Xi’s charm offensive traps Albanese between an old ally and a new friend
Labor’s method is to promote good outcomes with China and the US, yet the time will come – and it is soon approaching – when the contradiction leads to a showdown.
Xi Jinping is investing in Anthony Albanese – investing in charm, trade and pressure. Albanese’s six-day visit to China sees him assume political ownership of our expanding China ties with their benefits and risks, a restoration of relations secured largely on terms and conditions favourable to Beijing.
China rolled out the red carpet for Albanese. Its tactics of seduction and pressure on Australia fit into Beijing’s drive to deepen China-Australia mutual interests, weaken our security ties with the US and promote regional acquiescence to China’s aspirations as a hegemonic power.
The transformation of the relationship from breakdown under Scott Morrison in 2020 to mutual restoration under Albanese in 2025 is one of the most remarkable reversals in Australian foreign policy in the past several decades. China’s media praised Albanese and dismissed Morrison.
But Albanese’s prize comes wrapped in booby traps. For Xi, the so-called stabilisation that Albanese describes is already obsolete. China’s charm comes with growing demands – and Albanese knows this. He is positive yet wary. The reality cannot be disguised – Labor’s success in re-establishing relations means Albanese has a vested interest in their promotion and preservation. This is the exact leverage President Xi seeks.
Here is the great conundrum of the relationship: the more ties are strengthened in trade, enterprise and people-to-people links, the more Australia’s dependency on China grows and the more sway Beijing accumulates. The Chinese locomotive has an economic power that makes our official policy of trade diversification a daunting job.
The positive optics of the visit – invoking Gough Whitlam at the Great Wall, generous lunches and dinners, compulsory panda diplomacy – cannot disguise the unprecedented dilemma China constitutes for Australia: while Beijing has abandoned its previous campaign of coercion, it has not abandoned any of its strategic goals.
Xi, for the time being with Australia, has substituted seduction for intimidation – smart move. His tactics have changed, his strategy is unchanged. What happens if and when Xi decides that Albanese isn’t delivering?
Beijing’s behaviour shows it has only intensified its strategic goals: running an economic, technological and military strategy to outmuscle the US and replace America as the primary regional power; weakening the US alliance system in the Indo-Pacific; and securing the incremental acquiescence of countries including Australia to its regional dominance.
Former Defence Department analyst and critic of the AUKUS agreement Hugh White told Inquirer: “China’s strategic ambitions in Asia are fundamentally different from Australia’s view about how the region should be. Our vision is that the US should remain the primary player or a primary player.
“But China’s fundamental ambition is to push the US out of Asia and take its place. No matter how we manage this day-to-day diplomatic tension and how successfully we manage it, the fundamental conflict remains the same.”
The key to Albanese’s visit is to pretend the ultimate conflict doesn’t exist – yet everyone knows it does exist.
Labor’s method is to promote good outcomes with China and the US, yet the time will come – and it is soon approaching – when the contradiction leads to a showdown. Albanese, unsurprisingly, is governed by the needs of today, not the uncertainties of tomorrow.
Albanese told China’s leaders that stabilisation would drive “greater engagement” – in trade, tourism, education, culture, climate change, green steel and better investment outcomes. The aim is greater alignment of national interests. While his usual formula included “disagreeing where we must”, public disagreement is largely off the agenda. Labor runs a “softly, softly” stance, reluctant in the extreme to criticise China.
Both sides played down the differences, from Taiwan to ignoring Albanese’s pledge to take back Darwin Port ownership. Albanese raised China’s lack of notice over live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea and apparently was rebuffed. In his public comments Albanese praised the removal of trade “impediments” on exports of cotton, copper, coal, timber, hay, barley, wine, red meat and rock lobster – as though this was an act of China’s generosity, not the abandonment of its coercive, illegal, trade retaliation aimed to break the political will of the Morrison government, a tactic that singularly failed.
Yet its legacy may benefit China as a reminder of what China might do if crossed. China’s coercion against Australia documents for a Labor government the risks of offending China’s national interest. Don’t think Labor doesn’t feel this.
Former China correspondent and Lowy Institute fellow Richard McGregor highlighted Xi’s investment in Albanese: “Albanese was given hours with the top Chinese leadership in one-on-one meetings and talks over lunch; few Western leaders have done so recently.
