A sitting Australian prime minister will set foot in China this year, for the first time since 2016.
In the 15 months since he was elected, Anthony Albanese has been battered by political realities, like the difficulty of securing public support for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, and the economic headwinds that have pushed up interest rates, inflation and the stress levels of many Australians trying to pay their bills.
But the steady work of rebuilding the relationship with Beijing is leading to a phase both nations are calling stabilisation.
That’s despite the fact that Australia has welded its foreign policy to the United States and the United Kingdom by giving bipartisan backing to the AUKUS deal to secure the technology for nuclear-powered submarines.
The dividend of this effort is immense, the government calculating it’s whittled down the trade barriers from more than $20 billion down to $2.5 billion since being elected.
Australia is back on the map for the highly lucrative group tourism market. Barley, coal and timber exports have all been restored but the wine industry continues to languish.
Beyond trade, Albanese confirmed he raised the high-profile cases of indefinitely detained Australians Cheng Lei and Yang Hengjun and the low-profile cases of three people on drugs charges he did not name who are on death row in China.
Human rights in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang were also on the table.
Under media questioning, the prime minister confirmed it was not a one-way street and the Chinese premier raised “some issues” on trade and economic relations. Albanese did not elaborate.
But the most challenging part of the highwire act is the security relationship and the military jockeying in the region.
Just ahead of these G20 and ASEAN talks, China provocatively released a ten-dash line map, claiming most of the South China Sea and territory on the Indian border, sparking a furore from affected countries and states.
The engagement with Li is the first high-level political meeting since Albanese went to San Diego for the launch of the AUKUS deal, on a tri-podium surrounded by surfacing subs.SBSNEWS