Time ripe for a diplomatic reset
The new Chinese ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, can be assured of finding fertile ground if he really does want to see an improvement in relations between our two countries.
As Scott Morrison repeatedly has made clear during the past two years, Australia is no less keen for an improvement, and Mr Xiao, when he arrived on Wednesday, was right to note the significance of 2022 as the 50th anniversary of enduring diplomatic ties between Beijing and Canberra.
After the strains that developed under his firebrand “wolf warrior” predecessor, Cheng Jingye, Mr Xiao will find a ready audience for his view that the China-Australia relationship is at a “critical juncture facing many difficulties and challenges as well as enormous opportunities”.
It is early days and probably wise not to read too much into the views of Mr Xiao, a career diplomat who most recently was China’s ambassador in Jakarta. But it would be hard to see his arrival statement as anything other than potentially the most promising public sign yet that the bilateral relationship could be on the mend.
Neither side should be under any illusion, however, about what it is going to take to get things back to what Mr Xiao described as a “sound, steady Chinese-Australia relationship (that) serves the fundamental interests of the two countries and the two people and contributes to the prosperity and stability of the Asia-Pacific region”.
The Prime Minister’s sensible call in April 2020 for a full investigation into the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the trigger that enraged Beijing, remains as valid now as it was then.
Australia largely has weathered the storm caused by Beijing’s irrational and ultimately self-defeating imposition of $20bn in trade embargoes targeted at our beef, wine, lobster and barley industries. Yet the depth of the entirely unnecessary fracture in the relationship is seen constantly in matters such as the diplomatically indecorous failure of Chinese trade ministers to return calls from our Trade Minister, Dan Tehan, that he made in January last year.
The fraught relationship between two countries that have been close trading partners for many decades, to the immense benefit of both, is ripe for new, sensible and realistic thinking that is unlike the approach of Mr Cheng and his Foreign Ministry wolf warrior comrades in Beijing.
Hopefully, the welcome arrival of Mr Xiao signals at least a start on that new thinking and the process of resumed dialogue.
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