The trouble for the Albanese government with a visit like Wang Yi’s is that there was never going to be much to announce.
For Canberra, the top priority has been setting up a future visit by China’s Premier Li Qiang, which Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Wednesday was “on track”. People familiar with the plans tell me it is likely to be held in June, although the Chinese are intensely secretive about publicising the movements of their leaders so it may not be announced until days before it occurs.
That trip will allow Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese another opportunity to advocate our national interest to one of Xi Jinping’s top advisers. It is the only way to effectively press our concerns to China’s centralised, top down, Leninist political system.
The lack of announceables has meant various Chinese diplomatic initiatives have instead dominated coverage of the trip. None has loomed larger than Thursday’s brazen meeting between the Chinese Foreign Minister and Paul Keating, one of the Albanese government’s loudest foreign policy critics.
Hours before Senator Wong’s meeting with China’s Foreign Minister, Chinese state media continued the trend. A report in the Global Times suggested Canberra had leant on the independent Anti-Dumping Commission to end duties on Chinese wind turbines. The masthead also suggested it was part of a deal to secure the removal of whooping tariffs on Australian wine, a claim the government denies.
It was an awkward twist to what should be a positive story for the Australian government, the end of Beijing’s wine tariffs (which are expected to be made official by the end of March).
Canberra hopes the upcoming trip by Premier Li will bring more goodies. “They’re keeping the powder dry for the premier,” one China-focused Australian business figure told me.
Mr Li will likely bring good news about the future of the two giant pandas at Adelaide Zoo. “We’re on a good path there to continued panda presence,” Ms Wong said at her Wednesday press conference.
The return of the live lobster trade is also expected. Hopes that the industry might hear good news this week was punctured by the absurd spectacle of a Chinese journalist asking Ms Wong when the trade would resume. Keep in mind, China has never made the ban official — despite not allowing a single live Australian lobster to be legally exported to China since November 2020.
“I think that’s probably a question for the Chinese authorities,” Ms Wong answered, quite rightly.
Australian officials have spent almost four years trying to establish exactly what China’s customs department claims to be the problem, and how to address it. They are still waiting on answers.
There are many questions Australian journalists would have liked to ask Mr Wang — but that would require China’s foreign minister to have fronted up to the media.
Instead, Mr Xi s international affairs adviser slunk off to meet with a group of vetted China-focused business figures, along with two of Chinese state media’s favourite Australian academics: former Defence official Hugh White and ACRI head James Laurenceson.
All this right before Mr Wang travels to Sydney for his audience with Paul Keating, another “voice of reason”.
To be clear, I think it’s a good thing that at least some Australians will have the chance to interact, albeit in a limited way, with the senior Chinese official. And I think Mr White, Mr Laurenceson and Mr Keating often make useful contributions challenging the conventional wisdom in Australia’s China debate.
Late in the day, Mr Wang also meet with Peter Dutton and Simon Birmingham, who had requested an audience with China’s Foreign Minister. That is to be welcomed.
For the most part, the narrowness of the views the Chinese have sought out has been striking. China clearly prefers voices that will tell its Foreign Minister what he wants to hear — a troubling hallmark of the Xi era.
In the prelude to a question at the Wednesday press conference, one of the Chinese journalists remarked: “Many Chinese people believe that the bottleneck in Australia-China relations lies in Australia’s lack of trust in China.”
They are spot on. Most Australians don’t trust China. And is unlikely this secretive trip by one of Mr Xi’s top advisers will change their minds.
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