China visit is welcome but we must not forget lessons of the recent past

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is a welcome visitor and it is no surprise, as Will Glasgow reported on Tuesday, that senior Australian business figures are scrambling to meet him. After a hiatus of seven years since Mr Wang’s previous trip, including the four years of self-defeating retaliatory sanctions imposed by Beijing aimed at crippling our economy, it would be remarkable if that were not the case.

But business and political leaders alike need to be clear-eyed and realistic about expectations of Mr Wang’s visit. Optimism about the bilateral relationship is understandable following Beijing’s decision that with the advent of the Albanese government China’s national interest would be served best by gradually lifting the sanctions imposed in 2020 after Scott Morrison made his perfectly reasonable call for an international inquiry into the genesis of the pandemic.

It should not be forgotten, however, that since 2013 Mr Wang has been at President Xi Jinping’s side as the communist regime’s foreign policy chief. He has been the architect of the bullying and coercion that have been the hallmark of interventions it has made across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Mr Wang was a key figure in the decision made by Beijing in 2020 to launch its trade war against our country and was fiercely combative in defending the move.

With Mr Wang at the helm, China’s Foreign Ministry embarked on an outrageous campaign of denigration against Australia that went way beyond the realms of normal diplomatic point-scoring. That reached a particularly abysmal low in November 2020 when his “wolf warrior” ministry published a totally fake image of an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife under the throat of an Afghan child under the caption “Don’t be afraid, we are coming to bring you peace”.

It may now be inconvenient to remind Mr Wang and members of the Albanese government of the communist regime’s long record of intense hostility towards Australia. But it is a record that should not be overlooked, especially by those who, for business reasons, are falling over each other to embrace Mr Wang.

Hopefully, the “bad old days” following Beijing’s launch of its irrational trade war against us have indeed passed or are in the process of doing so. But no one should be under any illusion about China’s potential, with all the same actors, including Mr Xi and Mr Wang, still in place in Beijing, to do the same thing again. Business putting all its eggs in the Chinese basket before the pandemic turned out to be a mistake. That is even more so the case now.

Only Paul Keating, with his starry-eyed, entirely partisan view of the unerring, wholesome goodness of the communist regime, even when it comes to the AUKUS pact that is so vital to Australia’s security and that of democracies across the Indo-Pacific, seems to believe otherwise. But he is being disingenuous. With what Ben Packham reported on Monday is a move straight out of the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook, Mr Keating is being wheeled out for a meeting with Mr Wang that, as Packham wrote, is potentially inflammatory and “could upstage the diplomat’s meetings with (Penny) Wong and Anthony Albanese”. Mr Keating should do better than to allow himself to be used in that way.

In New Zealand earlier this week, Mr Wang reportedly sought to persuade the new Christopher Luxon government to abandon efforts to be part of AUKUS. It remains to be seen whether he succeeded. But his attempt to do so underlines the need for caution and realism – and not to be irrationally starry-eyed when it comes to rebuilding Australia’s relationship with Beijing.