China’s warning to Australian delegation over ‘two-faced’ policy in ‘security-focused’ Beijing talks
In 2023, I had to bite my tongue about what happened inside the room at the ‘Australia-China High Level Dialogue’. Happily, the ‘no reporting’ rules don’t apply to me at this year’s ‘less friendly’, ‘security-focused’ talks.
Days before Anthony Albanese was due to meet Donald Trump in New York, several current and former senior Chinese officials made it known to a high-level Australian delegation visiting Beijing that they are not happy about Canberra’s China policy.
“It was more security focused. It was quite robust. It seemed less friendly,” one Australian delegate told me about their experience this week in Beijing.
On Wednesday, an Australian delegation led by former trade minister Craig Emerson and former Howard government minister Warwick Smith arrived at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to meet a senior representative of China’s central government.
The expectation among many of the Australians was that they were to have an audience with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Wang, Xi Jinping’s top international affairs adviser, had met Emerson and his fellow delegates at the “Australia-China High Level Dialogue” when it last met in Beijing in 2023.
Back then, a huge fuss was made about Wang’s almost hour-long audience with the Australian representatives in an ornate room in the Great Hall of the People. I remember it well – I was one of the Australian delegates that year. His presence, we were told, was a signal that Beijing was warming up ties with Canberra.
This Wednesday there was no Wang. He had a good excuse. He was in Seoul meeting with his South Korean counterpart.
In his place was Tie Ning, a novelist who now serves as vice-chair of the standing committee of China’s National People’s Congress, China’s parliament with Communist Party characteristics. Her title has some weight in the Chinese system, but she has nothing like the clout of Wang.
With all due respect to Australia’s Senate president, it would be like going to meet Foreign Minister Penny Wong and instead being slotted into Sue Lines’s diary.
Was this payback for the pointed absence of Australia’s ambassador to China from Xi’s gargantuan military parade earlier in the month? Australian officials insisted it wasn’t, making much of Tie’s official ranking. The obvious alternative, Vice-Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu, was also said to be out of China.
While the status of the welcome party was ambiguous, the tone-setting editorial in the day’s China Daily was crystal clear: two years on, Beijing has grown frustrated with what it now openly describes as the Albanese government’s “two-faced policy towards China”.
The masthead complained about the Australian government’s continued efforts to shore up its defence ties with America and Japan while continuing to export far more to China than any other country.
“Canberra cannot butter bread on both sides,” the state-owned masthead complained.
“(Australia’s) two-faced policy towards China is not sustainable in the long run.”
How representative was that editorial of Beijing’s views? Well, one of China’s delegates at the “high-level dialogue” was Ji Tao, a member of the China Daily editorial board.
The “high-level dialogue” is called a “1.5 track” meeting in diplomatic jargon. In plain English, it is a meeting held behind closed doors that includes a mixture of serving government officials, retired politicians and people from outside the government, variously in business, industry groups, academia, think tanks and media roles.
It is the peak of its kind in the Australia-China relationship, so the annual meeting is a useful barometer of the state of things. As a delegate at the 2023 meeting, I had to bite my tongue about what happened inside the room. Happily, the “no reporting” rules don’t apply to me this year.
The big day of discussion took place on Thursday at Beijing’s Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. Things began warmly in the opening remarks, made before the assembled media.
Li Zhaoxing, head of the Chinese delegation and honorary president of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, said the two countries should view each other as “partners”, ensure co-operation remained “the mainstay of the relationship”, and manage differences appropriately.
“Direct engagement between Australia and China is fundamental to a constructive relationship,” said Emerson, who had again been chosen by the PM to lead the Australian delegation.
“It enables opportunities to be harnessed and differences to be addressed and managed,” added the former Rudd-Gillard-era minister, who also noted the complementarity between the Australian and Chinese economies in his public remarks.
Then the doors closed and journalists were moved on for the private discussion. Multiple people familiar with the discussion have told me it was not long before “robust” exchanges began.
Even the “people-to-people” session ended up in a pointed debate about operations by Australia and China’s respective navies.
China’s behaviour around Taiwan and in the South China Sea – and the Australian government’s public concerns and actions in response – were the main topics of dispute. When it comes to the People’s Liberal Army’s behaviour in these areas, Australia strongly “disagrees where we must” – and this closed-door forum allows the country’s senior officials to do so with a directness that would be impolitic for an Australian minister.
I am reliably informed that Australia’s ambassador, Scott Dewar, DFAT deputy secretary Elly Lawson and Jennifer Parker, a former Royal Australian Navy officer and now an expert at the ANU National Security College, put the Australian position forward with admirable clarity.
The Chinese delegation included its former long-serving US ambassador, Cui Tiankai (also a former vice-minister of foreign affairs), retired Lieutenant General Chen Xiaogong, a former deputy commander in the PLA air force, and Zhang Junsai, a former ambassador to Australia.
They made a concerted effort to cast Australia’s behaviour in the Indo-Pacific as “provocative”. The Chinese delegates were also much more open in talking about conflict than in recent years.
“It got tense in almost every session,” one delegate told me.
This year’s dialogue took place in what some of the Chinese delegates characterised as a “fluid and chaotic” international environment. Both sides of the table could be in total agreement about that assessment, but there is a huge gulf in what Beijing and Canberra think should be done about it.
For the Australian delegates, the unreliable behaviour of the Trump administration poses uncomfortable questions about some of the country’s biggest strategic bets – above all, AUKUS and the Quad. There is also a wide chasm between the thinking in Trump’s Washington and Albanese’s Canberra on the future of the international trade system and the best approach to addressing climate change.
For the Chinese delegates, they see opportunity in the chaos. “The Chinese are more confident,” one Australian delegate told me.
Canberra, for its part, believes Australia has demonstrated that it can continue its mighty trade relationship with China, all while shoring up security and defence ties with other capitals that share Canberra’s concerns about Beijing’s assertive behaviour.
“We’re the ones adjusting the dial now,” a senior Australian official told me recently.
That observation was not said with hubris. Rather, it was an assertion of Canberra’s increased assuredness in its own agency after China tried – and failed – to break Australia with its epic trade coercion campaign.
It is not only Canberra that scores the 2018-2022 contest that way.
“Australia won,” a senior diplomat from a “like-minded” country told me recently in Beijing. “What policies did Australia back down from? I score it 1-0 to Australia.”
For almost three years, China has clearly been the partner keener to reheat ties (although this week Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and a gaggle of her travelling state Labor MPs have done a spectacular job of undermining Australia’s considered approach with their shameless hawking and tawdry campaigning, all done weeks after Allan’s predecessor, Dan Andrews, made a spectacle of himself at a gathering of useful idiots and dictators in Tiananmen Square).
The federal government, if not always every part of the federation, has pursued the national interest – while continuing actions, and in some cases taking new ones, that infuriate Beijing.
In response, China has huffed and puffed about Australia one day, only to toast it the next – all while Trump’s Washington gives mixed signals about its relationship with Australia and other key Asian allies.
“We’re stepping between elephants,” said one of the Australian delegates in Beijing.
And for another week Australia has escaped untrampled.
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