It has taken eighteen months of an Australian Labor government to repair four years of steadily deteriorating relations with China, under the previous prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison. His successor, Anthony Albanese, completed the Canberra tour this Tuesday, with his meeting in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart, Li Qiang. Both have announced the recovery of bilateral summits on an annual basis.
The first visit by an Australian head of government to China in seven years began four days ago in Shanghai. The highlight was this Monday, with the meeting between Albanese and President Xi Jiping. At the same time, the respective Foreign Ministers, Penny Wong and Wang Yi (the former, by the way, the daughter of a Sino-Malay father) met.
The substance of the quote is that Australia is determined to repair relations with its largest trading partner by far. In reality, economic exchanges have doubled in the last seven years, although this responds to inflation in the price of raw materials.
Other sectors, however, have paid dearly for the belligerence of Morrison, who came to power with Donald Trump in the White House. The first to toast will be the Australian winemakers. In retaliation for several episodes of trade war, China imposed tariffs of 218% on Australian wines. Something that must be corrected soon, along with the penalty on beef from the Oceanian country. This has already been the case with other products, such as barley or coal.
The tourism sector also dreams of recovering Chinese tourism before the pandemic. Although the blow has been even harder in higher education and English teaching institutions. In total, the confrontation with China would have cost the equivalent of 12 billion euros, according to some calculations.
The Chinese punishment came after a trickle of measures seen as affronts by Beijing. In 2020 Morrison called for an international investigation into the emergence of Covid-19 in Wuhan. He also vetoed the deployment of Huawei's 5G technology in Australia.
He even passed a foreign policy law whose main objective was to enable Canberra to suspend agreements between Australian states and international actors. Something that allowed him to end the agreements that the Victorian Labor government (capital, Melbourne) had signed within the framework of the New Silk Roads. A declaration of principles, by a country that, a few years before, had had a Labor prime minister - Kevin Rudd - who spoke fluently in Mandarin.
On Monday, Xi stressed to Albanese that "Australia and China have no historical disputes, nor any fundamental conflict of interest", so he welcomed the reset of the relationship. Although he also criticized the attempts to set up "exclusionary clubs, political groups and confrontational blocs", with the objective, according to him, of "destabilizing the Asia-Pacific region."
A veiled reference to the defense forums in which Australia appears, such as Quad (along with the US, India and Japan) and Aukus (along with the US and the United Kingdom) and espionage, such as the Five Eyes ( along with the USA, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand).
In any case, Albanese has no intention of making Australia renege on these commitments. In fact, the Labor politician also immediately blessed, from the opposition, the reversal of the previous government that threw away the submarine contract for 66,000 million dollars signed with France - for defensive purposes - in favor of one five times more expensive for the acquisition of American nuclear submarines, capable of projecting power in the China Sea.
Canberra does not approve of Beijing's untimely claims in waters that are also important for its export and supply lines. Although the meeting of the last four days would not have been possible without a redoubled Australian recognition of the "one China" principle, to the detriment of Taiwan. If China masters the subtle diplomacy of pandas, to ingratiate itself with former rivals, Australia is no less known for its koalas, although some prefer the Tasmanian devil.
