‘Don’t kowtow to Beijing’, PM told

Australia risks being ‘supplicant’ from the outset if it pushes for an official state visit to China by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison greets Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in June. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

Top China experts say Scott Morrison is right not to be too eager to make an official visit to Beijing, amid Labor claims he has failed to balance sufficiently Australia’s US and Chinese relationships.

Lowy Institute senior fellow Richard McGregor said it was important Australia did not give up too much in seeking an invitation to visit China as an official guest of Xi Jinping.

“It’s not unlike human relationships. If you’re too eager, you’re going to put yourself in a position of supplicant from the start,” said McGregor, author of Xi Jinping: The Backlash, adding it would be a good thing if Mr Morrison was able to establish a personal relationship with Mr Xi as it would make the broader bilateral relationship much easier to manage.

“But you’d have to be careful about agitating for an invitation because the Chinese would just string you along until they got something that they wanted from him,” he said.

Australia’s relationship with China soured under former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who banned Chinese telco Huawei from participating in the nation’s 5G network, and declared — in a Mandarin phrase used by Mao Zedong — that Australia would “stand up” to foreign interference.

Michael Shoebridge, director of defence and strategy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said there would be plenty of “usual suspects” in Australia and at the Chinese state-owned Global Times “urging Morrison to request a visit so that he can ‘reset’ the relationship by apologising for protecting our national interests”.

“That would be a mistake because Australian government decisions have simply responded to Chinese state actions,” Mr Shoebridge told The Australian.

Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon said the Coalition’s handling of the China relationship had been “so bad” it was unsurprising Beijing hadn’t invited Mr Morrison for a state visit. And he predicted the relationship would get worse after an “awkward” appearance with Donald Trump during his US trip, when the President declared China was a “threat to the world”.

“That moment when then US President accused China of being a threat to global security while sitting alongside the Australian Prime Minister won’t be an insignificant moment in Australian political history,” he told Sky News on Sunday.

“Why would Beijing have extended an invitation to an Australian prime minister over the last two or three years when our language and rhetoric towards China has been so bad?”

Scott Morrison said in Washington DC he would “of course” go to China if “there was an invitation”, but was not vexed by the absence of one.

BEN PACKHAM, ROSIE LEWIS