On the issue of BJ's demands towards Australia, I don't see how there is really any room for Australia to "compromise." Beijing's demands are essentially:

1) surrender control of strategic businesses/industries to Chinese buyers/CCP control ("foreign investment decisions")

2) allow the CCP control over Australia's telecommunications network (the Huawei ban)

3) allow unfettered CCP influence/intelligence operations on Australian soil ("foreign interference legislation")

4) allow Chinese military and intelligence personnel to operate/study in Australia without restriction ("revoke visas of Chinese scholars")

5) accept that an outbreak like Covid won't be stopped early next time around either (Covid inquiry)

6) allow concentration camps, cultural genocide, forced live-ins of unwelcome political monitors in homes, and forced labor, as well as the destruction of a thriving democracy, and the potential destruction of another (speaking up about Xinjiang, HK, Taiwan)

7) allow China full political and military control of the South China Sea and replace the existing equal rights maritime law with a tributary/subjugation system centered on China

8) work with allies on core national security interests (siding with the US against China)

9) allow provincial governments to override national policy in the interests of a (hostile) foreign power (Victoria working with China on BRI)

10) do not allow any domestic discussion or analysis within Australia of how to deal with national security and human rights issues (criticizing Australian funding for think tanks and other civil society organizations which create nation-wide consensus--this is a big one! They're essentially trying not only to beat an opponent, but to prevent the opponent from even discussing the possibility of fighting/formulating a strategy)

11) I don't know much about the journalism demand China made

12) allow unlimited CCP cyberattacks on Australia with no retaliation or defense

13) restrict speech in Australia's parliament (another big one! This is their complaint about MP's criticizing China)--the racism issue is however extremely important of course, and I think it should push us all to be much clearer in our language and distinctions--Chinese Australians (and Chinese-Americans/other nations) are, this goes without saying, full and equal citizens, and at the same time, the CCP also happens to be Chinese, but they are different in the ways that matter (as opposed to ways that don't matter like ethnicity) and so the CCP should be treated differently)

14) shut down the free press in Australia and only allow media to say what the CCP wants (criticism of "unfriendly" reports in Australian media

Taken at face value (and why shouldn't they be?), these are a wholesale attack on the very character of Australian society. I would agree with Bill's suggestion that they are at least partially intended to provoke divisions within Australian society and ring the utmost pressure Beijing can get out of the Australian business community, but it's such a wholesale and aggressive attack and list of demands you have to wonder, once again, if it wasn't a fully thought out strategy in the sense that it was conceived in the incredibly ideological, xenophobic and nationalistic environment that is high-level CCP meetings, where it is sort of ideologically not permitted within those meetings to take any but the most imperious and extreme pro-CCP view, and they awkwardly try to graft that approach on to foreign affairs where they don't have the same absolute power they do at home, and so they don't get the results abroad they get at home.