Families have been separated for almost three years due to COVID-19 restrictions in both China and Australia.
However, just days before China finally lifts its border restrictions on January 8, countries around the world are tightening theirs.
From midnight, travellers from China, Hong Kong and Macau will need to show their airline a supervised, negative COVID-19 test result taken within 48 hours before departure.
There will be exemptions for children under 12 years old, airline crew and people with evidence of a COVID-19 infection in the past 30 days.
Australia joins other countries — including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France, India, Canada, Italy, Morocco and Qatar — in imposing similar rules. Most, including Australia, have cited a lack of COVID-19 information and genomic sequencing data from China for their decision.
Health Minister Mark Butler defended the government's decision on Tuesday after it was revealed that chief medical officer Paul Kelly advised against it.
Mr Butler argued the World Health Organization is concerned that the COVID-19 outbreak is worse than China's numbers show and it fears that new variants could emerge.
However, some health experts insist there is no justification for the government's move.
"Pre-departure testing, in particular, for travellers just from one country is really likely to have very minimal impact on preventing importation of new variants," infectious disease epidemiologist Professor Fiona Russell said.
"Targeting just one country doesn't really achieve anything because, as we know with Omicron, it just shoots all over the world because everybody travelled everywhere, and it'll just come in through a different entry point anyway."
Countries are encouraged to submit genomic sequences and share COVID-19 information with global online database GISAID.
"Most countries do this, which is really a fantastic development, however half of that Omicron data comes from two countries: [the] USA and the UK," Professor Russell said.
"[China] have had a couple of data uploads from a variety of testing sites … which is really fantastic to see and really encouraging but obviously more needs to come on a regular basis," she said.
She said that other countries — including India, Nigeria and Pakistan — sparsely upload data, so China should not be singled out.
"There's other countries that have sparse data … there's resources and feasibility issues, obviously, for poor countries to do this."
Professor Russell said people in China could be deterred from taking a supervised test to travel overseas over fear of "discriminatory policies and trust".
"I think that is certainly a possibility that there will be fear of punishment or being stuck in quarantine or not, well, obviously, not being able to travel," she said.
"If you want to do business in the country, you'd be thinking about all these sorts of things, too."
On Tuesday, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said his government had been consulted about the federal governments' move, but fell short of stating he was in support.
"We've been engaged. I've spoken to our health minister about it through our chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, but, ultimately, that's a matter for the federal government," Mr Perrottet said.
He has suggested however that the reopening of China's border — while quarantine measures won't be dropped until Sunday — was already creating a boom for the New South Wales economy.
"We're seeing that and what's pleasing to me is seeing international students come back because, when I was treasurer during the pandemic, this was an area which really affected the New South Wales economy. It's our largest service export."
