Australia in a disordered world
Everything Australia has achieved—prosperity, stability and strategic freedom—has been underwritten by a great power that shared our values. First it was Britain, then the United States. But with the second Trump administration, that arrangement is now uncertain—and there is no replacement. What we do know is that the period in which US power underwrote the liberal democratic principles that have shaped global norms since 1945 is over. A historical aberration at an end.
But while US uncertainty is deeply destabilising, there is a greater threat to Australia’s liberal democracy: China’s intentional, coordinated effort to replace the existing international system with an order that preferences the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian interests. The threat is accentuated by our tying of our economic fortunes to an authoritarian state that doesn’t respect our democracy, national values or sovereignty. Indeed, it actively seeks to undermine them.
We must avoid the trap of false equivalence. The socio-cultural convulsions afflicting the US may make it unreliable, but it is China that is unmistakably threatening. The US undermines confidence; China seeks to undermine the system itself. The US is drifting to an unknown destination; China has spent decades enacting a plan to reshape global norms to privilege authoritarianism.
China’s strategic intent: a system built for authoritarian dominance
President Xi Jinping’s frequent invocation of ‘great changes unseen in a century’ reflects the CCP’s belief that global power is shifting in China’s favour, enabling it to correct what it views as historical injustices and reclaim a central role in global affairs. China’s economic weight underpins this ambition. The Belt and Road Initiative was its first major effort to reshape international norms, later reinforced by the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilisation Initiative and the Global Development Initiative. In 2025, these were joined by the Global Governance Initiative, forming the pillars for an alternative, Sino-centric world order, which Beijing claims will benefit humankind.
The CCP has entrenched a narrative of ‘Century of Humiliation’ victimhood into national education, instilling the idea that China’s rise is both corrective and inevitable. While condemning Western imperialism, it sanitises its own. Rather than looking to the future, it looks to the past. Its grievance-driven nationalism frames external disagreement as hostility and conditions its public for confrontation.
In late November, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that Japan could deploy its military in a Taiwan contingency. In response, China’s consul general in Osaka posted on X saying that Japan’s leaders should have their ‘dirty heads’ chopped off. Those comments aren’t an aberration: they are the content of the Sino-centric order’s character.
Colluding with other authoritarian states—most notably Russia, through their no-limits partnership—China works to dilute the liberal principles that have underpinned global prosperity and stability since 1945. And it seeks to be the leader in technologies that will be foundational to global power in the coming century, in part by plundering our intellectual property and leveraging the naivety of our universities. China’s undertaking of the largest military build-up since World War II, combined with its egregious behaviour, stokes fears over its ambition to reshape the global order at others’ expense.
As documented in ASPI’s Pressure Points project, China has intensified its use of military pressure and grey-zone tactics against a range of countries to undermine norms, coerce neighbours and advance its interests. Beyond military intimidation, it employs a full spectrum of coercive tools, including:
—Lawfare to legitimise contested territorial claims;
—Economic punishment to silence critics;
—CCP United Front operations to subvert sovereignty and intimidate and leverage diaspora communities;
—Elite capture and corruption to secure alignment;
—Hostage diplomacy and arbitrary detention of foreigners to secure concessions;
—Cyberwarfare to shape negotiations, influence decision making and pre-position disruptive capabilities in critical infrastructure; and
—Information manipulation to control discourse, including persistent misrepresentation of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 as global recognition of China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.
While the West assumed that integrating China into global trade would encourage liberalisation, Beijing instead used its access to international markets to distort competition. State subsidies and export driven strategies have hollowed out foreign industrial capacity, deepened global dependencies and strengthened China’s leverage within the very system it seeks to transform.
What have we to fear from the Sino-centric order?
The Western rules-based order, though imperfect, was the most effective system yet devised for mitigating great power excess and protecting the sovereignty and agency of smaller states. Anchored by liberal democratic values, it offered transparency and predictability. The US, acting as a largely benign hegemon, underwrote global stability after 1945. This framework enabled unprecedented economic growth, helping transform nations such as South Korea from among the poorest to among the richest. Former adversaries—Germany, Japan and Italy—rebuilt into economic powerhouses and became some of the order’s strongest advocates.
A Sino-centric order would replace a broadly stabilising system with one engineered to serve the priorities of the CCP. Such an order would empower an authoritarian regime marked by internal repression, aggressive nationalism and systematic foreign interference—a party that rules by law, rather than subjecting itself to the rule of law.
The CCP’s domestic record shows its behaviour when unrestrained: broken commitments on Hong Kong, genocide in Xinjiang and an increasingly capricious environment for businesses that operate only at the party’s pleasure. If this is how the CCP treats its own population, imagine how it will treat the rest of us. Our world would be less free, less stable and governed more by coercion than consent.
