The Australia-China exchange that started with a kiss

Laura Tingle held out her right hand to greet China’s deputy ambassador Wang Xining, expecting him to shake it but, to her surprise, he bent forward to kiss it.

Laura Tingle with China’s deputy ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

As the room began to fill ahead of last Wednesday’s National Press Club address, moderator Laura Tingle approached China’s deputy ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, to greet him.

The star ABC journalist held out her right hand, expecting him to shake it but, to her surprise, he bent forward to kiss it. Tingle wore a polite smile, but admits she was caught off-guard by the gesture.

“I didn’t hold my hand out for him to kiss it. I held it to shake his hand, and he did that (the kiss). Which was rather a surprise,” Tingle told The Australian on Sunday.

“I was as nonplussed about that as I was about his reference to the Australia-China relationship being like Brunhilde throwing herself on to Siegfried’s funeral pyre.”

Tingle herself tweeted a picture of the incident, noting that Mr Wang had observed a “multidisciplinary approach to diplomacy”. It is not Chinese custom for a man to greet a person he does not know with a kiss.

But the incident drew little media attention until the following day, when the above photo was published in The Australian.

That prompted a firestorm on social media, with many commenters calling out Mr Wang for inappropriate behaviour, while others took aim at Tingle. Attempts to reach Mr Wang on the weekend, or any representative of the Chinese embassy, were unsuccessful.

Jane Golley, the director of ANU’s taxpayer-funded Centre on China in the World, who shared the stage at the NPC on Wednesday with Tingle, Mr Wang and the Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith, said she found the hand kiss greeting “a little bit awkward”.

“I guess it’s still a bit confusing because of COVID; people are still unsure how to greet one another,” Professor Golley said.

“But it did seem a little bit awkward today.”

Tingle didn’t seem perturbed by the pre-speech incident, enjoying lively exchanges with Mr Wang on the NPC stage.

“We went on to have a robust discussion about a range of China issues, and I asked him a series of robust questions about the fate of a Uighur man married to an Australian citizen who has just been jailed for 25 years without any documentation about his alleged crime, among other things,” Tingle told The Australian.

“Strangely, I regarded the discussion as somewhat more important than the hand kissing.”

China strongly denies human rights abuses against Uighurs, arguing that facilities branded detention camps in the West are in fact vocational training centres.

Mr Wang told the NPC that China was “a positive force in the world”, dismissing a question about an Australian Uighur family seeking information on a relative who had been sentenced to 25 years’ jail in Xinjiang.

“I don’t know every case … whether they are of any particular ethnic group,” he said.

Originally published as The Australia-China exchange that started with a kiss