“China is calculating that Albanese will be in office for some years and the restored relationship can go beyond Albanese’s view of ‘stabilisation’ into something more substantial.”
There is no question that this six-day visit is a significant event, laying the basis for an expanded relationship, yet its ultimate meaning is far more ominous.
McGregor said: “The significance of Albanese’s visit might be that the days of Australia’s successful reconciliation of both China and America are coming to an end. This task is getting much harder. China will make more demands of Australia while the AUKUS agreement binds us into deeper military ties with the US. It is hard to see how we can keep riding these two bikes without the risk of collision. What does China do when the US nuclear submarines start rotating out of Perth? There is no apparent answer to what comes next.”
White offered a similar warning: “Australia has always wanted to persuade the Americans we support them against China and persuade China that we aren’t really doing that. This has been the heart of Australian diplomacy since John Howard and for a long time it worked. But those days are now running out.”
White said Albanese’s visit meant “Australia-China relations are heading in a positive direction and the settlement with China that Albanese has established is pretty sustainable” – but this only worked if Labor recast its ties with the US by opting out of any Taiwan conflict and extricated itself from the consequences of AUKUS.
Albanese, on the contrary, is pledged to the US alliance, to AUKUS and a strategic partnership with the US. His conservative critics who dispute this are clueless about Albanese – he wants stability with both the US and China – but the days of that stability are coming to an end.
This is the real challenge. And it is where Australia is actually clueless.
The China that Whitlam and Bob Hawke dealt with successfully is long gone. Even the China that Tony Abbott engaged in 2014 is vastly changed.
What was the purpose of Albanese invoking Whitlam’s glory days from the early 1970s, half a century ago? It may work for domestic politics but it is farcical as any sort of China model today. Does Albanese not actually grasp this?
President Xi has transformed China. He has militarised the South China Sea; pioneered an economic and technological policy to achieve superiority over the US; promoted a strategy of creating client states across the region; united with Russia in a closer partnership vital in assisting its war in Ukraine; tightened Communist Party control within China; imposed tighter controls over business; made clear he is ready to use force to take Taiwan; and engaged in a massive military build-up, both conventional and nuclear.
Pivotal to Xi’s strategy is deceiving governments and analysts about what is happening in front of their eyes. For Australia, expanding and deepening relations with Xi’s China is entirely different from the highly sensible policies of Whitlam and Hawke. Yet there seems little or no sign that Albanese grasps this apart from his repeating the traditional rhetoric that Australia and China have “different political systems” and “different values”. This is a truism; it is not the China challenge of today.
That is about power and sovereignty; it is about compromising Australian sovereignty, undermining our ability to shape our own destiny and driving this nation to the point where our governments routinely take the decisions that China prefers.
Some business figures get this, but others are blind; witness Andrew Forrest, who told the media during the visit the task was to strengthen the bilateral relationship “and yes, security becomes a distraction”.
What has happened to the foreign policy and national security advisory process in Canberra? What advice did Albanese get before this visit? How does he intend to expand the relationship with China but safeguard national security from China’s repeated foreign and technological interference? The Labor government gives the Australian public nothing on the most vital questions in this relationship beyond sterile talking points. How does the government envisage its future management of the China relations with its mix of advantages and risks? The only conclusion is this government cannot tackle the critical issues that Australia faces.
Does Albanese ever listen to Kevin Rudd on China? As for the Coalition, does it ever bother to read Rudd? Presumably not. In Rudd’s 604-page book On Xi Jinping, he penetrates to the essence of Xi’s ideological quest to change China’s national direction, internally and externally. Rudd describes this a “decisive turn to a more Leninist party, a more Marxist economy, or a more nationalist and assertive international policy”.
Rudd documents at length the elements of Xi’s more aggressive policy, saying his ideology “still calls for maximum preparedness for the real-world possibility of confrontation and conflict with America”.
Rudd outlines Xi’s major expansion of China’s nuclear weapons; his game plan to use artificial intelligence in military rivalry with the US; his preparations to take Taiwan by force if necessary; his campaign to drive the region to accept China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea; his efforts to undermine Japan’s and South Korea’s ties with the US; his leveraging economic clout to make China “the indispensable economic partner of every region of the world except the United States” and to undermine any “rationale for continuing US military alliances”. Rudd says Xi sees making Beijing the “undisputed economic capital of East Asia” is a strategic condition “for eroding the political underpinnings of US regional military arrangements”.
