Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived in China over the weekend on a state visit to improve bilateral trade and mend diplomatic fences, even as he insisted his government wants to diversify its supply chains and “increase our relationships with other countries in the region.”
Albanese and a “very large business delegation” from Australia plan to meet with dictator Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang, National People’s Congress Chairman Zhao Leji, and other top Chinese officials during their weeklong trip, plus Chinese business leaders and tourism officials.
Relations between Australia and China were at a low ebb when Albanese and his liberal Labor Party took power in 2022, largely because conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an independent investigation into the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
The Chinese Communist Party has no intention of permitting any such inquiry into the coronavirus that boiled out of Wuhan in 2020 to ravage the world. China lashed out at Australia with a fusillade of diplomatic and economic sanctions.
The Chinese were also angered by Australia’s growing defense ties to the United States and Japan and by Australia’s pushback against Chinese political interference.
Beijing appeared to get everything it wanted when Albanese succeeded Morrison in 2022. The new liberal Australian prime minister quickly scuttled almost everything the Chinese disliked about the Morrison administration, rebooting Australia-China relations to 2019, and put a high priority on restoring trade. China began lifting many of the trade restrictions it imposed to punish Australia for demanding a Covid inquiry.
As he departed on his second trip to China, Albanese insisted his administration has “worked very hard to diversify trade” and “increase our relationships with other countries in the region, including India and Indonesia and the ASEAN countries.”
“But the relationship with China is an important one, as is our relationships when it comes to exports with the north Asian economies of South Korea and Japan,” he added.
Chinese state media gave Albanese an approving pat on the head, praising him for his efforts to “propel the bilateral relationship to a higher level,” and even hinting that Australia might come more fully into Beijing’s orbit in the era of President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.
“Under this context, the Australian government appears to prioritize relations with China more than before to safeguard its own interests and stabilize economic ties,” sniffed China’s state-run Global Times on Monday.
The Chinese Communist paper praised Albanese for his interest in building “people-to-people ties” and cultural “understanding” through trade and tourism.
“As an ally of the U.S., Australia has not blindly followed the U.S. but instead adopted a pragmatic approach to cooperation with China. This sends a positive signal against the backdrop of complex and volatile geopolitical landscape,” said Zhou Fangyin, a professor of international relations at Sun Yat-sen University.
The Chinese could not help administering a bit of light humiliation to Albanese and his delegation just to remind them who holds the whip in the deepening relationship between China and Australia.
When a group of Australian reporters traveling with Albanese tried to film a tourist attraction in Beijing on Tuesday, they were surrounded by a platoon of Chinese security officials, who detained them, attempted to seize their cameras, and took intimidating snapshots of the reporters. The reporters had written permission to film in Beijing, and they were accompanied by an Australian diplomatic official.
The Australians were eventually released. When Australian media organizations asked Albanese about the incident, he meekly replied that China “has a different system, obviously, with the media.”
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