Meet Xi Jinpingface to face, John Howard tells Scott Morrison

John Howard has advised Scott Morrison that repairing the relationship with Beijing is best done at the leadership level.

Former prime minister John Howard meets China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing in July 2014. Picture: Xinhua/Wang Ye

John Howard has advised Scott Morrison that repairing the relationship with Beijing is best done at the leadership level and says he urged the Prime Minister to seek out a face-to-face meeting with President Xi Jinping.

In an extended interview with Asialink at the University of Melbourne, Mr Howard said head-to-head meetings with Chinese leaders were “hugely important” and he had relayed to Mr Morrison the need to visit Beijing.

The former prime minister also said China had changed from being a “citizen of the region” when he was in office, arguing that its “fairly contemptuous treatment of international norms and institutions” had become most clear in its activities in the South China Sea.

While he was hopeful the fate of Taiwan could be resolved peacefully, Mr Howard said Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong “bodes ill for a more accommodating resolution”.

He said Australia needed to avoid choosing between Washington and Beijing “like the plague” but praised the reinvigoration of the Quad — a grouping of Australia, the US, Japan and India — as one the “smartest things that America has done and we have done”.

“For the foreseeable future, we are going to have a more assertive Chinese leadership,” he said. There is a qualitative difference between Xi Jinping and his predecessors. He is infinitely more assertive and aggressive than either Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin.”

Mr Howard said Australia could not sacrifice its values in managing its relationship with China, arguing “we have to find a way of — I suppose — peacefully coexisting, to borrow an expression from the Cold War”.

Reflecting on his own time in office, Mr Howard said he was able to resolve a fracture in the relationship with Beijing after an “icebreaker” meeting with Jiang Zemin on the margins of the APEC summit in Manila in October 1996, securing a visit in 1997.

“You have to have a good personal relationship. And the key to our relationship is to accept that (with) a country of Australia’s size and everything, what matters to the Chinese is the relationship between our head of government and their head of government.”

Mr Howard said he advised former foreign minister Bob Carr when Labor was in power to tell Julia Gillard to “get to Beijing as soon as possible and have a head-to-head meeting with the Chinese leadership, because that’s what matters.” Pressed on whether he advised Mr Morrison to do the same, he replied: “Yes, I have … He (Mr Morrison) understands that.”

While Mr Howard acknowledged the pandemic had made it “harder” for face-to-face meetings, he said “we’ve only had COVID for eight months”.

In June 2018, Mr Howard provided the same advice for Malcolm Turnbull to seek out a face-to-face meeting with Mr Xi, arguing there was “a lot of potential” for closer relations.

With relations in a downward spiral in 2020 after the Morrison government championed an inquiry into the origins of the corona­virus, Mr Howard said it was imperative to “find something that we agree on and make a success of that”.

He said China needed to improve its image. “The Chinese must understand this. Chinese esteem has fallen quite a lot. People can see the bullying that’s occurred in our part of the world.”

Mr Howard said China faced two great challenges, with its ageing population and how it managed a more “affluent population born into relative comfort”.