Australia’s relationship with China has been stuck in the bottom compartment of the diplomatic deep freezer since 2020. Given this, it seemed appropriate that Arctic weather heralded the arrival of Anthony Albanese to the Temple of Heaven on Monday morning.
When I say Arctic weather, it was cold enough to snap-freeze extremities. The wind ripped across the World Heritage site, sand-blasting rows of ceremonial chrysanthemums and threatening to upend a prime ministerial lectern. One Australian reporter, minus a coat, enfolded himself in bubble wrap to try to maintain some body heat.
Albanese was flanked by Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong. She was wrapped in an elegant winter coat but she wore pumps without stockings. The tops of her feet were bare. She shivered slightly but declined to flinch.
Wong is one of Albanese’s closest friends and confidantes, a relationship that spans three decades. The two came to the Temple of Heaven on Monday as Australian prime minister and foreign minister. But they are also a couple of Labor party lifers, two leftwingers who have scrambled to the top of their political organisation.
Albanese and Wong were acutely conscious of walking in Gough Whitlam’s footsteps. They were making history for their country but they were also re-enacting a seminal moment in the history of the modern Labor party; the moment when Whitlam visited the Echo Wall flanked by Australia’s first ambassador to the People’s Republic.
Whitlam is a hero to these two. He was the change agent who led the ALP out of the wilderness; the party leader with the foresight to shrug off rigid cold war verities and forge a relationship with a communist country to centre post-colonial Australia in our own geographic region.
Fifty years later China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, led Albanese and Wong through the ancient monument. There was an obvious opportunity to re-enact the photograph of Whitlam’s Echo Wall moment although the present-day addition of a crash barrier meant Albanese could not lean in to the wall as Whitlam had done.
He brought Wong up to stand beside him at the designated spot. Then the two walked side-by-side towards the Hall of Prayer – the part of the complex that Chinese emperors visited in imperial times to pray for good harvests. The choreography from the two Australians was deliberate. The point was the past is always with us, but it is also another country. It can’t be recreated. Whatever happens between Australia and China now will be something new, not a pastiche.
The challenge before Albanese and Wong (as the foreign minister put it to reporters on Monday) was to navigate a complex and mature relationship with an emerging regional superpower “wisely”. Asked to define what the bilateral relationship going forward would look like, Albanese said Australia’s bond with China was “important.” The relationship had changed over 50 years. “China has changed. Australia has changed. And the relationship has changed. We’re dealing with strategic competition in the region.”
Albanese expressed Wong’s point about wisdom differently. He borrowed from the US diplomat – the respected Asian affairs veteran – Kurt Campbell. “Diplomacy is back,” the prime minister said. Implied, but not stated: this would be diplomacy, not partisan bluster, or foreign policy shaped exclusively by domestic political expediency. The objective would be statecraft, not winning the nightly TV news.
This strategic objective was obvious as Albanese walked into the Great Hall of the People on Monday night.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, received the Australian at the heart of Chinese power, signalling a new period in a relationship that has been battered since 2016. The protracted battering reflects a clash of irreconcilable values – the global ambitions of an illiberal autocracy colliding with the aspirations of liberal democracy.
Xi knows how to command a room. Albanese had to hold while the president finished meetings with the prime ministers of Cuba and Serbia. Once the Australian was ushered in, Xi greeted Albanese warmly. He referenced the Whitlam history. He said Whitlam had dug the well of the Australia-China relationship. “In China, we often say when drinking water we should not forget those who dug the well,” the president said. “The Chinese people will not forget prime minister Whitlam for digging the well for us.”
Xi said the two countries must now embrace the next 50 years. Monday’s meeting was a milestone, the president said, because it “builds on the past and ushers in the future”.
So, China wants a diplomatic reset, and so does Australia; out of the deep freezer, back up to room temperature. Albanese’s objective is simple. As well as ensuring that exports to China continue to underpin growth and opportunity in Australia, the prime minister wants a relationship where he can pick up the phone to a Chinese president and potentially avoid catastrophic misadventure. Given the dangerous times we live in, this is the humanist insurance leaders seek; a measure of rapport.
Monday night’s reception in the Great Hall of the People was cordial enough to ward off several years of chill.
But that’s all that can be said of the current rapprochement. A meeting in Beijing is a fascinating interregnum, not a guarantee of future comity.
The test of the diplomatic reboot isn’t whether or not Albanese can get back into a room Australia has been excluded from since Scott Morrison called for an inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Getting back into the room is certainly an achievement; a function of patient and deliberate strategy (as Albanese likes to say) on Australia’s part, and a pragmatic understanding on China’s part that foreign policy belligerence was not achieving the desired end.
But the resilience of this reboot remains to be tested.
The true test is whether or not Australia can remain in the room when our two countries next strongly disagree.
