Why China’s so keen on meeting Keating
Sam Hawley: When one of China’s most senior figures came to Australia this week, it was one unofficial meeting that really stuck out. Wang Yi was very keen to meet former Prime Minister Paul Keating, a move that would have frustrated Australian officials. Today, Foreign Affairs reporterStephen Dziedzic on what China’s playing at. I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Stephen, before we talk about this visit by Wang Yi, I just want you to tell me a bit about him. Who is he?
Stephen Dziedzic: Well, Wang Yi is a political veteran in China and he is very much part of the political elite. So he holds a senior position not just in the Chinese government as Foreign Minister, but also more importantly in the Chinese Communist Party as well. And of course, in China, the party and the government are basically indivisible.
Sam Hawley: And he’s the most senior Chinese politician to have set foot in Australia since 2017. So his visit is a big deal and let’s unpack it in a moment. But we’ve got to talk about the headlines because they’ve all been consumed with the fact that as part of his trip here, he’s going off to see Paul Keating. And I mean, Paul Keating hasn’t been Prime Minister for a really long time. So what on earth is going on there?
Stephen Dziedzic: Well, what’s going on is a bit of signalling from the Chinese side. Now, Paul Keating is, as you say, well and truly out of office now and has been for quite some time. But he has emerged as certainly the most strident and perhaps the most prominent critic of the government’s policies on China.
Paul Keating: Running around the Pacific Islands with a lei around your neck handing out money, which is what Penny does, is not foreign policy.
Stephen Dziedzic: He’s been particularly ferocious in his criticism of AUKUS and Australia’s attempts to effectively develop its own nuclear powered submarine capability with the United States and the United Kingdom. Now, Paul Keating makes a couple of arguments on that. He says, one, it’s going to be ineffective because we’re unlikely to be able to develop these submarines. And even if we do, it’s going to be like, as he put it, I think, you know, throwing a toothpick at a mountain given the size of China’s naval forces and its own submarine fleet.
Paul Keating: You know, the idea that we need American submarines to protect us, if we buy eight, three at sea. Three are going to protect us from the might of China. Really? I mean, the rubbish of it. The rubbish.
Stephen Dziedzic: And two, he says it ties us to the United States in a desperate attempt to find our security, as he puts it, out from Asia rather than in Asia. So he sees it as regressive and backward looking as well.
Paul Keating: The Americans will never condone or accept a state as large as them, you know, and that’s what China presents. But the fact that China is now, you know, an industrial economy larger than the United States, they say, hang on, this is not in the playbook.
Stephen Dziedzic: So the fact that the Chinese are deliberately seeking out and meeting Paul Keating shows a couple of things. One, they’re willing to signal their displeasure still towards the Australian system over AUKUS. And two, perhaps that they are trying to look to elevate Paul Keating and therefore to try and drive a bit of a wedge into the broader Labour Party or Labour movement over AUKUS.
Sam Hawley: Okay, so China doesn’t like AUKUS, basically.
Stephen Dziedzic: Yeah, and it’s trying to elevate Paul Keating’s worldview in Australia, essentially trying to say this is the voice of reason on China. This is a man that you want to listen to when it comes to China.
Sam Hawley: And Stephen, to get a sense of just how out of step Paul Keating is with the current government on China, you just have to listen to him when he was at the National Press Club last year.
Paul Keating; Underlying all this stuff is the idea that China has either threatened us or has threatened us, has threatened us or will threaten us. Now, this is a distortion and it’s untrue. The Chinese have never implied that they would threaten us or said it explicitly.
Sam Hawley: Well, the opposition says that the meeting between Paul Keating and the Chinese foreign minister was a calculated humiliation for the government. But of course, during his visit here, Wang Yi also had official meetings with official government ministers.
Stephen Dziedzic: Yeah, that’s right. So he sat down with Penny Wong in Canberra on Wednesday.
Penny Wong: Thank you very much for coming.Thank you very much for As you know, this morning I hosted in this room my Chinese counterpart Wang Yi for the foreign and strategic dialogue.
Stephen Dziedzic: The last time the foreign ministers met was about 15 months ago in Beijing when Penny Wong travelled over, about six months after she became foreign minister. Before then, there’d been a big gap between meetings, basically because the relationship between Australia and China went into freefall under the coalition when Scott Morrison and Marise Payne called for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. So the meeting that we saw earlier this week in Canberra was basically another sign that top level dialogue between Australia and China is now basically flowing once again at a relatively normal pace.
Penny Wong: Dialogue enables us to manage our differences. It doesn’t eliminate them. But this government, in the interest of Australia, will always seek to manage those differences wisely.
Sam Hawley: And it’s a sign, isn’t it, that the relationship is improving. And there’s other signs of that too, because all those trade restrictions that China put in place over the last few years are starting to be lifted, including, Stephen, huge tariffs on Australian wine. So what’s happening there?
