Albanese a pragmatist on China, while Coalition missed the point

Coalition politicians and the hawkish media have been lining up to criticise Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for his recent China visit.

Shadow finance minister James Paterson thinks going to the Great Wall was “indulgent”. Even Kevin Hogan, the shadow minister for nothing less than trade, believes that going to a third city in addition to Shanghai and Beijing and doing “the panda thing” felt like a “working holiday”. To him, this presumably had little to do with trade. But you’d expect Michaelia Cash, shadow minister for foreign affairs, to appreciate the importance of diplomacy, given her portfolios. Alas, she complains that the PM’s six-day “extended visit” hadn’t secured enough concrete outcomes for Australia.

As for the opposition leader’s criticism, it is a doozy. Sussan Ley said, “Friendship is important, but that friendship can’t come at the cost of our national interests.”

To be sure, none of these Coalition politicians has faulted the PM for going to China to talk trade. But their comments, which have been enthusiastically covered by our media, seem to reveal, yet again, a glaring blind spot in the Coalition’s thinking about China. Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull dismissed the criticism as “opposition for opposition’s sake”. All this “whingeing”, he said, “does the opposition more harm than the government”.

Coalition politicians seem genuinely nonplussed about how diplomacy might have anything to do with trade, why friendship should be part of the equation, how visiting the Great Wall could bring any tangible benefit to Australia, and why on earth maintaining a stable bilateral relationship with China itself counts as a strategic outcome.

The PM thinks his trip was “successful” and “constructive”. Clearly the opposition does not agree. This invites the question: what would a successful visit to China look like for the Coalition?

Would it have been better if the PM had flown to Beijing, spent only a day there, shirt-fronted President Xi, and told him his country is a threat to Australia and that we’re going to take back Darwin Port? Should Albanese have put him on notice that we will go to war with China over Taiwan if necessary? Oh, yes, after going through all these important issues of “national interest”, should he also have told Premier Li to keep buying our exports, including more apples and blueberries?

Or better still, as one Chinese-Australian WeChat group member quipped, in response to the Coalition’s criticisms, “Why not skip the formalities altogether. Land a military aircraft in the South China Sea — preferably from a borrowed US carrier — beating our hairy chests and yelling across the waves at the PLA Navy with a giant megaphone, ‘Listen up, comrades! We’re here to tell you how bad you are, but also … could you hurry up and place that next coal order? We need your money to pay our AUKUS bills!’”

Sussan Ley’s comment doesn’t bode well for the Liberals’ prospects regarding their China policy. At best it betrays a muddled understanding of what the national interest is, and at worst it reveals a deliberate conflation of national security with national interest. The Coalition also seems to be stuck on the notion that trade and security are mutually undermining.

Labor is not naive in thinking that a bit of panda diplomacy might make Australia more secure. It has enough political savvy to realise that economic security is closely tied with strategic security. As Penny Wong reminds us, “economic integration still provides a critical incentive for peace”. After all, as has been remarked by both serious commentators and the facetious WeChat punter quoted earlier, how else are we going to pay the ever-growing AUKUS bill?

Nor is Labor naive enough to assume, as the Coalition seems to, that functional transactional trade relations can be sustained without showing some interest in the trading partner’s culture, history and people. Indeed, while Australia and China may differ in values and ideologies, China has a recorded history of 5,000 years of civilisation before it became a communist nation-state in 1949. Surely, having a bit of interest in Chinese history is not going to lead us to drink the CCP’s Kool-Aid and risk becoming a Beijing apologist?

The Great Wall of China was built over many centuries, with construction beginning as early as the seventh century BCE, although the best-known sections of the Wall that still exist today were primarily built during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE). And although the PM was a bit in awe of this history while standing on the wall, he didn’t seem to lose sight of the political KPIs he needed to achieve. While acknowledging that the Great Wall of China “symbolises the extraordinary history and culture here in China”, Albanese was quick to say the gesture was mostly intended to service a functional relationship, saying that the photo opportunities were important in promoting both China and Australia to “potential tourists” and “job creators”.

No, Albanese didn’t go to China because he is a Sinophile and feels warm and fuzzy about the country. Nor did he turn into a panda hugger after his visit to Chengdu. It’s just that he has enough emotional intelligence to know that building trust, goodwill and reciprocity is essential to maintaining even a purely transactional partnership. One does not need to be a psychologist to know that. And any successful company in Australia doing business with China knows this first-hand.

As Albanese said, “respect … never cost anything”. Just as he said that showing kindness is not weakness, showing respect is not being “subservient”, as The Australian’s Greg Sheridan put it. It shouldn’t take complex international relations theory or an MBA textbook to prove that the best way to show your respect is to convince your business partners of your interest and capacity to see them as a culture and as human beings, not just as an ATM, or worse, an enemy.

Having secured a massive electoral win, Albanese knows that even though the opposition whinges about him staying for six days and visiting pandas, voters most likely do not care. He probably knows, as Lowy’s poll indicates, that there are still more Australians who see China as an economic partner (50%) than as a security threat (47%). While Albanese may well prefer to have, say, the UK or Japan as our biggest trading partner, he is a realist who knows that he has to play the cards he has been dealt.

This means managing whatever diplomatic and pragmatic factors are necessary for our transactional partnership with China to function. He is keeping his eyes on the prize: delivering the goods to those who voted him in.

This seems to be something the Coalition, with its current tendency towards self-harm, continues to forget.