Chinese-background scientists are leaving Australian universities for China “at all levels”, from senior professors to postdocs, according to unpublished research findings presented at a webinar on the Australia-China education and research relationship.
The disclosure came with an unusual proof point: organisers said they had tried and failed to recruit a single Chinese-background STEM researcher in Australia to join the panel.
According to Professor Wanning Sun, who has been interviewing such researchers for an ongoing research project, many have concluded that “for Chinese scientists in Australia, any sort of publicity is likely to be bad publicity.”
Professor Sun, Deputy Director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), made the comments at a webinar hosted by the institute on June 3. The session was moderated by UTS:ACRI Director Professor James Laurenceson and also featured Dr Angela Lehmann, Senior Director Global Engagement and Policy at Universities Australia, and John Ross, Asia-Pacific Editor at Times Higher Education.
Meeting against the backdrop of a 25 percent year-on-year fall in Chinese applications for Australian student visas, the panellists canvassed falling student demand, universities’ financial exposure and the costs and rationale of research security settings.
“Over-securitisation” and its costs
The senior researchers Professor Sun had interviewed – most of them Australian citizens or permanent residents of long standing – accepted the principle that national security safeguards should apply to sensitive research, but regard current settings as excessive, describing it as “over-securitisation”.
They pointed to several concerns, including an increasingly expansive application of the concept of dual-use technology and university and government processes that can discourage China-linked grant applications, co-authorship and academic visits.
“It’s like the high fence… small yard sort of concept no longer works here, because the yard is getting bigger and bigger,” Professor Sun said.
Related research by Professor Sun and colleagues has also identified long visa delays for Chinese PhD applicants, in some cases lasting 18 months.
One interviewee summarised the consequences for supervisors awaiting delayed PhD candidates. “No lab work means no research progress. No research progress means no research output and income,” they said.
Another sentiment Professor Sun reported hearing from multiple researchers was along the lines of, “Look, I’m just a scientist, my place is in the lab. I just want to get on with my life and do what I can.”
Asked whether leading researchers were returning to China as a result, Professor Sun said, “the brain drain is happening right now”, a process she said had been under way for several years, though the discussion did not quantify its scale.
The security concerns the settings respond to are not hypothetical, and the panel did not suggest otherwise. In October 2023, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess disclosed that the agency had “detected and disrupted a plot to infiltrate a prestigious Australian institution” involving a visiting professor recruited by Chinese intelligence.
Professor Laurenceson said every country has “the right, indeed the obligation, to take foreign interference and national security risks seriously,” and that “no one is saying that there’s nothing to see here.” He made his own position explicit: that Australia’s interest lies in remaining as open as possible to collaboration, including with China, with appropriate risk mitigations.
A collaboration Australia leans on
The stakes of the policy balance were set out in data presented from Clarivate, covering the top 10 percent of most-cited publications globally over the past five years in computer science, materials science and engineering.
By those figures, an Australian-affiliated author appears on about five percent of such publications, against 61 percent for Chinese-affiliated authors and 14 percent for US-affiliated authors, and 54 percent of Australia’s share involves a Chinese co-author, compared with 12 percent involving an American co-author. The dependence runs one way with only five percent of China’s top publications involving an Australian author.
Mr Ross cautioned against treating the risks as grounds for wholesale disengagement. He pointed to what collaboration has delivered, such as work between UNSW and Chinese postdoctoral researchers that helped put solar panels on roofs around the world, and virologist Edward Holmes’ work with Chinese scientists in sequencing the COVID-19 virus. He added that Australia also needs the relationship simply to understand China, which was geopolitically important to know.
“If we stop working with China, we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he said. “We’ve got to be more nuanced than this… we’ve got to look at the good as well as the bad, with clear eyes on it, about both.”
Student demand falling globally
The pressure on research talent is unfolding alongside the slide in student demand. Department of Home Affairs figures show the 25 percent fall in Chinese applications covers the 2025-26 financial year to April, compared with the same period a year earlier. Offshore higher education visa applications from China were down 32 percent over the first four months of 2026, returning to 2017-18 levels.
Panellists cautioned against reading the decline as a purely Australian phenomenon. Dr Lehmann cited Chinese figures showing a 20 percent global fall in Chinese students studying abroad since 2019, and noted China now hosts around 500,000 international students annually, positioning itself as “a competitor as well as a source market.”
