We are graced on Wednesday morning with a visit to Australia by the Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of Amnesia, Wang Yi. He is to meet our own Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, and other Albanese government dignitaries.
On Thursday, he’s set to meet Paul Keating, private citizen and outspoken critic of the Albanese government’s foreign and defence policies. It’s important to remember who this man is. Wang Yi, that is, not Paul Keating.
Born in 1953, he grew up during the dictatorship of Mao Zedong and has had a flourishing career as a diplomat under the post-Tiananmen dictatorship. Fluent in both English and Japanese, he has been ambassador to Japan (2004-07); director of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office (2008-13), then Xi Jinping’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (2013 to 2022), and again now.
In short, Wang Yi is both a hardliner and a servant of the uber-dictator whose approach to foreign policy has been notably aggressive for well over a decade. Zhao Lijian, the notorious “wolf warrior” of those years, was the mouthpiece, via Wang, of Xi Jinping’s foreign policy attitude.
At a press conference in Ottawa, on June 1, 2016, when asked by Canadian journalist Amanda Connolly about human rights in China, Wang retorted: “Your question was full of prejudice against China and an arrogance that comes from I don’t know where. This is totally unacceptable to me.” Lest we forget.
That’s the man who lands in Canberra on Wednesday morning. That’s the man Paul Keating is very happy to meet, in order to discuss how “mindless” and wrongheaded the Albanese government’s foreign policy is, though heaven knows it’s emollient by any measure. He asked for the meeting, knowing full well Keating has poured scorn on the policies of the very people he will meet on Wednesday.
It should be added that the Australia China Business Council is seizing the opportunity to bring eager members to meet this Chinese Molotov, doubtless seeking to put the independent stance of the Coalition government behind them once and for all and to seek most-favoured-numbskulls status in Beijing.
Wang, like his subordinate in Canberra, Xiao Qian, is a class act and will likely have all too many of them eating out of his hand and bowing and scraping at his feet.
They might do well to remember, however, that at a conference in early July last year, in Qingdao, Wang lectured Japanese and South Korean delegates, asserting that white Westerners were mostly unable to tell the difference between China, Japan and South Korea; and that “no matter how blonde you dye your hair, how sharp you shape your nose, you can never become a European or American, you can never become a Westerner”. Let’s make an East Asia for the East Asians on racial lines was the thrust of his message.
Against all that background, three things might usefully be spelled out in briefing notes for those meeting Wang on his arrival and pondering his planned meeting with Keating. The first is that his mission and his master’s foreign policy are not about friendship with Australia, but about subordinating this country to the imperial and totalitarian global vision of his master in Beijing.
The second is that he, or they, appear to believe it is perfectly appropriate for him to meet in private with a man who has expressed open contempt for the foreign policy of the elected and appointed people he’s meeting, while always insisting that no foreign country, certainly not Australia, should ever intervene in China’s own internal affairs.
The third is a corollary of the second. Xiao Qian and now Wang Yi freely and arrogantly lecture Australians (Xiao has been given a podium at the National Press Club on more than one occasion) about how we ought conduct ourselves – or else. The Keating assignation is of a piece with this arrogance.
Yet when Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary Shingo Yamagami was here (until about a year ago), he was thrice reproved for making clear that Japan and Australia have common security concerns about Xi Jinping’s foreign policy.
In January 2021, over a dinner at the ambassador’s residence, a former Australian ambassador to United States and sometime secretary of defence admonished Yamagami, saying: “You are Japanese ambassador to Australia. You should focus on the Japan-Australian relationship. Don’t get involved with China.”
In June 2021, a Labor heavyweight, presumably Penny Wong, summoned Yamagami to her Parliament House office, following a press article of June 4 that quoted him on the need for a bipartisan approach to China. She talked to him in a reprimanding tone, saying: “Ambassador, I have to caution you. Your remarks are being politically used in this town.”
In late 2022, senior Australian DFAT officials summoned one of Yamagami’s senior colleagues and informed them: ‘We admire Ambassador Yamagami’s speaking out, but Australia’s relations with China are entering into a sensitive phase. So we want the ambassador not to speak on China. Moreover, never ever quote the Opposition Leader’s statement on the Senkakus.’
Yamagami, like Keating, is now a private citizen. The issues to which he drew attention, however, remain salient. They will, or ought, be very much on the table in Canberra: the militarisation of the South China Sea, despite Beijing’s explicit avowal that this would not occur; the constant threats of war against Taiwan; the suppression of civic and political freedoms in Hong Kong; China’s outrageous support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; the (suspended) death sentence imposed on Australian citizen Yang Hengjun; the limitations arbitrarily placed on trade between China and Australia.
Then, updated in Canberra, Wang will have a conversation at Potts Point, with Mahler. But let’s hope, in the spirit of her frank and constructive meeting (her own description) with Wang in New York, Penny Wong is at her best and raises each of these discussion points with firm deliberation. As for the ACBC, may China open to it.
We all want a good relationship with China. It’s what the CCP wants that is the problem.
Paul Monk is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2023), Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018) and The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009) among other books.
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