Australia’s booming pre-COVID international education industry was built on the back of Chinese students:
![Australian international student exports](https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Capture-335.png)
China was Australia’s most lucrative student market.
In 2019, this prompted Associate Professor Salvator Babones to publish the seminal paper, The China Student Boom and the Risks It Poses to Australian Universities, which showed that Australian universities had become dangerously dependent on Chinese students, with concentrations that dwarf similar advanced nations: