PM indulges in panda diplomacy as state visit in China nears end

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has toured a panda breeding facility in the final stages of an extended state visit that has cast China as a fellow champion of a global fair trade system under threat from the United States.

The panda diplomacy stop yesterday in the central Chinese city of Chengdu highlighted Australia’s special status as the only Southern Hemisphere country to host a pair of the rare Chinese native animals.

Albanese and his fiancée Jodie Haydon visited a pen where they saw Fu Ni, a giant panda who had been on loan to Australia’s Adelaide Zoo until last year.

“A great ambassador for China and a great friend of Australia,” Albanese said of Fu Ni as she chomped on bamboo.

China loans Australia pandas

Premier Li Qiang used a visit to the Adelaide Zoo last year to announce Fu Ni and her partner Wang Wang would be replaced by another China-born pair that will hopefully breed.

The new couple, Xing Qiu and Yi Yan, made their public debut in January at the zoo in the South Australia state capital where they are a major tourist attraction.

Albanese’s China trip, which began Saturday and ends today, is extraordinarily long compared with Australian state visits over the past decade and marks a normalization of bilateral relations that plumbed new depths under the previous Australian government’s nine-year reign.

Albanese said he had visited Chengdu and the Great Wall of China, as well at the usual diplomatic destinations of Beijing and Shanghai, as a show of respect to the Chinese people.

“The Great Wall of China symbolises the extraordinary history and culture here in China, and showing a bit of respect to people never cost anything. But you know what it does? It gives you a reward,” Albanese told reporters.

“One of the things that I find about giving countries respect is that you get it back,” he added.

In 2020, Beijing banned minister-to-minister contacts and imposed a series of official and unofficial trade barriers on commodities including wine, beef, coal, barley and lobsters that cost Australian exporters up to 20 billion Australian dollars ($13 billion) a year. This was a response to Australia’s previous government demanding an independent inquiry into the cause of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the pandemic was the final straw, relations had been deteriorating for years over issues including laws banning covert foreign interference in Australian politics and Australia barring Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei on security grounds from involvement in the national 5G network rollout.

The trade barriers have all been lifted since Albanese’s center-left Labor Party was first elected in 2022. But now, the United States threatens to become a major disruptor to global trade through President Donald Trump’s tariff regime.

Xi urges Australia to hold course

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Albanese at the outset of their bilateral meeting in Beijing Tuesday that the important thing their two countries had learned in repairing relations was that equal treatment, seeking common ground and pursuing cooperation served the interests of both.

“No matter how the international landscape may evolve, we should uphold this overall direction unswervingly,” Xi said through an interpreter. The comment was widely interpreted as a reference to U.S. tariffs.

Albanese replied that his government welcomed progressing cooperation under their decade-old bilateral free trade agreement.

“Australia will remain a strong supporter of free and fair trade,” Albanese said.

The United States has allocated Australia the minimum 10% tariff on U.S. imports. Australia argues that any tariff cannot be justified and that the U.S. has enjoyed a trade surplus with Australia for decades.

The greater economic damage for Australia would likely be from a Chinese economic downturn caused by its U.S. tariff treatment. Around a third of Australian exports go to China.

Australia shifts away from the US

James Laurenceson, director of the University of Technology Sydney’s Australia-China Relations Institute, described China’s presentation of itself as Australia’s ally in defending free trade as “self-serving.”

“It’s not so much Australia aligning with China. It’s really just about Australia and China agreeing they’ve got a shared interest in the existing system, and it’s the U.S. that’s walking away from that,” Laurenceson said.

“I don’t think the big shift this week is Australia getting closer to China. I think the distance with the United States is getting wider and wider,” he added.

Albanese’s political enemies have criticised him for now having four face-to-face meetings with Xi – including two in Beijing – while the prime minister has yet to meet Trump in person. KEN MORITSUGU & ROD McGUIRK, BEIJING, MDT/AP