When the fresh intake of Australian teenagers arrives at university campuses next year, the first crop of students born in 2008 will be among them.

It’s a milestone to be clocked with concern by those who care about Australia’s declining reservoir of China expertise which, frankly, should be everyone, but especially our policymakers.

As far as symbolism goes, the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics marked the moment China stepped on the global stage as an ascendant great power. It was galloping towards economic liberalisation with such promise that many hoped – naively, as it turned out – that it was on the cusp of a new era of political freedom.

Since then, as Beijing has taken a sharp authoritarian turn under leader Xi Jinping and massively expanded its military machine, the China story has only become more important.

Across the Indo-Pacific, Beijing is aggressively exerting its influence to the extent that Foreign Minister Penny Wong sees Australia as locked in a “permanent contest” with China to remain the region’s top security partner. A “knife fight” is how one minister described it to me recently. At the same time, Australia’s economy is as reliant as ever on China buying our goods.

And yet, not nearly enough of 2026’s new undergraduates and their successors will be specialising in Chinese studies for Australia to be sufficiently equipped to understand its greatest strategic threat and biggest trading partner in the years to come.

That’s the message coming directly from Australian universities and China experts, who are sounding the alarm on a declining across-the-board interest in Asia studies.

“It’s worrying because at a time when our focus on the region needs to increase, our capabilities are dropping,” former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Varghese tells me.

In a report to the federal government last year on funding strategic policy, Varghese, chancellor of the University of Queensland, concluded that Australia’s declining China expertise was a “systemic failure”.

One of the most concerning data points he and others highlight is this – across the country’s 40 universities, there are no more than five Australian graduates in any one year with an honours degree in Chinese studies including the language.

Varghese doesn’t see student interest substantially picking up unless the business sector steps up its investment in China – already a challenge of confidence on Xi’s watch – and, along with it, places a premium on hiring Australians with specialist knowledge of the country’s institutional and political culture.

He might have a point.

I recently spent four days in Guangzhou attending the annual Australia-China Youth Dialogue (generously benchmarked at under 40) alongside some of the best and brightest mid-career professionals identified as emerging leaders in a range of sectors on either side of the aisle.

I’ve spoken with current and past delegates on the Australian side, many of whom graduated from top universities fluent in Chinese, having immersed themselves in exchange programs at China’s elite institutions, while earning degrees back home in law, economics, engineering and tech. They represent the pipeline of expertise Australia should be cultivating.

But some painted a grim picture of the challenge they faced acquiring this expertise, only for the Australian jobs marketplace to place little value on it. A number were employed in roles that made little use of their China knowledge.

One delegate told me he was the only domestic student in his Chinese studies course at university and, after struggling to find employers who valued his skills, moved overseas.

At the risk of further extrapolating personal experience into trend, 2008 was also the year I started as an undergraduate at the Australian National University in Canberra. At the time, the Asian Century seemed well and truly upon us.

Down the road, Kevin Rudd – an honours graduate himself in Chinese language and history from the ANU – was ensconced in The Lodge as the country’s first Mandarin-speaking prime minister.

All around me on campus, students were studying Asian languages and, in particular, Chinese. As I battled my way through an arts/law degree, I quietly wondered if I had missed the memo. (Given my current role, yes, as it turned out.)

But rather than 2008 being an inflection point that turbocharged Australia’s investment in its China capability, this momentum evidently evaporated in the years after my cohort graduated.

By 2013, Julia Gillard’s Asian Century white paper – which envisioned an Australia in 2025 that was “Asia-literate and Asia-capable”, with more students learning Mandarin, Indonesian, Hindi and Japanese – had been shelved by the incoming Liberals.

A federal parliamentary inquiry is now examining this decade-plus erosion of Asia capability, and the data being presented by universities – albeit patchy – is bleak.

The ANU, which has long been a hub for China expertise, estimates the size of its Asian studies degree has declined by 70 per cent over the past six years. There’s no reason to think they are an outlier.

One of the issues is that language courses have become increasingly dominated by international students, and seen as their domain – a consequence of universities becoming drunk on foreign fees to ensure course viability as the government funding noose has tightened.

The University of Sydney, for example, has recorded a combined 480 per cent increase in overseas student enrolment in Chinese and several other Asian languages, while domestic enrolments have declined 15 per cent.

As a China-focused foreign correspondent based in Singapore, I assure you that when it comes to understanding your subjects, there is no substitute for meeting them where they are – on their home turf, and preferably in their own language.

It’s the reason why this masthead is eager to get back to Beijing permanently, after a five-year hiatus, resuming a four-decade stint of in-country reporting.

The decline in China expertise will ultimately impact media coverage too (and yes, I can hear our critics chiming in here), and therefore the quality of the public debate on critical issues from Taiwan and the South China Sea, to Pacific diplomacy, and Donald Trump and trade wars.

Already too few Australian experts make themselves available for media commentary, for reasons that I appreciate includes a wariness to put their head above the parapet on what has, at times, been a shrill and highly politicised national discourse.

In the absence of considered expertise and on-the-ground coverage, debate can easily be pulled to the extremes.

In the vast expanse of views between the fringes, reporters place a premium on China-literate experts who have carved a career out of poring through Communist Party documents, or picking through the entrails of Chinese elite politics, or developing a deep understanding of the country’s centuries-old history and culture and how this shapes decision-making. Or who are able to speak with nuance about Chinese society and business culture because they have lived and worked there.

They aren’t the total of a well-rounded China knowledge base. But ideally, you want this literacy infused through the layers of decision-making and public policy discussion.

For that pipeline to be guaranteed in the decades to come, we need 17- and 18-year-olds to be signing up for Chinese studies now, confident there’s a job for them in five years’ time that values their skills.

Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald

Peter Hartcher is on leave.

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