Analysis: Neither China nor Australia Likely To Give Much Ground
Can a weekend visit from China's premier help China and Australia mend their damaged relationship? TaiwanPlus spoke to Graeme Smith at Australian National University.
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00:00This is the first visit of a Chinese Premier to Australia since 2017, what are we expecting to come out of it?
00:08I think as someone famously said, most of diplomacy is about showing up, and this is largely about showing up.
00:15I don't think there's going to be a lot of ground given on either side.
00:20Positives on the Australian side, we're hoping that the last remaining Chinese trade restrictions on lobster and crayfish get removed.
00:29There's also a lot of focus on a couple of pandas that due to return to China and whether they'll stay on or be replaced,
00:37that seems to be a big focus on the Australian side.
00:39On the Chinese side, there's a hope that we'll be more open to Chinese investments in strategic minerals such as lithium.
00:46But again, I don't think there's a lot of hope on that front.
00:50Trade is set to dominate the meetings between Albanese and Lee, but in recent years, Australia has been strengthening defence ties with the United States.
01:00So how likely is this to put a strain on the relationship?
01:04Yeah, I think China largely accepts this is how the alliance system works.
01:10We're in a military alliance with the US, we have been for a long time.
01:15And China, I think, long ago accepted that, you know, this is just the way things are done.
01:22And I think on both sides, the buzzword is stabilisation.
01:26So to stabilise the relationship, which got extremely rocky from about 2017 onwards.
01:33And why have relations improved since that rock bottom time when China imposed trade tariffs on Australia?
01:41Because it called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID.
01:45Yeah, I think things have improved since the new Labor government came to power.
01:50But in some ways, the arrival of a new government gave China an excuse to do what I think it had wanted to do for some time, largely for domestic reasons, as is always the case with China.
02:02Economically, they didn't get the bounce back from COVID that they were hoping for.
02:08And so having a compromised trade relationship with an important partner like Australia wasn't really in its own national interest.
02:16And nor was it really in its interest to have what it sees as a close ally of the United States.
02:22And having, in the case of Australia, quite legitimate trade grievances, many of which were going to be ruled on by the World Trade Organization.
02:30So that in itself would have been a bad look and explains why many of these sanctions have been dropped.
02:37Thank you.