Sunshine and pandas for Albanese as Beijing turns up the charm and rolls out the diplomatic red carpet
For almost six years, Australia had enraged Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Anthony Albanese’s visit to Beijing marks a new era in Australia-Chinese relations … with caveats | WATCH.
Xi Jinping was in a good mood as Anthony Albanese walked into Beijing’s cavernous Great Hall of the People. The day had already begun well for China’s leader.
Official data released hours earlier showed China’s economy had grown by a faster than expected 5.2 per cent in the second quarter of the year, a welcome sign of resilience after a bruising few months of trade blows with Donald Trump.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s longstanding Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, a frequent visitor to Beijing and “old friend of China”, had dropped by in the morning.
Perhaps no other envoy has spent as much time with Xi.
And now, just before noon, the recently re-elected Prime Minister of Australia had arrived with a huge grin.
For almost six years, Australia had enraged Xi.
Malcolm Turnbull’s government had banned Huawei from Australia’s 5G network before any country in the world, passed a China-focused foreign interference regime, spoke up early in support of the international arbitral tribunal’s decision against Beijing in a South China Sea dispute with The Philippines and blocked Chinese firms from investment in its critical infrastructure.
Then Scott Morrison’s Coalition government had called for an inquiry into the failure of Xi’s government to handle the outbreak of Covid.
China’s leader was furious.
That era of what Beijing euphemistically calls “twists and turns” moved further into the past this week. The Prime Minister’s trip was orchestrated to demonstrate that, after three disciplined years, the government is tiptoeing beyond “stabilisation”. There is now talk of growth in the relationship.
“We’ve stabilised the relationship and we’re developing new relations as well,” Albanese told the Communist Party’s top official in Sichuan, Wang Xiaohui, on Wednesday. That formulation was not quite as emphatic as the urging by China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, to move “beyond stabilisation”, but it was a notable move in that direction.
Chinese officials were visibly happy by that wording and the overwhelmingly positive tone the Prime Minister sustained throughout the six-night visit, the longest since Bob Hawke’s epic four-province trip in 1986 in the sunny years before the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Ambassador Xiao radiated satisfaction when The Australian bumped into him and a colleague as they took an after-dinner stroll on Wednesday along the lively bar district on Chengdu’s Jinjiang river.
THAW IN RELATIONS
Their relaxed faces on encountering an Australian journalist spoke volumes. The day before in the Great Hall had been a big success.
A switch in the Chinese system was flicked ahead of Albanese’s first trip to China in November 2023.
Chinese officials suddenly were meeting their Australian counterparts again after years in the diplomatic freezer. Chinese business figures, ever alert to political signals from Beijing, were quick to follow.
On this trip the Chinese adjusted the lighting to a more intimate setting. Even the editorial writers at Global Times joined in. The notoriously bombastic masthead was soaring in its positivity after Albanese’s two hours with Xi and even longer with Premier Li Qiang.
“Compared with the ‘minefields’ status described by the Global Times editorial three years ago, today’s China-Australia relationship is like a plane flying in the ‘stratosphere’ after passing through the storm zone, and the most turbulent and bumpy period has passed,” the Global Times editorial team said.
Albanese’s meeting with Xi was their fourth. It was also their warmest, according to sources familiar with the exchange.
Things were even friendlier when Albanese and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, and senior Australian officials joined Xi for lunch. China’s leader brought with him a clutch of his top advisers, including Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Vice-Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu (once China’s ambassador to Australia), current Chinese ambassador Xiao, Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and National Development and Reform Commission chairman Zheng Shanjie.
The invitation is what is known in diplomatic language as a Really Big Deal, something well appreciated by Albanese. “I regard the relationship with President Xi as warm and engaging,” he said on his final afternoon in China. “One of the things I find is if you give countries respect, you get it back,” he added.
There has been criticism – some of the most pointed in these pages – about the Prime Minister’s three-city trip, which began with a walk on the Bund in Shanghai with former Socceroos, moved to Beijing for the anchor meetings with Xi and Li, before finishing in the world’s panda capital, Chengdu.
Albanese and his team make no apologies for the length of the itinerary, which included stops at the Great Wall and a panda enclosure, in part to re-create pictures of former Labor prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke.
Albanese also oversaw the first meeting by an Australian prime minister in China of Australia’s four big iron ore exporters, BHP, Rio Tinto, Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue and Gina Rineheart’s Hancock Prospecting, with their giant state-owned Chinese counterparts.
Albanese’s advocates point out that Morrison spent even longer in the US in 2019, during Trump’s first term in the White House. That will not calm the Prime Minister’s most strident detractors.
Their upset is not hard to grasp. This was unquestionably a trip that sent a signal to Washington, and beyond, about the re-elected Albanese government’s attempt to best position Australia for a world in flux after Trump’s return to the White House.
Albanese is of the view that a better relationship with Xi, one of the world’s two most powerful people, is a good thing for Australia. There are loud critics of this approach but, as Peter Varghese, one of Australia’s smartest foreign policy brains, put it this week, the government is navigating “a very different and much tougher world”. There are no easy answers.
