What Shapes Australia’s Perception of China as a Threat? The Media, Foreign Policy, and Public Opinion

Existing data point to a dramatic increase in the proportion of Australians who believed China was likely to become a threat in the period of 2022–2025. Media have long been found to be pivotal in shaping public perceptions of foreign countries. It is therefore important to ask how the media decide which stories about China to highlight and how those stories are told. This article adopts a tripartite framework — securitization, speech act, and agenda-setting — to explore how media shapes the Australian public’s perception of China as a high-level threat. It does so by conducting a critical analysis of major news and current affairs reports, documentaries, and analyses published in Australia’s most influential media outlets from 2021 to the present on the theme of China as a military threat. The analysis identifies a number of ways in which Australian media create and sustain the salience of the China threat by amplifying the voices of political and security elites, and normalizing a pre-war emergency discourse. The analysis points to a return of the Cold War–style journalistic tradition in which the framing of China tells us as much about Australia’s anxieties, alliances, and strategic positioning as it does about China’s intentions.