Australia’s lack of independent foreign policy will hurt China ties, own interests in long term: report

The Australia-US alliance and security concerns are ‘impediments’ to better China ties and will over time erode trade and people links, the think tank report notes
Australia’s strategic choices show it is under ‘significant pressure from the US’ and do not indicate they are driven by Australia’s own national interests, the report adds

China-Australia relations

Su-Lin Tanin Singapore

Published: 8:30am, 8 Nov 2023

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Australia’s inability to form an independent foreign policy as it plays hostage to its alliance with the United States will jeopardise long-term stability in its relationship with China, according to a new report by prominent Australian think tank China Matters.

While the relationship has improved in the past year, culminating with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s historic visit over the weekend to China, the report said the Australia-US alliance and increasing concerns in both countries over national security issues threatened long-term stability in relations.

“I make the case that … China’s deeply entrenched sense of victimhood and its continued dismissal of Australia’s capacity for independent foreign policymaking are impediments to better bilateral relations,” said Yun Jiang, AIIA China Matters fellow and author of the report titled “Can Australia and China have a stable relationship?”.

“The greatest risk to a stable long-term relationship is the expanding suite of issues deemed to be of national security significance in both countries, as they will over time erode trade and people-to-people links,” Jiang said.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Tuesday. Photo: EPA-EFE

Jiang noted that the mainstream thinking in China was that Australia had “firmly fallen into the American orbit” and become a vassal state.

On Tuesday, Albanese concluded his trip to China – the first by an Australian leader in seven years – after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.

The Australia-China relationship is significant in the Asia-Pacific region, especially given Australia’s supply of iron ore and other key commodities needed by Beijing.

Albanese’s trip also marked the 50th anniversary of the first visit to China by former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, and ended three years of antagonism between the two nations.

While bilateral relations had not been amicable since 2017, it was former prime minister Scott Morrison’s push for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus in 2020, and therefore assigning blame to China for the pandemic, that sank ties to a new low.

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Jiang’s interviews with China’s scholars and insiders for the report, released on Wednesday, showed that Morrison’s move and those by prior Australian leaders were “shortcuts” to ensuring that “the US-Australia alliance would not be abandoned”.

With Canberra remaining firmly entrenched in its alliance with the US, many Chinese scholars and analysts were not optimistic about the long-term prospects of the relationship, Jiang said.

“The most common explanation for Australia’s strategic choices is that the Australian government is under significant pressure from the US and, as such, Canberra’s choices are not driven by Australia’s own national interests,” she said in the report. “Their expectations for the relationship are shaped primarily by increasing competition between the US and China.”

Australian wines and other agricultural products in Shanghai in 2020. Photo: AP

Following Morrison’s call on the coronavirus investigation, Beijing imposed informal bans on several trades with Australia not because it thought it could change Canberra’s loyalty to Washington, but to punish Canberra for disrespecting Beijing, Jiang said.

It was important for the Chinese government to be respected by other countries especially when it believed Western countries looked down on China during the “century of humiliation” – between 1839 and 1940s – and now, as a weaker country than theirs, Jiang said.

Given the circumstances, suspicions, particularly on national security grounds, abound in both countries, the report said.

In China, foreign companies including Australian ones faced Beijing’s anti-espionage scrutiny while in Australia, there was diversification of trade away from China and reduced approvals of Chinese investments, the report added.

These would not pave the way to a successful future relationship. Some partial economic decoupling would also occur, whether in reduced cooperation in tackling climate change or producing critical minerals, the report said.

“Some experts in [China] espouse the view that their country first needs to improve its relations with the US, and relations with Australia would consequently follow the same trajectory,” the report said.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi said during Albanese’s visit that the two countries had “embarked on the right path of improving … relations” and they had restarted an annual leaders’ dialogue.

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The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) also does not see the relationship returning to “the high point of the early 2010s”.

“The governments remained divided on everything from human rights issues in China to Australia’s approach to assessing Chinese investments,” the EIU said in an analysis on Tuesday.

These include prohibitive Chinese duties on Australian wine, the continued detention of Australian writer Yang Hengjun, and Australia’s Aukus defence alliance with the US and Britain, which will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to the region, according to the EIU report.

The two countries would carry out a more normalised trading relationship, but there would be no progress on the underlying “ideological issues”.