Just now, I was travelling by high-speed rail from Xuzhou to Beijing, passing through Tai’an. When I saw Mount Tai, I suddenly remembered a question I had once discussed with an old friend. China has imported so much iron ore from Australia over the years. If all of it were piled together, how many Mount Tais would it amount to?
Over the past several decades, China has undergone industrialisation and urbanisation on an enormous scale, requiring extraordinary quantities of steel, energy and basic raw materials. Australia happens to possess abundant reserves of iron ore, coal and natural gas that are well suited to large-scale extraction and export. As China’s economy grew rapidly, Australia gradually became one of its most important suppliers of natural resources.
Iron ore is perhaps the clearest example.
According to Australian Treasury data, Australia exported only about 26 million tonnes of iron ore to China in 1999. By 2011, the figure had risen to 305 million tonnes. It continued to grow afterwards, reaching roughly 700 million tonnes a year in recent years. Between 2010 and 2019 alone, cumulative exports exceeded 5.2 billion tonnes. Added together, Australia’s iron ore exports to China since around 2000 are now on the order of 10 billion tonnes.
What does 10 billion tonnes actually mean? If we use a rough bulk density of about 2.5 tonnes per cubic metre, 10 billion tonnes of iron ore would occupy around 4 billion cubic metres, or about 4 cubic kilometres.
If coal, liquefied natural gas and other major bulk resources are added, and their volumes are calculated in the physical form in which they were transported, the total volume of major resources imported by China from Australia over the past several decades would be roughly 6 to 8 cubic kilometres.
Mount Tai, of course, is not a regular geometric object, and there is no generally accepted figure for the volume of the mountain itself. But simply to establish a sense of scale, if we very roughly estimate the main body of Mount Tai at around 40 to 50 cubic kilometres, then all these resources shipped from Australia to China would amount to approximately one-sixth of Mount Tai.
Natural gas gives us another interesting way of looking at the same relationship.
Most Australian natural gas shipped to China is transported as LNG, or liquefied natural gas. When natural gas is cooled to about minus 162 degrees Celsius and liquefied, its volume falls to roughly one six-hundredth of its gaseous volume. If China has cumulatively imported around 300 million tonnes of Australian LNG, its volume in liquid form would be about 0.7 cubic kilometres. Once converted back into gas at normal temperature and atmospheric pressure, however, it would occupy roughly 400 cubic kilometres.
Using the same rough Mount Tai comparison, that would be equivalent to around eight Mount Tais.
Of course, “one-sixth of Mount Tai” and “eight Mount Tais” are based on two completely different measures. The first refers to the actual transported volume of the various commodities, while the second refers to the space LNG would occupy after being converted back into gas. These comparisons are not intended as precise geological measurements. They are simply a way of making the enormous material flows between China and Australia over several decades easier to visualise.
What really matters, though, is where all these resources went.
Over the past several decades, China has built vast numbers of homes, office towers, factories, expressways, high-speed railways, bridges, airports, ports and metro systems. All of this required enormous quantities of steel and energy. China produces iron ore domestically and also imports large quantities from countries such as Brazil, so it would obviously be wrong to say that any particular building or bridge was constructed from Australian iron ore. But viewed at the level of the entire industrial system, a significant part of the steel required for China’s modernisation has long depended on Australian iron ore supplies.
Looking back today, it is therefore fair to say that Australia’s resources are present, indirectly, throughout China’s skyscrapers, roads, bridges, railways, airports and ports. Australian resources played a major role in China’s modernisation over the past several decades.
And the relationship was never one-way.
After Australia’s recession in 1991, the country went for roughly 29 years without experiencing what is usually defined as a technical recession, until the economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This was extremely unusual among modern developed economies. During the same period, the United States experienced both the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the global financial crisis, while Europe, Japan and other major developed economies also went through various recessions. Australia, by contrast, maintained an exceptionally long period of uninterrupted economic growth.
That achievement cannot simply be attributed to China. Australia’s economic institutions, financial system, population growth, and fiscal and monetary policies all played important roles. But from the beginning of the twenty-first century, the enormous demand for resources generated by China’s industrialisation and urbanisation, and the Australian mining boom that followed, were undoubtedly major contributing factors.
The result is a striking picture.
On one side were China’s rapidly rising skyscrapers, roads, high-speed railways, bridges, airports and ports. On the other were Australia’s expanding mines, heavy-haul railways crossing vast stretches of remote land, enormous ore terminals and LNG facilities.
There is an Australian presence in China’s modernisation, just as there is a Chinese presence in Australia’s prosperity over the past several decades.
Political relations may warm or cool, and diplomatic disagreements and frictions will inevitably arise. But when we extend the time horizon beyond the headlines of one or two years and look instead across three or four decades, a deeper connection becomes visible. The complementarity created by natural resources, industrial structures and market demand is far more durable than temporary shifts in the political atmosphere.
As the high-speed train passed Tai’an just now, I once again remembered the question I had discussed with my old friend — how many Mount Tais would all the resources China has imported from Australia over the years amount to?
After doing the calculation, I realised that the number of Mount Tais is probably not the most important point after all. What matters more is that, over the course of several decades of development, China and Australia have become deeply embedded in each other’s economic structures and, in a broader sense, in each other’s modern histories.
That may be the most easily underestimated aspect of the economic relationship between China and Australia.
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