Stephen Dziedzic: Yeah, that’s right. Almost all the tariffs that China imposed at the nadir of the relationship back in 2020 and early 2021 have now been unwound. The big one that we are still officially waiting on is, of course, wine. So when China whacked enormous tariffs on Australian wine of up to 200 per cent, an enormous fountain of wine gushing into China slowed to basically a tiny, tiny little trickle. We saw exports around a billion dollars a year. And that has basically gone down to nothing, a few million. And now in the next five to 10 days, there is a broad expectation that we will see China drop those wine tariffs entirely. Now, it’s worth noting, Sam, that doesn’t mean that we’re going back to the land of milk and honey for the wine industry. China’s wine market has actually shrunk substantially over this time. And a lot of that market share that Australia had enjoyed has now been gobbled up by other players. But of course, it’s still a very important market, a massive market for them. And even if trade returns to something like half or, you know, 40 per cent of what it was, that would still be a very welcome development for the industry.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, absolutely, because the industry has really struggled through this. Apparently they had so much excess wine that it could fill 800 Olympic swimming pools. So, yeah, it was a tough time for the wine industry. And, you know, we like our wine industry, Steve, and I don’t want to see that go away, right?
Stephen Dziedzic: No one does. No one who’s had a South Australian Shiraz could wish anything new upon them.
Sam Hawley: Exactly. So hopefully those tariffs are lifted soon. All right. So if China’s playing ball, it’s lifting all its tariffs, it’s the relationship is getting better, what are we giving them in return?
Stephen Dziedzic: Well, that is an excellent question, and it is a fiercely, fiercely contested one. Australia says that it has given nothing back to China as a quid pro quo for these tariffs being lifted. The truth is perhaps a little bit more complex than that, and it lies not so much in what Australia has given or done, and perhaps more in what Australia has decided not to do. So there are a few examples that I’ll point to quickly. Wang Yi and the Chinese state media, for example, pointed to a decision that Australia made last week to essentially let tariffs on Chinese wind turbines drop. Now, that is a decision that China is trying to portray as a quid pro quo. Now, Australia is adamant that there is absolutely no connection between the wind turbines decision and the wine decision. There are a couple of other things that people have pointed to. One is the Port of Darwin to essentially allow a Chinese company, Landbridge, to take ownership of the port. There were a lot of rumbles that this would create unacceptable national security risks. The government insists, again, this wasn’t done with an eye on China, it was a sober assessment that was made on its own merits, but it seems unlikely to me that it wasn’t made with at least one eye on the broader political relationship. And then there’s the things that Australia simply hasn’t done, which other countries have done. For example, using targeted sanctions in retaliation for human rights abuses within China. That’s a move that some Western nations have made and Australia has decided not to make.
Sam Hawley: Interesting. So it’s a little unclear whether the deals are going both ways, but potentially they are. But, Stephen, despite the trade, there’s still some serious concerns about the relationship and there are some serious tensions still between China and Australia, aren’t there?
Stephen Dziedzic: Yeah, and this is across multiple fields. I mean, some of these disputes are already in the headlines. Dr Yang Hengjun, the Australian citizen who received a suspended death sentence last month, that really did frustrate and anger officials and leaders in Canberra.
Anthony Albanese: We have conveyed to China our dismay, our despair, our frustration. To put it really simply, our outrage at the verdict.
Stephen Dziedzic: There’s the fact that Australia is very anxious about what China is doing in the South China Sea. There’s Australian anxieties about the increasingly strident and belligerent language that China is using about Taiwan and its military exercises across the strait. The great nightmare for Australia, of course, is a regional conflagration that’s tipped off by a Chinese aggression towards Taiwan. And that’s not even touching on the fact that Australia continues to be deeply frustrated, not just by Chinese cyber attacks, but also by Chinese political interference in Australia’s system. Yes, the relationship is stabilised now. We’re probably in a bargaining position, but there is a long list of differences between the two countries, which cannot be surmounted by negotiations.
Sam Hawley: Alright, well, Stephen, I want to just briefly return to that meeting Wang Yi had with Paul Keating, because it does muddy the waters somewhat. You mentioned this is about Australia’s relationship with America and the UK and AUKUS. Penny Wong, she’s made it pretty clear to China that Paul Keating has no influence whatsoever over government policy. But what about other members of the Labor Party? Does this meeting stoke division at all within the Labor Party?
Stephen Dziedzic: Look, not within the parliamentary party, because the federal parliamentary party is still, at least publicly, very strongly behind the government on AUKUS. However, it is a different story in the ALP membership more broadly. At the ALP conference, for example, we saw perhaps something in the order of one in five members vote against AUKUS effectively. The meeting won’t so much expose divisions within the parliamentary party, but it does at the very least elevate and point to existing tensions within the broader Labor Party family over AUKUS and over the country’s strategic direction under the Albanese government.
Sam Hawley: I gather that’s China’s aim. So I know, Stephen, the relationship is really unpredictable. But what’s your assessment? Is this a really big step and a big sign that our relationship is back on track?
Stephen Dziedzic: I don’t think it is a particularly big step simply because it was always going to happen under the revived dialogue framework. But it is another important signal that both sides are still intent on recalibrating the relationship. Now, that doesn’t magically disappear, the deep and profound differences between the two nations. And I think the relationship is still, because of those profound differences, vulnerable to external shocks, which could once again throw Australia back into the deep freeze. But China has made a calculation that its previous approach was not working. And it does have an interest in trying to maintain a more healthy, normal and reasonable relationship with Australia. And that’s really what this dialogue was about this week.
Sam Hawley: Stephen Dziedzic is the ABCs foreign affairs reporter. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald and Nell Whitehead. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. Thanks for listening.
