In a far cry from Henry Kissinger’s secret trips to China in the 1970s, Anthony Albanese’s planned travel to the country has been an open secret for months.
Still, the Australian prime minister’s confirmation this week that he had accepted an invitation to fly to Beijing is another key step in his government’s efforts to “stabilise” a relationship that hit rock bottom in 2020.
It also reflects a key calculation of Albanese’s team: that dialogue with a major power such as China, in and of itself, is of value.
On this view, talking reduces the chances of misunderstanding or worse – even if both sides agree to disagree on policy or values. And it is not as if the last year and a half of high-level talks have been fruitless – just ask Australian barley and coal exporters.
While the dates have yet to be confirmed, Albanese’s trip is likely to be steeped in symbolism and tied to the 50th anniversary of Gough Whitlam’s first trip to China as prime minister. That milestone is due in late October or early November.
The counter-argument – advanced by figures such as Albanese’s predecessor, Scott Morrison – is that the government should have secured more concessions from Beijing before locking in the trip.
This more gloomy assessment points out that Australian citizens Cheng Lei and Yang Hengjun remain in detention in China on ill-defined national security accusations with verdicts delayed multiple times. What’s more, Hong Kong authorities have recently vowed to “pursue for life” an Australian citizen and an Australian resident over their pro-democracy commentary.
According to the ABC, Morrison told a Coalition party room meeting earlier this week that an excessive keenness to restore relations with China “would be interpreted in Beijing as Australia being concessional and acquiescent”.
However, to date there have been no obvious concessions from the Labor government when it comes to policy.
Yes, it has dialled down the rhetoric: Albanese said warmly after a meeting with Chinese premier Li Qiang in Jakarta on Thursday that China was rightly proud to have lifted millions of people out of poverty over the past couple of decades.
But Albanese’s government is simultaneously going full steam ahead with the Aukus plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines in a move that ministers now explicitly say is driven by concerns about China’s own rapid military buildup.
Albanese was in the Philippines on Friday to deepen strategic ties with a country that is increasingly at odds with China (there was a confrontation involving water cannon last month). Australia is planning joint patrols with the Philippines in the South China Sea, with Albanese again voicing support for a 2016 tribunal ruling that undermined Beijing’s expansive claims.
Against this backdrop, key Coalition policies such as the ban on Chinese telco Huawei in the 5G network remain firmly in place. Australia shows no signs of ticking off on China’s desired entry into the CPTPP regional trade deal and continues to warn against force across the Taiwan Strait.
If anything could be put in the “concession” category, Australia may have given up something by sparing China the public opprobrium of a negative World Trade Organization ruling against one of a series of trade measures that the Coalition had always branded “economic coercion”.
Both China and Australia had a copy of the WTO panel’s final report on China’s barley tariffs before the two sides agreed to sort it out among themselves – consequently the findings never became public. But the fact China’s ministry of commerce ended up scrapping the 80% tariffs entirely leaves us in little doubt about which way the ruling was heading.
Australia is now trying to offer the same “off ramp” to China ahead of an another impending ruling on its wine tariffs. The calculation from the Australian side is that direct deals will probably deliver tangible gains for industry sooner than rulings that might be seen as a moral victory but could trigger lengthy appeal processes.
Albanese continued to make the case during his “frank and constructive” meeting with Li on Thursday that removal of the outstanding trade barriers would be in the interests of both countries. He was also forthright in urging Li to understand that Australians “want to see Cheng Lei reunited with her children”.
Thursday’s meeting coincided with the resumption of a high-level, semi-official dialogue event in Beijing, with former ministers Craig Emerson and Julie Bishop among the Australian delegates.
While Aukus was apparently not directly raised in the Jakarta meeting, it was probably the catalyst for the Chinese side to declare in Beijing that it would be a strategic miscalculation for Australia view China as a threat.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, used the same dialogue event to call for the two sides to move past “twists and turns and difficulties over the past few years”.
The message was echoed by the state-controlled Global Times, which published an editorial saying that if both countries could “effectively manage their disagreements” then it would be a model for better ties between China and other western nations.
While welcoming the dialogue as a good sign, the paper also urged Australia to “overcome internal and external pressures” and argued that “Australia has not done enough in this regard and some mistakes are continuing”.
That sounds like another way of saying “beware of getting too close to the US”.
Incidentally, Albanese will fly to Washington for a state dinner with Joe Biden in late October. That will be a chance for the close allies to swap notes before the prime minister’s much anticipated date with Xi Jinping in Beijing.
