Paul Keating appears to be a willing partner in Chinese charade

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Paul Keating says he supports Labor’s move to end “counter-productive baiting” of China, but he remains curiously willing to provoke senior party figures.

In his latest missive from his Potts Point mansion, Keating made the astonishing claim that he had backed Penny Wong in her attempts to stabilise Australia-China relations.

His statement on Monday confirmed he had accepted an invitation to meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Sydney this week – an inflammatory move that could upstage the diplomat’s meetings with Wong and Anthony Albanese.

This is the same former Labor PM who accused Wong a fortnight ago of deploying her “deeply concerned frown to rattle the China can”. And who could forget his attack on Wong last year, accusing her of speaking in “platitudes” and “failing to add one iota of substance” to securing peace between China and the US.

Wang’s request for an audience with Keating – revealed by The Australian on Monday – is straight out of the Chinese Communist Party playbook. Senior Chinese officials often call on sympathetic former leaders in the countries they travel to, just as they seek out supporters in the Australian-Chinese business communities. It sends a signal to the host government and the Chinese domestic audience about China’s wider influence.

But it’s a particularly bold move in this case, given Labor’s relatively accommodating position on China and the scale of Keating’s attacks on Wong. As China watcher Clive Hamilton has observed, Keating is one of Beijing’s “most committed advocates”, arguing human rights are a Western concept that doesn’t apply to China, and lauding the CCP as “the best government in the world in the last 30 years”.

Labor figures privately dismiss the former PM as “yesterday’s man”. But the 80-year-old former leader still has influence in the party.

Jim Chalmers speaks to him regularly, and his strident anti-AUKUS views are shared by many of Labor’s rank and file.

The optics of the Wang-Keating meeting are terrible for both Wong and Albanese as they try to recalibrate Australia’s China relationship without undermining ties with the US.

The Albanese government’s position on China is really the best that Beijing could expect, given Beijing’s hostile treatment of Australia in recent years. It gave China an off-ramp to de-escalate the tensions between the countries, and it refrains from openly criticising Beijing.

Wong herself continues to speak in veiled terms about China’s threatening behaviour, warning of “destabilising provocative and coercive actions” in a recent speech to ASEAN leaders, rather than calling out Beijing by name.

This wasn’t enough for Keating, who attacked what he described as a “mindless pro-American stance”.

He was once a ruthless political performer, but the politics of the China debate seems to elude the former PM.

The Coalition would leap on any hint of capitulation to Beijing, painting Labor as weak on national security at a time of unprecedented threat.

For its part, China wants to have its cake and eat it too. It will take Wong and Albanese’s careful statements on the bilateral relationship as a show of respect, while using Keating to amplify its own attacks on Australian and US policy.

It’s hard to believe Keating is an unwitting party in the charade.