former Coalition’s “bellicose megaphone diplomacy.” Albanese’s approach, while helping to restore bilateral commercial, ministerial, and people-to-people ties at the national level, raised expectations on the part of China’s representatives in Australia that their demands for local discretion on sensitive matters would yield willing compliance. Canberra’s restraint was being repurposed to serve Beijing’s coercive subnational diplomacy.
Backfire?
It is doubtless clear to China’s diplomats in Australia that the Albanese government’s measured diplomacy has not altered Australia’s broader strategy in the region. This geopolitical strategy was inherited intact from the Coalition government and is aligned with regional partners’ understanding of the challenges and threats China presents.
That does not inhibit consular officials from cajoling local governments and community organizations to silence talk of those threats in the interests of stabilizing bilateral relations. In May 2026, Melbourne’s consul general told a local city newspaper that claims of “so-called” threats would “backfire” and rebound “just like a boomerang” on any making them.
Backfire on whom? Most consular interventions have remained below Canberra’s threshold of awareness, but this is changing. In July 2026, Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History appeared to breach a federal funding agreement by hosting a consular speaker at its annual high-achievers program without notifying the government funding body. The rotating host for the 2026 Chinese Australian Achievers Awards was Lord Mayor Rees’ City of Melbourne, which customarily invites China’s consular officials to speak at community events. By withdrawing funding, Canberra signaled its concern about consular officials piggybacking at federal expense on local events.
A more serious threshold was crossed later that month when the Museum first invited then disinvited Foreign Minister Penny Wong to launch journalist Emilia Tagaza’s book “Behind a Million Faces,” described by the Museum as “a seminal book on the history of Chinese Australians.” Wong accepted the invitation. Her office nominated September 1, 2026 for the launch, and it requested an advance copy of the book to be forwarded ahead of that date.
In July, however, according to emails reviewed by the author, members of the Museum board reviewed their own advance copies and objected to its contents on several grounds. These included the author allegedly underplaying the U.S. factor in Australia’s deteriorating relations with China and overemphasizing communism, exaggerating China’s “assertiveness,” and incorrectly suggesting that Chinese migrants to Australia sought to escape CCP control. It directed the CEO to forward the author 17 pages of corrections, none of a factual nature, most entailing reframing the agreed facts to minimize offense to the government of China. When Tagaza rejected the board’s amendments, the CEO was directed to cancel the launch and withdraw the invitation to the foreign minister.
That was not the end of it. The CEO reinstated the launch and Wong’s invitation after receiving advice that the board decision may have infringed the author’s free speech. Just weeks before the event, however, the board again reversed course and canceled the event and the invitation. September passed without the Museum book launch, and with the foreign minister wondering what on earth was happening in Melbourne.
She had more than one reason to wonder. In 2024 a former Museum board member had become the first Australian to be jailed for planning foreign interference on behalf of the CCP – although not in his role on the board. But in fact nothing out of the ordinary was happening in Melbourne. Conspicuous displays of anticipatory obedience toward the local consulate are the default position among state and city governments, elite cultural institutions, and peak organizations in the city. Given sufficient haranguing and inducement, institutions adapt their behavior to what they imagine local consuls want, in many cases without receiving specific requests. Self-censorship is commonplace.
The Museum too has a record of silencing voices and histories that could annoy China’s local officials. A small everyday instance of anticipatory obedience can be found in the Museum’s display on the recent history of immigration from China. A Museum volunteer told me that a draft text linked the 1989 Beijing/Tiananmen Massacre to Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s memorable offer of permanent residence after the massacre to tens of thousands of resident Chinese students. Were it not for the Chinese military’s slaughter of students and workers in Beijing, the 40,000 students would not have been invited to stay. The text on display elides this “offensive” context: “40,000 students arrived and studied whilst many stayed in Australia.”
More seriously, the Museum promotes certain histories while silencing others. The board raised no concerns before or after the launch in August 2026 of a book on the history of the Victorian branch of the Australia-China Friendship Society (ACFS), held at the Museum in association with events marking the 75th anniversary of that Society’s founding. The ACFS’s relationship with China is mediated by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries under the direction of the CCP’s United Front Work Department. The consul general spoke at the historical commemoration along with Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece.
What was novel in the case of Tagaza’s aborted book launch was not the selective censorship but censorship undertaken in full gaze of the Australian foreign minister. The board’s customary deference to China’s official perspectives on Australian history, immigration, and bilateral relations is not normally acted out in front of federal ministers. And this time the coercive influence over local government and community affairs wielded by China’s consulate in Melbourne embarrassed a senior member of Albanese’s Cabinet.
Three considerations appear to have shaped the Museum’s decision to cancel the launch and the foreign minister’s invitation – not once but twice. First, as noted, there were concerns that parts of the text may prove problematic for sections of the “Chinese community.” Second, the Museum faced growing community opposition on unrelated matters. Third – and, in my view, most importantly – the Museum anticipated the local consul general’s likely response to a high-profile ministerial launch of a book that did not reflect the Chinese Communist Party’s perspectives on Australian history, immigration, and bilateral relations.
If invited to speak, the consul general would have been obliged to challenge the book’s shortcomings in the minister’s presence; if the Museum failed to invite him, it risked damaging its relations with the consulate. Faced with a choice between embarrassing Australia’s foreign minister and disappointing the local consulate, the Museum board chose to embarrass the minister.
Being Stabilized
Beijing’s diplomacy is directed at advancing China’s national interests and first among those national interests is securing the ruling party in power. The conventional separation of domestic and foreign policy collapses under this obligation because the top national security priority applies equally in both domains: preserving the status and power of the CCP is just as important outside China as it is within it.
The same goes for managing security risks. Domestically in China, a nationwide “stability maintenance” (weiwen) system anticipates and suppresses perceived threats to CCP rule before they arise. Outside China, this task falls to locally stationed consular officials. Those silenced by the weiwen system in China say that they have been “stabilized.” The same could be said of Australia.
Under the banner of stabilizing bilateral relations, Chinese consular staff apply their stability maintenance techniques to undermine initiatives and silence dissent across Australia’s local governments and communities. As they interpret it, Canberra’s softly-softly diplomacy gives China’s consulates the license and leverage to pressure cultural, arts, community, and government bodies to comply with their wishes by framing them as consistent with Australia’s policy of stabilization. As Cheng Lei told the Melbourne Age, Australia is starting to feel like China.
For now, the domestic risks of being stabilized bear on freedoms of expression, association, and religion that underpin the Australian way of life. International risks entail states such as Victoria missing out on Taiwan’s extraordinary growth spurt for fear of offending a local PRC consul. The broader geopolitical risk for Australia is that China’s diplomats could apply their new wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing strategy to Pacific Island communities at Australia’s expense. After all, if Australia can be shown to be compliant with China, how would it advantage smaller Pacific nations to do otherwise? There is a danger that Australia’s massive Pacific investment, made to counter the China threat, could serve CCP interests via the canny invocation of Australian words and actions on the part of Beijing’s representatives in the region.
Beyond the Pacific region, the wider lesson is that all countries seeking “strategic stability” in relations with China will, if they let down their guard, find China’s diplomats practicing stability maintenance in their own backyards – using the host country’s commitment to stability to keep the CCP secure and in command, everywhere.
