Australia’s research relationship with China presents a dilemma that resists easy resolution. Security imperatives demand scrutiny of research collaboration with Chinese institutions, yet that scrutiny generates observable costs to Australia’s capacity to engage with one of the world’s leading research powers. This article examines that dilemma through two lenses: the experiences and concerns documented in In Limbo: Perspectives on Australia-China Research Mobility, a qualitative report published in early 2026 by the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS: ACRI); and the security concerns that animate current Australian visa and governance settings. It finds that the costs of current arrangements are observable, that the security benefits are not independently assessable from public information and that this asymmetry complicates any evaluation of whether current settings are proportionate. Complicating any reform effort is the fact that Australia operates under simultaneous external pressure from both China’s tightening research governance and the US’s expectations of strategic alignment, a structural constraint that is examined in a dedicated section below.
The human costs of current settings are illustrated starkly in the interview material gathered for In Limbo. Interview participant 6 (IP6), a medical researcher from China specialising in oral diseases, completed a visiting fellowship at an Australian university before successfully competing for a postdoctoral position at the same institution, a significant career step she pursued, as she put it, because “while I’m still young, and since the world is so big, I should see more of it.” To retain her position at her home institution in Nanjing, she took unpaid leave rather than resign. Then she waited. The Australian university extended her contract deadline five times over the course of a year. On the day she was interviewed for In Limbo, that deadline was two days away. A sixth extension, she was told at the time, was unlikely.
IP8 was a researcher from China whose work involved using drones to detect and monitor water pollution. The project, led by his Australian supervisor and funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), was an environmental and public health initiative, directed at identifying waste in waterways. IP8 reported waiting at least 23 months for his Australian visa, relying on his wife’s income throughout. He acknowledged that his field, which involves antenna systems within robotics, sits in a dual-use grey zone, even as he questioned the limits of that reasoning, saying, “If they judge it that way, then most people in engineering fields wouldn’t be allowed to go; everything would be considered sensitive.”
These two accounts are among 24 in-depth interviews conducted for In Limbo. The study was published in an illustrative moment, for in the same period, The Australian newspaper reported that Australian academics had recently been collaborating with researchers from China and Iran on security-sensitive research, including cases where Chinese co-authors were affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army. This prompted the Australian Shadow Minister for Education, Julian Leeser, to state, “Australia’s research program should serve Australia, not our adversaries”. Shadow Minister for Defence James Paterson went further, declaring, “Naivete is no longer a defence… If universities won’t get with the program, the Albanese government must use the numerous levers available to them to force their hand”.
Australia’s federal Education Department, in a letter to the universities involved, said the Australian government expected all universities to keep strengthening national security protections, applying such protections “not only to institutional arrangements but also to collaboration undertaken by individual researchers, as well as allowing foreign researchers access to facilities and specialised equipment.”
These two sets of facts sit in the same policy space and pull in different directions. These reported cases of PLA-affiliated co-authorship illustrate why security-oriented governance of research collaboration is necessary, while the visa accounts show that its current implementation imposes observable costs on applicants and institutions. The analytical task is to specify what each set of evidence establishes and, equally, what it does not. Most broadly, this juxtaposition highlights a key feature of the current policy environment: the costs of these settings are observable, while the security benefits they are intended to produce are not directly observable from publicly available information.
In his 2024 Annual Threat Assessment, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Director-General Mike Burgess rated espionage and foreign interference at “certain”, the highest level on the scale, while terrorism sat at “possible”. The 2024 assessment specifically noted that a foreign intelligence service – likely a division of China’s Ministry of State Security – had offered “Australian defence industry employees money in return for reports on AUKUS, submarine technology, missile systems, and many other sensitive topics.” Burgess’ 2025 assessment stated that espionage and foreign interference were among three heads of security already “flashing red”, and only set to intensify, enabled, in particular, by advances in technology.
The security concern has specific grounding in the domain of research.The ‘Seven Sons of National Defence’ are seven Chinese universities formally subordinate to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which also supervises China’s defence industry. Their military-civilian character has been identified in policy discussions internationally as having links to China’s defence-industrial system: all seven appear on the US Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List; Flanders has banned all seven from its research funding schemes; and the European Commission is moving towards excluding them from its Horizon Europe research and innovation program. Former Australian Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo has argued that any relationship with Chinese scholars and institutions has “the Chinese state sitting behind it”. This likely overstates the uniformity of risk. But it is grounded in a feature of how parts of the Chinese research system are organised.
A further complication is that dual-use categories are not stable. As IP8’s own acknowledgement illustrates, even researchers working on ostensibly civilian projects may occupy grey zones, and may dispute where within those zones their specific work falls. Researchers studying research security governance have pointed to the difficulty that applying dual-use frameworks as a clear guide for collaboration decisions “is in no way guaranteed” to counter risk, as the categories themselves shift. This complicates the institution-versus-project-level debate. Even where a specific project appears civilian, neither the researcher nor the institution may be well-placed to assess what the underlying knowledge could become. This does not make institution-level gatekeeping correct, but it helps explain its persistence and the limits of project-level due diligence.
