Features | Diplomacy | East Asia | Oceania

Wolf Warriors in Sheep’s Clothing: China’s New Subnational Diplomacy in Australia 

Beijing’s diplomatic officials are adopting the language of the Albanese government to press their demands upon local governments and communities.

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.

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........

© The Diplomat