For nearly a month, Australian forces were on alert as a flotilla of Chinese navy ships made an unannounced voyage around the continent. The ships sailed in and out of Australia’s exclusive economic zone. They fired live shots near commercial airspace, forcing dozens of civilian flights to reroute. They sailed past Perth in Western Australia, days after a visiting U.S. nuclear submarine docked at a nearby naval base.
Finally, last weekend, the Chinese ships headed north toward Indonesia.
Australian officials repeatedly assured the public that the Chinese ships’ presence and actions were perfectly legitimate under international law. But the voyage was the farthest south the Chinese military had ever come, and was deeply uncomfortable for Australia.
It has forced the nation to take a hard look at its own aging fleet, its heavy military dependence on a faraway ally, the United States, and the increasing muscularity of its biggest trading partner, China.
There was nothing about the deployment of the three Chinese vessels — a cruiser, a frigate and a replenishment tanker — that was technically impressive or strategically significant. China’s formidable navy has long demonstrated the vast distances it can cover and the capabilities of its premier ships.
Instead, it ended up highlighting Australia’s inadequacies: its own navy is the oldest and smallest it has been since World War II, analysts and former navy officials say. It has two tankers, which are crucial for navigating long distances, as the Chinese did, but both have been out of commission for months. The two Chinese warships had a combined 144 vertical launch missile cells, while the Royal Australian Navy’s 10 warships, altogether, have 200.
“The Chinese are showing us up in our own backyard,” said Marcus Hellyer, an expert on military spending and capability who previously worked for Australia’s defense department.
“We can’t even sail around our own country. They are really rubbing it in,” he said. Australian forces, could of course, rely on friendly countries like New Zealand, which refueled an Australian ship in the Tasman Sea as the two countries jointly surveilled the Chinese ships.
The firestorm the flotilla ignited in Australia is an indication of how China could take advantage of a moment when the staunchest of American allies are being forced to revisit longstanding assumptions about ties to Washington. The United States has not officially commented on the Chinese ships, even though they coincided with the visit of a top U.S. commander and a U.S. submarine to Australia.
Chinese officials have said they were carrying out training in international waters as all navies do, and had nothing to explain or apologize for.
That hasn’t stopped the speculation in Australia about the timing and the message it was designed to send. The ships encircled Australia as the Trump administration has been upending expectations about continued U.S. support for allies like Europe and Ukraine. Australia is about to hold a federal election, in which the ships all but guaranteed that defense will be a major talking point.
“China’s navy is illustrating Australia’s vulnerability at the exact moment that the U.S. is demonstrating American unreliability,” Peter Hartcher, the political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote last month. Between the “buccaneering” in Washington and China’s military drumbeat, he wrote: “We’re so exposed that we face the next decade near-naked.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government has spent the past few years working hard to stabilize relations with China, which had hit a low point under the previous government, with China imposing crippling trade restrictions.
At the same time, Australia has doubled down on its military alliance with the United States. In February, it paid half a billion dollars to Washington as a down payment to bolster the U.S. submarine industry, to eventually receive used U.S. nuclear submarines as part of a security pact with America and Britain known as AUKUS.
Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Australian counterpart, Richard Marles, that President Trump was “very aware, supportive” of the three-way agreement. But a few weeks later, when a reporter asked Mr. Trump whether he would discuss AUKUS with Britain’s prime minister, Mr. Trump asked: “What does that mean?”
Australia first detected the Chinese ships in early February, one to the north and the other two to the northeast. It tracked them as they traveled south along its eastern coast, entering Australia’s exclusive economic zone near Sydney.
The unease over the ships became full blown alarm on Feb. 21, when a commercial pilot flying over the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand heard radio broadcasts from the Chinese vessels warning of live fire drills. The pilot informed Australia’s civil aviation service, which scrambled to divert flights in the area. Nearly 50 planes would end up changing course.
The drills came as a surprise to both Australia and New Zealand but both acknowledged they were legal. One ship had the potential to carry land-attack missiles or anti-ship ballistic missiles.
China’s response was, in essence: Get used to it.
“As a major power in this region, as a country that has so many things to look after, it is normal for China to send their vessels to different parts of the region to conduct various kinds of activities,” Xiao Qian, China’s ambassador to Australia, told Australia’s national broadcaster.
China’s navy, already the world’s largest and rapidly expanding, has also been more aggressive in making its presence felt elsewhere in Asia. Japan’s defense minister said last month that Chinese navy ships had passed through the waters around the Ryukyu Islands — a chain that stretches between Kyushu and Taiwan — a total of 68 times last year, a dramatic increase from 21 times in 2021.
“They are gradually but very steadily spreading their wings, showing the world they’re able to be anywhere they want to be, whenever they choose,” said Rowan Moffitt, a former deputy chief of the Australian navy. “We see no reason to suggest intent to use their capability against us today. Should the intent change, they could.”
But for some, the Chinese flotilla was a reminder of the possibility of hostile powers reaching Australian shores.
“We’ve thought of conflict as something we choose to get involved in on the other side of the world,” said Jennifer Parker, a naval expert and two-decade veteran of the navy.
Last year, Mr. Albanese’s government announced ambitious goals to expand and update Australia’s naval fleet, but the results aren’t expected to be seen until the 2030s, and some experts are skeptical that the local industry can deliver.
Australian warships have sailed near China, through the Taiwan Strait, and participated in joint exercises in the South China Sea. (And a Chinese defense ministry spokesman asked if Australia would notify Beijing of its own exercises near China.) But those are heavily trafficked corridors where multiple countries’ interests intersect, whereas the only reason to be south of Australia or in the Tasman Sea would be to send a message, said Ray Powell, the director of the maritime transparency project SeaLight, who previously served as a U.S. defense attaché in Canberra.
“That particular message is, we are able to hold you at risk,” he said.