Question: does any of this analysis ever get to Albanese?
Albanese’s visit merely highlights the essential and unresolved dilemmas that Australia faces. The economic reality is that President Xi and Premier Li Qiang offer Albanese an opportunity he can hardly reject. China’s leaders are focused on the big picture. Xi said China wanted to “push the bilateral relationship further” and “no matter how the international landscape may evolve” the two nations should uphold this new direction “unswervingly”. That is, Australia and China should be tied together. Li talked about the “new momentum” in relations.
Yet the language conceals the reality. Australia and China aren’t tied together, though Albanese’s method of minimising any public criticism of China only distorts the picture. As McGregor says: “With Trump in the White House, China is back to the game of a decade ago or so ago, when they hoped they could use the massive economic partnership to prise Australia away from the US”, and while “Albanese will disappoint Xi on that issue” Beijing will keep working at the job.
The reality is that the Albanese government is standing firm on removing Darwin Port from its Chinese owners, it maintains its naval transitions through the South China Sea, conducts exercises off The Philippines with Japan and the US, and above all upholds the AUKUS agreement.
That’s a suite of positions that China loathes but is prepared to temper its views about in the hope of making progress with Albanese courtesy of pressure, tangible enticements and charm.
And Albanese was charmed – too charmed.
It is a story we have seen before. Whitlam’s visits to China in 1973 as prime minister and in 1971 as opposition leader, laying the basis for the establishment of diplomatic relations, were epic events. This is the legitimate stuff of Labor legend. The risk is creating the false suggestion that Australia can re-create such glory days. But they are gone in a far harsher and tougher Australia-China relationship.
To be fair to Albanese, he tried to negotiate a middle path, applying to China his usual refrain “not getting ahead of ourselves”. He described his personal relations with Xi as “warm and engaging” but dodged the question on whether he trusted Xi, saying instead “nothing that he has said to me, has he not fulfilled”. Asked whether he believed Australia could win in the “strategic competition” it has used to characterise relations, Albanese chose the path of evasion.
Reflecting on the visit, White said: “Albanese in his first term wanted to avoid the appearance of going too far with China and exposing himself to domestic criticism for being too soft. But he has moved on from that. I believe this is a significant visit because it shows Albanese far more confident about warming up ties with China without paying any domestic political price. I think China has got what it wanted from Albanese’s visit but I don’t think what it wanted has been to Australia’s disadvantage.”
This would accord with Albanese’s analysis. But as White recognises, the pivotal question remains: what happens when Albanese fails to satisfy Xi’s demands?
Albanese’s visit confirms that the security hawks who insist that the Prime Minister prioritise security over economics are preaching a doomed cause. This is hardly a revelation.
Trade Minister Don Farrell has said our China trade is worth nearly 10 times our US trade and provides 25 per cent of our export dollars. Australia won’t decouple from China. It won’t bow to any US pressure to limit economic ties with China. The core position was enunciated by Farrell post-election: “We don’t want to do less business with China, we want to do more business with China.”
That’s Albanese’s mission, tied to a domestic political spin. Hence the business delegation with him.
What will the Trump administration make of Albanese’s visit, if it has time to make anything? There is one certainty. The architect of the AUKUS review, anti-China hawk and Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, will become only more suspicious of Australia. The juxtaposition of Albanese’s six days in China with its leaders and without any meeting with Trump creates an optic that won’t help Albanese or Australia.
The irony is that Albanese has put China relations on a stable forward path when American relations are clouded in uncertainty courtesy of Trump’s punitive tariffs, his unpredictability, the AUKUS review and speculation about our stance on Taiwan.
There is an urgent need for a Trump-Albanese meeting to bring clarity to the issues that now impinge on the alliance.
The pivotal question for Australia is how US policy in Asia will be sorted. That means a resolution of the obvious split in the Trump administration. That’s between the conventional anti-China hawks who want strategic deterrence against Beijing and the isolationist lobby – with Trump as its likely proponent – who believe in economic and technology rivalry with China but shun any notion of military conflict over Taiwan or anywhere else involving China.
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