China's ambassador to Australia, Fu Ying , is fast gaining a status as the best-known foreign diplomat in this part of the world. She is articulate, media-savvy and unafraid of jumping into controversial issues when the need arises. Last week, Ms Fu waded into one of the most contentious political issues in Australia - uranium mining.
At a conference in Darwin, the capital of the uranium-rich Northern Territory, she let the Northern Territory government know that Beijing was keen to buy uranium from Australia. Nuclear power is viewed as a 'clean' energy option by China - it wants to double its capacity by 2020.
Much of the regulation of uranium mining in Australia is controlled by the state and territory governments - not the national government, even though Canberra wants to tap into Chinese demand and lift the ban on the export of uranium to China.
While Prime Minister John Howard's conservative Liberal-National Party coalition has run the federal government since 1996, all six of Australia's states and two of its territorial governments are ruled by the centrist Australian Labor Party (ALP). Its policy, adopted in 1982, prohibits the opening of any new mines.
Some ALP state premiers want the party to revisit the policy, but colleagues in jurisdictions with uranium mining potential are opposed. The ALP's policy was adopted when the prospect of nuclear warfare between the US and the Soviet Union was a daily reality. After nuclear plant accidents at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979 and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986, it made good political sense.
But in today's world, with the rapid onset of climate change causing havoc, the ALP is being urged in some quarters to rethink its policy.
For Ms Fu and her Chinese colleagues, Australia is viewed as an excellent potential source for imported uranium. Almost 30 per cent of the world's known reserves are in Australia - 990,000 tonnes out of a total of more than 3 million tonnes.