After years of backroom lobbying Anthony Albanese has scored a one-on-one meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping in Bali.
Xi has kept Australian prime ministers in a deep freeze for five years, so the meeting is a very welcome development. After all, China is our major trading partner or, to put it another way, our best customer.
Our exporters have been hit with trade sanctions worth $20 billion; our wine, grain and meat producers are desperate to sees these bans eased and lifted completely.
The signs of a thaw are unmistakeable especially after China’s No.2 Premier Li Keqiang spontaneously approached Albanese in full view of the cameras before the two joined other leaders for a formal dinner at the ASEAN meeting in Phnom Penh.
Albanese says Li warmly recalled the rapidly approaching 50th anniversary of then prime minister Gough Whitlam’s Labor government establishing diplomatic relations and incidentally – like the United States and other Western nations accepting Taiwan as part of China – the one China policy.
Nothing, of course, is as simple as it seems.
Australia is wedged between its closest strategic ally the United States and its biggest trading partner China.
But wait there’s more.
Changing landscape
Since 1972 Australia-Chinese people-to-people relations have changed exponentially.
There are now an estimated 1.3 million Australians of Chinese heritage and as one Liberal, still counting the cost of the last election bemoans: “They vote.”
The loss of Chisholm and Bennelong top the list for a Chinese voter backlash against Scott Morrison’s demonising of China as an immediate strategic threat, along with his government leading the world blaming Beijing for COVID-19.
So whatever the implications for our relations with Washington, there are significant domestic pressures on Albanese to make a better job of sorting out issues than his failed predecessor Scott Morrison.
There’s no doubt both major parties see the US alliance as absolutely critical to Australia’s security.
Miscalculation
Morrison’s miscalculation was not understanding the “yellow peril” threat of invasion from the north, so potent at federation and in the immediate post-war period, has morphed in multicultural Australia.
The backdrop is no longer the vestiges of “White Australia”: How could it be with significant immigration not only of Chinese but also significant numbers from Asia more widely and South Asia?
Foreign Minister Penny Wong in her Whitlam Oration at the weekend recalling the Labor prime minister’s historic overtures to China also noted how Whitlam’s Liberal opponents accused him of being a “pawn” of Communist China and a traitor.
Wong quoted the Liberal prime minister at the time, Billy McMahon, saying “China has been a political asset for the Liberal Party in the past and is likely to remain one in the future”.
Morrison and his defence minister Peter Dutton were clearly still banking on resurrecting this anachronistic view.
Historic lesson
Back in 1972, McMahon’s miscalculation was that the Nixon administration was also embarking on recognition and détente with the Asian giant.
How that wheel has turned.
The Biden administration now sees China as a threat to its dominant position in the world and has embarked on active containment, which includes what looks like an escalating trade war beginning with a ban on American microchip exports.
Former Labor PM Paul Keating wants the Albanese government to adopt a much more independent foreign policy and not to be drawn into Washington’s power plays.
The harsh irony is the United States was a major beneficiary of China’s trade sanctions of Australia, with American producers and farmers getting a lion’s share of the trade denied us.
Wong accepts that the China of today is “not the same as the China of the 1970s or even the 2000s but the Albanese government is determined to “stabilise” the relationship and admits it will take time.
In the process the Foreign Minister is promising to navigate differences in the national interest and “not to exploit them for political gain”.
However, if she and the PM manage to pull this off there could be considerable political gain, taking the last election as a guide.
Challenge remains
Still to be seen is how the Australian government manages to assure Beijing that its ramped-up strategic engagements with the US – like the basing of B-52 nuclear-capable bombers here are defensive rather than offensive – will be a very tricky undertaking.
Former diplomat Bruce Haigh believes we have already become a vassal state of Washington with our alarmist views on the competition between the two superpowers not shared in South-East Asia.
Albanese and Wong insist they are acting in Australia’s sovereign interests, President Xi will probably mount the same argument in regard to China’s behaviour.
Let’s hope all sides see diplomacy as the safest solution.
Paul Bongiorno AM is a veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery, with more than 40 years’ experience covering Australian politics