“The value proposition of studying in the traditional Anglo destinations really isn’t stacking up that much anymore. Return on investment doesn’t justify it, unless you’ve got a hell of a lot of money,” Mr Ross said.
“I think for many years, the Anglo world has been trading on this idea that Chinese students need to head to the west, to where the action is… I don’t think for a lot of Chinese people, the action is in those places anymore. I think it’s back home in China,” he said.
Dr Lehmann said the composition of the cohort coming to Australia has shifted markedly, with postgraduate students now making up around 61 percent of Chinese enrolments, a reversal of the 2011 picture, while management and commerce has fallen from two-thirds of enrolments to around 40 percent.
Australian policy changes, including a student visa application fee that has nearly tripled since 2024, were identified by the panel as a contributing factor.
Of the treatment of applicants facing the $2,000 non-refundable fee and lengthy processing delays, Mr Ross said: “I don’t think this is an acceptable way for a wealthy country… a wealthy civilised country to behave and to treat the young people from its middle-income neighbours.”
“House of cards”
Mr Ross described the sector’s incentives, saying universities publicly emphasise the “soft benefits” of international students, while privately the conversation centres on enrolment flows and university revenue.
He also pointed to “20-odd years of policy settings that have basically made it inevitable” that universities would lean heavily on international student income, a point Professor Laurenceson reinforced with the observation that Australia has the second-lowest share of public university funding in the OECD.
But Mr Ross catalogued substantial downsides acknowledged by higher education lobbyists in private. These included English-language difficulties, near-monocultural classes in some business master’s programs, the social isolation of many Chinese students, serious mental health concerns, exploitation by landlords, extortion scams targeting Chinese students, and some impact – though in his view “vastly exaggerated” in public discourse – on housing. He also referred to threats facing some Chinese students in Australia from those seeking to curtail what they can do here.
On financial exposure he said, “Australian universities’ financial reliance on Chinese students is extremely serious. It’s basically a house of cards. I think it’s going to come crashing down pretty soon.”
A relationship broader than enrolments
Professor Laurenceson noted the scale of the existing relationship. There are currently an estimated 750,000 or more Chinese alumni of Australian universities, possibly over one million, and at institutions such as the University of Sydney, Chinese students account for between a quarter and a third of the student body and around a third of revenue.
He pointed to US think tank MacroPolo’s tracking of top global AI talent. Fifty-seven percent of top AI researchers who completed PhDs in Australia were recruited from Chinese undergraduate programs, against 13 percent from domestic Australian programs. Fifty-eight percent of Australian-trained AI PhDs continued to work in Australia.
Dr Lehmann said the relationship extends well beyond inbound students, pointing to outbound Australian student mobility, transnational education partnerships delivering Australian degrees in China, sector-level dialogues between Universities Australia and its Chinese counterpart, alumni networks and roughly 1,250 formal university-to-university partnerships, a count she said is in significant decline.
She assessed that Australia “does punch well above its weight” as a student destination relative to its size, though the UK leads on transnational education. No Australian university has established a joint institution in China along the lines of the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus, a path she described as high risk and high cost.
Mr Ross said that as China pushes for more joint ventures on its own soil, Australian universities risk being “tacitly pressured to accept limitations to academic freedom” that would not be accepted at home. He also noted that the formal agreements between Australian and Chinese institutions are rarely made public “so we don’t really know what’s going on.”
Public opinion mirrors the ambivalence
In audience questions, Dr Lehmann acknowledged the need to improve orientation and ongoing support for Chinese students, including their employability on returning home, which she described as a priority, while noting that financial pressures across the sector could affect universities’ capacity to deliver bespoke services.
UTS:ACRI’s own nationally representative annual polling, cited by Professor Laurenceson, captures the tension the panel described. Sixty-nine percent of Australians surveyed agreed Chinese international students provide a major economic benefit, yet 75 percent believed universities are too financially reliant on them. On research collaboration, 63 percent agreed that collaboration with China makes Australia more internationally competitive, alongside continuing concerns about academic freedom.
None of the panellists proposed walking away from the relationship, but none suggested it could continue on its current settings without cost. The discussion underscored that Australia-China education and research ties remain too important to abandon, but too complex to leave unmanaged. “China is one of those issues where you’re never going to get… a universal view,” Mr Ross said.
Elena Collinson is head of analysis at the Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney.
