Prime Minister Anthony Albanese departs for his second trip to China with the spectre of Donald Trump looming large over meetings with Xi Jinping. While the prime minister flies to Beijing to strengthen economic and diplomatic ties with Australia’s largest trading partner, a nervous eye must stay on the US’s promised Aukus nuclear submarines: military commitments of hundreds of billions of dollars, spending spurred by China’s own military buildup, now under review by the US defence department.
Albanese will take a business delegation to the cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu for a six-day trip from Saturday. His official itinerary is about meeting business, tourism and sport representatives “to continue building on Australia’s strong economic and trade links with China”. That includes the Australia-China annual leaders’ meeting, attending a Shanghai soccer club with strong ties to Australia, a visit to the headquarters of Trip.com and likely a photo op with pandas.
Australia’s two-way trade with China amounted to almost $312bn in 2024 – by far our biggest partner, the government has been keen to stress, noting Albanese’s success in overseeing the removal of $20bn in trade barriers and boosting exports of barley, lobster and beef. Efforts to “advance Australia’s security and economic interests” are the flavour of the trip, government sources say.
Executives from banks, including ANZ and Macquarie, miners Rio Tinto and Fortescue, manufacturers BHP and BlueScope, and universities Monash and UNSW will join the prime minister’s trip. Heading their agenda is a CEO roundtable in Beijing, hosted by the China Development Bank, with an emphasis on green metals, research and development, education, finance, and clean energy.
But advancing Australia’s security interests, as the government has also put at the top of its priority list, will call for a fine balancing act. The foreign minister, Penny Wong, in an important speech in Malaysia on Thursday, spoke of the “worrying pace of China’s nuclear and conventional military buildup, without the transparency that the region expects”. In the same breath, she praised China’s strength, saying its “size and weight makes it central to solving global challenges”.
Albanese’s Beijing visit will not go unnoticed in the White House. Conservative criticism of the absence of a meeting with Trump has been overblown, and is unlikely to abate after a second meeting with Xi. But Albanese will toe a fine line as he pursues closer ties with China while continuing to strongly maintain to the US that Australia needs the Aukus submarines.
