SINCE the ABC Four Corners report on June 5, on links between business and political interests from China and Australia’s national politics, there has been a continuous stream of revelations from the ABC, Fairfax and News involving both major political parties, the defence and intelligence community, and the university sector.

The domestic public debate about the nature of Australia’s relationship to China has even garnered significant coverage in the US, Europe and Asia.

That business and political interests from China have been insinuating themselves into Australian political and institutional life should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the complexity of Australia’s relationship with China.

With over 30 per cent of Australia’s exports going to China and with the promises being made by Australian policy-makers and business people about the opportunities in China, in everything from tourism, the dairy industry and even AFL, entanglements of power and money would always be at the centre of the relationship.

There has, however, been a distinctive arc to the Australia-China relationship in recent years. China has been a growing export market for decades, but with the global financial crisis of 2008, the Chinese economy slowed very sharply. China responded with state-directed stimulus spending and the economy rebounded. In Australia, we felt China’s crisis management as an extraordinary mining boom, with far-reaching effects on the economy.

In our public debates, however, rather than seeing short- to medium-term opportunity from Beijing’s policy response, we saw an Asian Century. China would sustain Australian prosperity far into the future.

This view was crystallised by state and federal Asian Century white papers.

A few analysts warned very early on about the risks of excessive debt in the Chinese economy, creating bubbles in markets, including stocks, commodities and housing, but it took the iron ore price crashing from US$187 in February 2011 to US$41 in January 2016 for the risks of Australia’s trade with China to become a feature of public debate and policy-making.

The current period of media coverage of China can be seen in the context of a pendulum swing away from the unrealistic expectations of the early 2010s.

In Tasmania, China gripped the imagination of local policy-makers just as firmly, especially in the lead-up to the visit by Xi Jinping in November 2014.

The latest state trade figures from March 2017, showing a 25 per cent year-on-year fall in exports to China, are salutatory. Behind that number is a very complex story, but nevertheless, the state export growth trend over the five years since the Asian Century white paper is no more than GDP growth.

It might be premature to call Tasmania’s Asian Century project a failure, but for those in Tasmania who have spent lifetimes engaged with the Chinese world, it has certainly been a disappointment.

Despite their enthusiasm for China, government and education policy-makers and the business community have shown little sign they have developed any mental map of the Chinese world. They have one word to make sense of it, “China” itself. From it they imagined opportunities of “lucrative, high-end markets, like China” but little else.

The Chinese world is one of extraordinary richness and diversity. A gentleman from the south educated in the art of calligraphy and China’s classical heritage will have little in common with youth from a depressed industrial city in the northeast, or party apparatchik building a career on provincial Communist Party committees. Yet all have a place in the Chinese world.

Tasmanian policy-makers have yet to build a map of this complexity and diversity into the groups and institutions that are dealing with China. Without it, they are poorly placed to make realistic policy decisions about the relationship. In their enthusiasm for anything labelled “China”, they make themselves vulnerable to the kind of dealings being aired at the national level.

However, in understanding that people from China come from all walks of life, with different motives and interests, local policy-makers can build deeper relationships, and may also see we have more in common than we might think.

Dr Mark Harrison is a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Tasmania and an adjunct director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.