Xi Jinping turned up to his meeting with Anthony Albanese with a smile, a Gough Whitlam story and a clear desire to take the heat out of the bilateral relationship.
The Chairman of Everything’s hour-and-a bit meeting with Australia’s Prime Minister went about as well as you could hope for an audience with the most powerful Chinese Communist leader since Mao Zedong.
Let’s be clear: Australia’s relationship with China has not moved into some post-friction fantasy-land after Monday evening’s meeting in the Great Hall of the People.
But Australia’s Prime Minister had reason to be in a good, if far from triumphant, mood after one of the most important international meetings of his 18 months in office.
“It was a very positive meeting,” Mr Albanese told those of us journalists allowed into China to report on the trip at a post-meeting event at the Australian Embassy in Beijing.
That positivity was helped by a second meeting that took place hours earlier, not far away, in Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse between the two countries’ foreign ministers, Penny Wong and Wang Yi.
Australian officials present at that working lunch told me it was the most freewheeling the two have had. Mr Wang, in a welcome change, wasn’t reading from a script.
Rather, the two had something approaching a genuine exchange – albeit with Chinese characteristics – over a host of thorny issues the two countries decided were better kept away from the leaders’ meeting. For all the smiles, there is no shortage of those.
“It’s not like: ‘You give us beef, we give you the South China Sea’,” one senior government official told me.
Access for live lobsters won’t make Beijing’s threats of war on Taiwan any less ominous. The end of a tariff of Australian red wine won’t reduce Canberra’s concern about the persecutive of China’s Uighers, or make the bounties on the heads of Australian Hong Kong-ers any less odious, or paper over the vicious detention of Dr Yang Hengjun.
While there remains a wealth of things Australia and China disagree on, it’s a good development that our two countries are now disagreeing in person, and at a senior level.
Mr Albanese has had the good fortune of being Australia’s Prime Minister when China wants to improve relations.
The Prime Minister has benefited greatly from not being Scott Morrison, who Mr Xi’s government has decreed was almost entirely responsible for the bilateral implosion.
However, the PM, his Foreign Minister and the Australian government do deserve credit for skilfully managing that opportunity.
Project “stabilisation” has succeeded more than its architects thought possible. They have made Australia’s relationship with China significantly less bad.
Sure, the Whitlam as visionary stuff has been overdone on this trip. Switching recognition to China in 1972 was far less exceptional than many of the Labor sympathising historians who have written about the period assert.
But it has created a space to engage, which Xi continued on Monday evening as he told the Prime Minister about meeting Mr Whitlam in the 1980s, during the Labor legend’s long post-prime ministerial wilderness. Back then, Xi was a mere regional government official.
A smiling PM @AlboMP makes the front of today’s @ChinaDaily
— Will Glasgow (@wmdglasgow) November 6, 2023
The PM gets top billing in this story — but as you can see, President Xi had more than Australia on his mind as four leaders passed by on the Great Hall of the People conveyor belt (1/3) pic.twitter.com/ibBpnxXPsn
There has been some anxiety among the usual suspects about Australia’s relationship with China modestly improving.
It is quite reasonable that so many Australians continue to distrust China’s government. They are not short of material.
But perhaps we also shouldn’t lose sight of improvements, however modest.
That Xi brought up the animated movie Kung Fu Panda in his meeting with Mr Albanese doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things. Nor does their exchange over pandas and Tasmanian devils.
“I pointed out that whilst I liked Tasmanian devils, they’re probably not as cute as cute as pandas,” said Mr Albanese.
However, that the two leaders had the meeting does matter. Talking to China is better than not talking, during this dangerous phase of China’s adolescence as a great power in the 21st century.
Many people in Australia remain concerned about a range of positions taken by Beijing. That’s quite understandable.
But it is hard to see how Australia isn’t better off advocating those concerns directly to China’s leaders – noting of course that it was Beijing that ended those high-level talks.
Future meetings between Australian prime ministers and China’s ruler-for-life are unlikely to be as warm as Monday evening’s highly choreographed exchange.
Still, it will be a good thing if they keep happening.
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