Trump revels in his unreliability even with the US’s closest allies and has assaulted the international trading system that modern Australia has thrived in.
“The salad days of Australian foreign policy are over,” Varghese, the former head of Australia’s peak intelligence assessment agency, observed this week.
After years of retrenchment, Australia’s relationship with China is back in a growth phase – up to a point, in certain areas, with caveats.
However, a range of datapoints jars with Albanese’s positivity about the future of the relationship. So far this year, exports to China have dropped by 16 per cent from 2023, falling from $83.2bn in the first five months of the year to $69.6bn, according to Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade statistics. The value of lithium exports has plunged by 80 per cent. Iron ore, worth about 60 per cent of the total, is down 10 per cent.
Australian direct investment in China is even more discordant with Albanese’s sunny message. It has plummeted to a mere $1.6bn from a peak of $15.5bn back in 2019, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data. Albanese’s stabilisation process has not been able to stop the trend, with investment falling by more than 50 per cent since 2023.
FIVE-STAR HOTELS
Even Australia’s diplomatic network in China has been reduced since Albanese’s trip in 2023, before the permanent closure of Australia’s consulate in Shenyang, in China’s northeast. The Shenyang consulate’s closure last December was the first shrinkage of Australia’s diplomatic footprint in China since the Whitlam government recognised Beijing in 1972. The decision is a function of the sharp fall in the numbers of Australians living and working in China today.
Albanese, who was in a determinedly good mood throughout the trip, said he wanted to turn these trends around. “I want to see more direct investment here,” he said at his final press conference in Chengdu on Thursday.
In one of several optimistic speeches given during the week, Albanese said he wanted to see more Australians visit. “So that they get a better understanding of what China is,” he told an audience of mostly Australian business figures and their partners in Shanghai. “(So) they get the same welcome that I have had during my eight visits to China.”
China has certainly been a magnificent host. Albanese and the travelling delegation have been flattered all week in a trip that could hardly be more removed from the lives of all but the super elite of China’s 1.4 billion people. The Australian delegation’s plane – with its white napkin lunch service – landed at VIP airport terminals. Roads were cleared for their motorcades to pass. Well-prepared staff welcomed them at five-star hotels, located in wealthy pockets of three of China’s wealthiest cities, Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu.
An hour’s drive from Beijing, a huge chunk of the Great Wall, majestic with a blue-sky backdrop, was fenced off for a private visit, the summer crowds most tourists experience kept on the other side of a security fence.
An early opening at Chengdu’s panda breeding centre – during panda breakfast – was timed for the furry creatures’ one brief period of activity to coincide with Albanese and Haydon’s arrival.
There are many different Chinas. The country presents a different face for a favoured prime minister than it does to those visitors who come without a private jet and entourage of diplomats waving away the grind of normal life here.
That said, Albanese’s longer than usual visit did allow him and the visiting journalists to see a bit more of the country than is normal on these trips.
It is hard to reconcile portrayals of life in China as a totalitarian dystopia with the happy, relaxed lives the visitors saw of people living in Chengdu, one of the country’s lifestyle capitals. (Things are less happy over the Sichuan border in neighbouring Tibet, a non-Han Chinese majority part of the People’s Republic that so worries Beijing that international journalists are not allowed to enter unless accompanied by Chinese government officials.)
Australia is not the only country wrestling with the difficulty of managing an important economic relationship with an increasingly assertive China while dealing with the most unpredictable White House since the establishment of the US-alliance network. Japan, currently being treated appallingly by the Trump administration, is a US ally in Asia in the same club. So is South Korea.
Australia has never before had such important economic relations with a country that is also such a big security threat. The Albanese government’s response is to accept that China is going to do some things that make Australia uncomfortable but that Canberra believes it can do little about, such as the PLA Navy’s circumnavigation of the country.
“There is no fixed model for a stabilised relationship,” Albanese told the business crowd in Shanghai, recognising that friction was going to continue in the relationship. Albanese’s response is to continue the Turnbull and Morrison government’s efforts to work with allies and partners in the region to try to form groups able to constrain Chinese military power.
The US is supposed to be the leader of this multi-generational project – or so went the plan – but its current self-absorption has rattled its Asian allies.
Albanese has responded by this week accentuating the engage side of the formula Kevin Rudd summarised as “engage and hedge”. However, while he wasn’t shouting about it while in China, Albanese and his advisers were well aware that throughout his trip the largest Talisman Sabre military exercise was taking place in Australian territory with 40,000 troops from 19 countries.
The Australian-led exercises, which include the US and most of the region less China, were not preparing for potential military conflict with Tonga.
”China sees itself as confident,” Albanese said at the end of his trip. His hope is that more dialogue, built on an investment in personal relations with Xi, will make it less likely that China’s confidence switches to hubris and then into various nightmarish future military scenarios. “I want a more stable and secure world,” the Prime Minister said.
But the hedging continues – just in case.
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