PLA shoots down Australia’s ‘post-stabilisation’ era with China
At the end of his three-city trip to China in July and following his lunch in Beijing with Xi Jinping, Anthony Albanese indicated his government was open to tiptoeing beyond that diplomatic epithet.
“We’ve stabilised the relationship and we’re developing new relations as well,” the Prime Minister said in scripted comments in Chengdu in a meeting with a senior Communist Party official.
Albanese repeated the sentiment in one of his in-flight interviews on board his Royal Australian Air Force plane on the way home, saying his government was now “adding layers” to Australia’s relationship with China.
Australia’s China-focused business lobby applauded the shift, while members of the country’s China-fixated security community worried.
That apparent increase in ambition was absent after Albanese met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Malaysia on Monday, his first meeting with a member of Xi’s leadership group since his July trip.
The deflation seems to be the result of the Soviet-designed PLA-AF Su-35 fighter aircraft, which eight days ago shot a flare near an RAAF P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in airspace over the South China Sea. It was not “beyond stabilisation” behaviour.
Defence Minister Richard Marles and his department called it “unsafe and unprofessional”.
The PM raised it in his meeting on Monday with Li on the sidelines of an ASEAN summit. Perhaps more significantly, it seems to have led to him to adjust the dial on the relationship from “stabilised” back to “stabilising”.
While the relationship with China had “improved” since the Morrison government, the PM noted after his meeting with Li, it remains one that “is stabilising”.
While the “beyond stabilisation” green shoots appear to have been pruned, the Albanese government’s China formula looks as durable as any put forward by Canberra since John Howard was prime minister.
After more than half a decade of extreme volatility, Australia’s relationship seems to have reached a dynamic equilibrium with Xi’s China. That doesn’t mean that events don’t impact it – as demonstrated by the recent Wolf Warrior PLA pilot – but the Albanese government’s formula allows for friction. Indeed, it expects it.
Some had hoped for an end to the PM’s China troika in his second term. The indication from Albanese in Malaysia is we should expect to hear it for as long as he is in The Lodge. “I’ve said repeatedly, we must co-operate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in our national interests,” he said. As with Howard, Albanese casts the relationship pragmatically. While he staged photo-ops to honour Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke on his recent China trip, he is avoiding their sentimentality.
“It’s a relationship that’s important for Australian jobs. It’s as simple as that,” he repeated on Monday.
Of course, it isn’t as simple as that – as the PM’s itinerary this crowded October has spectacularly demonstrated.
On Sunday, Mr Albanese had a “very warm” first meeting with Japan’s new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi. “Japan is such an important relationship for us,” he said, citing economic and security issues.
It isn’t a relationship that needs a low-expectations mantra, such as Canberra has created to speak about China. When it comes to Japan, there is no tension for Australia between the economic and strategic arms of the relationship.
No country in Asia is a more important partner for Australia to work with as it tries to shape a region in which territorial rules are respected – in other words, one that constrains China’s great power ambitions.
Obviously, Albanese’s China-focused agenda with Donald Trump in the White House last week made clear that there’s a bit more than trade in mind when Australia thinks about Beijing.
And while there has been much sniping that Trump was only in Malaysia because of his Nobel Peace prize ambitions, his itinerary revealed greater ambition. American presidents routinely miss meetings of ASEAN and APEC. That Trump is attending both, and squeezing in a meeting with Takaichi in Tokyo before travelling to South Korea, is good for Australia.
Let us hope he makes it a habit for the rest of his term.
In the months after the PM’s July trip, there has been grumbling from Beijing about Australia’s “two-faced policy towards China”.
At least in his public comments and in the early accounts released by the Chinese on Monday, Li did not push that line in Malaysia.
There was also nothing said publicly about AUKUS, which last week got Trump’s endorsement. Nor anything sharp on the $13bn rare earths and critical minerals pipeline that Australia and the US have announced in an effort to end Beijing’s monopoly of the trade.
Indeed, Albanese and Li both beamed at each other in front of the cameras before starting their seventh meeting together. Despite the recent PLA-shaped, “stabilisation” hiccup, the PM said that “once again, it was a positive meeting”.
“Dialogue is about advancing our interests, managing differences but also dealing with each other in a frank and clear way,” he said.
In his prime ministerial autobiography Lazarus Rising, Howard spoke of his “Australian way of dealing with the Chinese”.
“To focus on the things we had in common and to put aside those things that could never be resolved between the two nations,” is how he put it.
By the Turnbull and Morrison governments, that approach seemed anachronistic. But in this, the Albanese government’s fourth year, it seems more and more familiar.
As if to underline the point, next week, all of a fortnight after the latest trouble in the South China Sea, Trade Minister Don Farrell will fly to Shanghai to meet his Chinese counterpart and, for the third consecutive year, attend China’s biggest trade show, the China International Import Expo.
Indeed, it may not be long until the Albanese government’s talk of a “post-stabilisation” era returns.
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It seems the People’s Liberation Army Airforce has shot down fledgling talk of Australia moving into a “post-stabilisation” era with China – for this week at least.