Against that security context, In Limbo documents costs whose relationship to any corresponding security benefits cannot be assessed from public information. In Transit: Australia-China Research Mobility and the Visa Experience, the quantitative survey preceding the In Limbo qualitative report, found that 78 per cent of respondents (comprising 371 PRC visa applicants) were still awaiting a decision at the time of data collection. The median approved processing time was six months; one in six waited more than a year. Eighty-four per cent reported that timelines materially disrupted their study or research plans. Processing times in many cases sat at or beyond the Australian Department of Home Affairs’ 90th-percentile benchmarks, suggesting delays are not confined to routine variation and are unevenly distributed: applicants in Engineering and Technology reported the longest median waits (8.5 months), compared with substantially shorter durations in humanities and social sciences.
The qualitative interviews provide further texture. IP1 described how delays disrupted research planning and institutional arrangements – planned fieldwork could not proceed, compressing the timeframe for required outputs, while previously reassigned teaching duties created administrative complications for her home institution. IP19 noted that delays affected her teaching allocation and risked disqualifying her from promotion due to unmet teaching requirements. In other cases, applicants described holding limited funded positions or quotas that could not be taken up or reallocated during the waiting period. Around 60 per cent of In Transit survey respondents reported considering alternative study or research destinations due to visa processing times, indicating that such delays may influence the direction of research mobility more broadly.
The impact extends beyond individual cases to the research system as a whole. UTS: ACRI analysis by economist Professor James Laurenceson showed that ARC grants involving collaboration with PRC-based researchers fell from 116 in 2019 to 47 in 2023. Professor Laurenceson has also documented that foreign interference and research security measures have been associated with a climate of caution, in which some researchers avoid proposing or continuing collaborations involving PRC-based partners, particularly in the context of highly competitive grant funding.
The AUKUS framework sharpens this picture further. Australia has committed to deepening technology collaboration with the US and UK in priority capability areas under Pillar II, including hypersonics, quantum technologies, autonomous systems and electronic warfare. At the same time, China is assessed to lead high-impact research across a majority of comparable critical technology fields, including 19 of 23 identified in recent analyses. Group of Eight analysis found that over 2018-2022, China produced more high-impact scientific publications than Australia in all 12 research fields relevant to AUKUS capability priorities, and more than the combined AUKUS total in eight of them. Australia’s AUKUS commitments, therefore, require building competitive capability in precisely the fields where China is the leading research power, yet the security concerns that animate those commitments simultaneously constrain engagement with that research base.
Australia’s policy choices in this area do not occur in a vacuum. They are shaped simultaneously by China’s tightening of its own research environment and by the US’ expectations of alignment, two external forces that together narrow the range of available options.
The constraints imposed by China’s own regulatory tightening are an active force narrowing the practical space for bilateral engagement. In April 2023, China’s largest academic database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), terminated access for foreign institutions to databases including dissertations, conference proceedings, census reports and statistical yearbooks, in a move attributed to China’s tightening data security framework, including laws enacted in 2021-2022. The broader trend extends to patents and business data, driven by amendments to China’s anti-espionage law and a tightened data security assessment regime. Nature reported in March 2025 that foreign researchers in China were finding it increasingly difficult to work with local counterparts as a result of these frameworks.
From the other direction, recent shifts in US research policy have introduced uncertainty into what has historically been Australia’s largest research partnership. These include the distribution of a 36-point questionnaire to Australian researchers at at least eight universities, restrictions on Chinese researchers’ access to US biomedical databases and cancelled grants, as well as increased congressional scrutiny of university partnerships. US government research funding to Australian research organisations totalled AU$386 million in 2024, according to the Australian Academy of Science, equivalent to around 43 per cent of ARC grant funding in that year. This figure does not include in-kind contributions or access to critical research infrastructure. In this context, expectations of alignment with US positions may narrow the political space for policy settings that differentiate between high- and low-risk forms of engagement with Chinese partners. As Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) senior analyst Rebecca Arcesati has observed, efforts to minimise risk exposure can, in practice, encourage disengagement: “If you want to have zero risk, then the only answer is to disengage.”
The In Limbo report’s interviewees, for their part, do not contest the legitimacy of security screening. They acknowledge that states may restrict entry on security grounds. Their concerns centre on the opacity and duration of the process. These are critiques of implementation rather than of the security framework itself.
The evidence documented above does not resolve the question of whether Australia’s current research governance settings are appropriately configured, but it contributes to the clarification of the terms on which that question should be assessed. Observable costs and unassessable security benefits create an asymmetry that complicates any straightforward evaluation of proportionality.
Two categories of questions follow. The first concerns administration rather than substance: whether the current management of processing timelines and status communication is generating costs disproportionate to any security benefit those specific practices produce. The second concerns framework design, that is, whether institution-level risk assessment is set at the right level in either direction. The cases documented in the public record suggest it may, in some instances, be insufficient; the documented culture of caution and disengagement from Chinese partners in the research literature suggests it may, in others, be producing outcomes beyond what the security rationale requires. Both assessments are complicated by the bilateral constraints examined above – the narrowing of China’s own research environment and the expectations of US alignment together limit the range of options available to policymakers. As the space for productive exchange narrows, the quality of governance over what remains becomes more consequential.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
