Personal touch key to China ties, says John Howard

John Howard says personal contact between leaders is the key to maintaining a good relationship with China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

John Howard says personal contact between leaders is the key to maintaining a good relationship with China and says it should not be jeopardised by the pre-­eminence of the US alliance.

Addressing the National Press Club ahead of the release of the 1996-97 cabinet documents on January 1, Mr Howard said Australia did not have to choose between the US and China. “We sell ourselves short if we don’t think we can manage our relationships with both, understanding that we’ll always be closer to the US because we have values and history in common,” he said.

Mr Howard said talk of a new cold war between the US and China was “overblown” and Australia needed to be pragmatic in its dealings with both.

The Howard government suffered a crisis in its relationship with China following a series of incidents in its first year, including Australian naval ships being turned around in the Taiwan Strait in the lead-up to Taiwan elections, visits to Taiwan by Australian ministers, cuts to aid and Mr Howard’s granting an audience to the Dalai Lama.

Mr Howard said the key to restoring the relationship was his decision to seek a meeting with China’s president Jiang Zemin on the margins of an APEC leaders summit.

“It was one of the most important meetings I had as prime minister,” he said, with the two leaders deciding to focus on the areas where they agreed.

The one concession the Howard government made was that instead of voting in the UN to condemn China’s human rights each year, the two nations would establish an annual human rights dialogue.

“As we were leaving, Jiang Zemin said to me in English, ‘It is better face to face’, and he invited me to go to China.

“Regular head-of-government meetings are very important for a power our size. We did end up having an excellent relationship and one of the reasons it wound up good was we didn’t pretend that China’s and Australia’s systems aren’t fundamentally different. You should never try and bland away the differences.”

China was an autocracy with the Communist Party having far more power under President Xi Jinping than it did 20 years ago, and China struggled with Australia’s free media and ­robust parliamentary system.

“That’s not going to change,” Mr Howard said.

Scott Morrison’s meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the East Asia summit in Singapore last month was the first high-level meeting in more than a year following difficulties in the relationship over the past year, but he is yet to meet Mr Xi.

Mr Howard said China’s rise challenged US supremacy but the view that Australia had to choose reflected pessimism about the future of the US. “I remain to be convinced that at the end of this century the US won’t be the most dominant power in the world.”