Australia’s experience is a sobering reminder. After signing a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement with Beijing in 2014, Canberra believed the relationship to be positive and manageable. But by 2017 it was evident that, while we pursued cooperation, the CCP was interfering in our politics, targeting our critical infrastructure, engaging in cyberwarfare and weaving false hostile regional narratives to undermine our standing with our neighbours. When we acted to protect our sovereignty—and assisted partners who drew inspiration from our example—China responded with economic coercion, arbitrarily detained our nationals and sought to export its authoritarian values into our political system with 14 political demands. That was a CCP restrained. A Sino-centric order would enable far worse.
What are we doing about it?
Australia’s Labor government has sought to stabilise relations with China in the wake of Beijing’s punitive measures. This has helped restore trade and returned one of our arbitrarily detained nationals. But stabilisation is a tactical solution to a strategic problem—we can’t stabilise a relationship with a revanchist power that seeks to overthrow the very order upon which our prosperity and sovereignty depend. And as sanctions are replaced by the persistent threat of their re-imposition whenever Beijing’s malign activities are challenged, coercion remains. The CCP’s desires still hang like the Sword of Damocles over sovereign Australian decisions.
But look deeper and there’s much to leave the CCP dissatisfied. Stabilisation is hardly the enthusiastic embrace of the Sino-centric order the CCP seeks. It’s a holding term, a means to some other end rather than an end in itself. While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talks of independence within the US alliance, he still publicly upholds it as Australia’s most important security partnership, precisely because it provides the capability to balance China’s threat. No other actor can credibly offer the same deterrent.
Just as important is what Canberra is doing, not just what is being left unsaid. Australia is engaging in measures to counter China’s coercive tendencies, protect national resilience and strengthen collective deterrence with partners.
Initiatives include:
—Pursuing high-level agreements with foreign and defence ministers across the Indo-Pacific, including Japan and India, along with a commitment to the Quad, all designed to uphold a free, open, inclusive and rules-based order;
—Maintaining commitments to AUKUS and enhanced US force posture initiatives, signalling long-term alignment with Washington;
—Building a more integrated defence industrial base through partnerships with US treaty allies Japan (building Mogami-class frigates) and South Korea (building Redback armoured vehicles in Geelong), demonstrating commitment to a distributed and resilient defence production ecosystem to secure supply chains in a contested region;
—Investing in Pacific integration, with Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong saying we’re in a ‘state of permanent contest’ with China in the region;
—Expanding military training and exercises, such as Talisman Sabre 2025—the largest ever, with more than 30,000 military personnel from 19 nations—and Exercise Alon 2025 with the Philippines, where Australia projected a battle-ready force into a key location in the First Island Chain; and
—Continuing freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea to uphold the rules-based order.
Beijing sees these measures, with its China Daily mouthpiece warning that attempts by Canberra to ‘butter both sides of its bread’ aren’t sustainable. Australia may be committed to stabilisation, but it’s only a matter of time before China seeks a reset.
What more can be done?
Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong noted in late October that the rules of the old global order were fading while new ones remained unwritten. If Australia wants a say in shaping that emerging order, we must invest far more in the tools of power that give us a voice: defence capability, diplomacy, development partnerships and resilience. If we don’t help define the rules, others will.
Deterrence still matters. We need credible military capabilities to raise the cost of coercion, alongside deeper economic and diplomatic ties that give our neighbours choices. Every state wants autonomy, but not all have the agency to secure it. Unequal burden-sharing is inevitable; if Australia wants influence, we must be prepared to shoulder more than our share.
Australia has assets that our region values, and we have partners—Japan, South Korea and European democracies—who share our interests and want to shape the order with us.
No one, including China, wants war. Beijing prefers to win without fighting, using its strongest levers: economics and technology. Wong is right to reject false binaries, but Australia must prepare for the economic and technological bifurcation emerging from Sino-US rivalry. Hedging between our economy and security will become increasingly untenable, and difficult choices will soon be forced upon us.
Australia continues to operate on assumptions from the old order, where globalisation wasn’t weaponised. That world is gone. We must abandon the illusion that economics and security are independent domains; they never were. China and Russia understand this. The West is only now adapting.
Ultimately, Australia needs a national conversation, buttressed by bipartisan consensus and involving the media, business, academia and civil society, about the world we now inhabit: one defined by contest, coercion and diminished certainty. Disorder is upon us. The question is whether Australia helps to shape it or is shaped by it.
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