Source: AFP
Chinese Premier Li Qiang combined sharp “diplomacy of everything” with a visit to a historic vineyard on Sunday to celebrate the thawing of once-frozen trade relations with Australia.
The most senior Chinese official to visit Australia in seven years, Li’s four-day trip offers the prospect of greater trade after Beijing lifted sanctions on a number of major Australian exports.
China is by far Australia’s biggest trading partner, taking almost 30 per cent of its exports last year, including key commodities iron ore and coal.
Two-way trade to reach A$327 billion ($216 billion) in 2023.
Setting the warmest tone, Li took a trip to Adelaide Zoo in blazing sunshine and announced that China would lend new “adorable” giant pandas to replace the popular couple Wang Wang and Fu Ni.
The Adelaide pandas, which have failed to produce offspring since arriving in 2009, will return to China by the end of the year.
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“I guess they must have missed home a lot,” said Li, the second most powerful man in China after President Xi Jinping.
Source: AFP
The prime minister said China made the panda offer to honor the wishes of Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, an Adelaide resident who has worked to stabilize relations with Beijing.
Wong said her own children would be “very happy” with the news, which she hailed as a “symbol of goodwill”.
Lee then joined Wong for a meal at the 19th-century Magill Estate vineyard, home of the original Penfolds winery and now part of Australian global winemaker Treasury Wine Estates.
Wine was among a number of Australian exports, along with coal, timber, barley, beef and lobster, hit by Chinese sanctions in 2020 during a diplomatic rift with the former Conservative government.
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These penalties cost Australian exporters about A$20 billion ($13 billion) a year, including A$1 billion for the wine industry.
“Constant Tension”
Tariffs have been gradually lifted since the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office in 2022 and adopted a softer diplomatic approach towards China. Lobster is one of the few exports that still faces trade barriers.
Li and Albanese are due to hold closed-door talks in Canberra on Monday, which will include issues of foreign influence, human rights, alleged “unsafe” behavior by the Chinese military in the region and their rivalry in the Pacific.
China’s growing influence in the South Pacific, where it seeks to expand security and economic ties with island nations traditionally allied with Australia, remains a notable point of tension.
Source: AFP
“We are in a state of permanent competition in the Pacific. That is the reality,” Wong said in a televised interview on Sunday.
But the Chinese premier, who will also head to a lithium mine in Perth, is focusing his attention on economic opportunities rather than areas of friction.
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“Mutual respect, seeking common ground while putting aside differences and mutually beneficial cooperation” are key to the relationship, Lee said on his arrival in Adelaide on Saturday.
Australia has endured “a long period of deep freeze where it was not possible to have any sort of formal talks with China,” said Melissa Conley Tyler, an emeritus fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute.
Lee’s visit sends a message that “Australia has come back as a friendly country and not the hostile, hostile country that we saw in those years of maximum tension,” he told AFP.
Source: AFP