Beijing Just Wrote the Manual for the Next Coercion Campaign

State Council Order 834 makes economic coercion permanent law. The Australian risk is not what most analysts think it is.

When China ran wine, barley and lobster off Australian export ledgers between 2020 and 2022, the legal predicate was held together with administrative tape. Tariffs framed as anti-dumping. Biosecurity suspensions framed as customs technicalities. A coal de facto ban that nobody in Beijing would acknowledge in writing. The campaign worked, in the sense that Canberra eventually walked away from its WTO case in exchange for a diplomatic detente.¹ But it was improvised. The next campaign will not be.