Having Beijing's ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian address the National Press Club should signal that bilateral relations are on the up and up.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Better for there being any dialogue at all.
Without material changes in Australia's stance by the new Labor government, both nations took an opportunity for a reframing without admitting to past over-reactions, unsubtle rhetoric, and plainly domestic tub-thumping.
Dialogue doesn't guarantee peace but there is no peace which does not rest on it.
Yet despite Xiao's address and nascent ministerial-level talks, tensions between Australia and China are perilous. If anything the geo-strategic situation is now substantially worse, thanks to Beijing's adolescent over-reaction to the visit last week to Taipei by the US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
Xi Jinping's reading of Pelosi's essentially grandstanding gesture has revealed much about his real intentions over the territory Beijing insists is not a sovereign democracy but merely a rogue province of China.
Absurdly excessive sabre-rattling has included open-ended military training exercises, live missile fires over the island, testing of plane to ship weapons systems and other simulated attacks, plus an encirclement of Taiwan tantamount to a naval blockade.
Pelosi's visit must have been motivated by America's mid-term elections because in strategic policy terms, its upside is even more obscure.
Western governments had openly warned that Beijing may use the distraction of Russia's invasion of Ukraine to move on Taiwan, or at least to dial up the pressure.
In that context, it is astonishing then that the US simply handed President Xi a fresh pretext for doing just that.
American policy, supported by Australia, is one of strategic ambiguity on the question of what the US would do if Beijing invaded. Australia, like the US, officially recognises only one China, and acknowledges Beijing's claim over Taiwan.
MORE MARK KENNY:
Overlaid on these deliberately contradictory vagaries, is the notion of all players protecting the status quo - in other words, saying and doing nothing to provoke a change in the current arrangement. Pelosi's exquisitely poorly timed visit did that. It leant clarity to the US's deliberately unspecified intentions. Why?
To a nationalistic Xi, the high-profile visit was all the justification he needed - thin though it was - to licence a sharp escalation of tension in the Taiwan Strait.
These are dangerous developments. And Ambassador Xiao Qian did little to dissuade Australia that Beijing's grudging observance of the status quo - to wit, a democratic Taiwan with implicit defence cover from the West - has run out.
The ambassador, who ominously admits "re-education" of the Taiwanese could follow any successful annexation, said it was a unique case that could not be called "invasion".
"The issue between China and Taiwan, which is an issue between a central government [and] ... a local government ... it's an issue of reunification. Coming back to the motherland."
You may recall that Putin said Ukraine hadn't existed as a separate state either - just days before his tanks rolled in.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
