Can China Sway Australia?

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by Charlie Adele, Senior Advisor and Australia Chair here at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. I've been wanting to do a China-Australia episode for a while now, in part because our listeners keep requesting one, and I want to prove that we really do read all the emails, but also because Australia stands as a really interesting lens through which to unpack China's strategy for dealing with U.S. allies, for ramping up economic coercion and ramping it down again, for influencing democratic politics, and for winning over the most sinuskeptical players in the Indo-Pacific. And of course, it's instructive to look at how Australia is responding and working to shape the trajectory of China-Australia relations. So Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Henrietta, thank you very much for having me on. As we say, long-time listener, first-time caller, this is a great podcast. I'm thrilled to be on with you. Thrilled you could join. We like to start all of our episodes with a question about how our guests developed their regional expertise. So what did that look like for you? Well, a very long time ago, when we were living in Beijing, my wife and I took a once in a lifetime trip to Australia, you know, dummies that we are, we got on the plane and thought, oh, look, it's on the same side, China and Australia, quick flight. So 13 hours later, when we had flown down all the way, we realized, oh, actually, it's pretty far away. That once in a lifetime trip, though, obviously evolved. I've been doing work on the Indo-Pacific, on China, on allies and partners. I had been working for the Secretary of State and policy planning when I was at state. I had been teaching at the Naval War College. And then as with many things in my life, Henrietta, my wife, who's a US diplomat, said, hey, what do you think about moving? I said, no. And she said, great, we're moving. So we ended up in 2017, moving to Sydney, Australia for her job. I mean, the real answer here is I was a traveling spouse. And I was lucky enough, one, to go to Australia, two, to set up shop at the US Study Center at the University of Sydney, and three, to be there at a fascinating moment. Now, I tracked Australia for the secretary as part of my remit. But I would joke all the time when I would fly home during that period that covering Australia was in some ways busier than when I was working for the Secretary of State, which is on its face a patently ridiculous thing to say. But if we think about August 2017, moving onwards, the first Trump administration, crazy amounts of coercion and intimidation and political interference by the Chinese state into the Australian body politic, the questions were coming so fast and so furiously for Australians about what is happening with the United States and what is China doing to us at this moment. That was an incredibly interesting, productive, churning period in Australian politics. And I got to live here during it. So your question was, how did I end up kind of focusing on Australia? But I gave you Australia and China as a twofer there. Well, I guess that's consistent with the theme we're going for. So I appreciate that. So then jumping into the theme, if we could start somewhat unfairly broad, I'm hoping you can help our listeners and me understand why Australia matters to China. Like in what ways does Beijing look out at Australia as something that's important to their own interests? And then why does China matter to Australia? Yeah, there are a couple of different, let's take the why does Australia matter to China first? And there are a couple of answers as there would be for any country. First and foremost, resources. Australia matters enormously to China because Australia has a lot of resources and commodities that get sold to China that have helped power China on its growth. We're talking primarily about coal. We're talking about oil. We're talking about iron ore that gets sold up to China. So they look down, they see an extraordinarily important resource. The Chinese obviously are pursuing their own diversification policy. If you look at where China is sourcing its minerals from, if you look at their moves towards Africa, towards Latin America. But for a very long time, Australia has been the primary source for the Chinese, and that matters to them. You know, there are other parts to this question, or to this answer rather too. Australia is a destination to which many Chinese tourists go. It's the destination to which many Chinese go to get their education. But if we were going to say that resource is one part, the other part is, I think, somewhat strategically and has been developed over the past couple of years. So Australia is a firm ally of the United States has been increasingly is so if we think about this from a military standpoint, a defense standpoint, and that's uncomfortable and always has been to China, particularly as it sees the US kind of growing its footprint, diversifying its military footprint for the region. I think a better way to think about this, though, is why does Australia matter to China, we're going to talk about what happened starting really in 2017 and 2020, when the course of hammer began to come down on Australia from China. But I think primarily that as a middle size power that is democratic, that has trade extraordinarily tied up with China, when China leaned very hard on Australia starting in 2017, but really accelerating in the spring of 2020, when China did that to a number of different countries, you saw a number of different responses. The Australian response was a very strong one. They pushed back, it united the political parties. And so I think why does Australia matter? Because it was in some ways, a counterexample of a country that pushed back and that was really annoying and very frustrating for the Chinese. And can you tell us about that episode? Sure. So there is a prehistory here, which we can get into. But basically, the idea was, if you look at trade flows between the two countries, Australia was, comma, Australia still is, but Australia was at that point, the most trade dependent of all advanced democratic countries on China. At the high point of trade between the Chinese and the Australians, as much as 39, 40% of Australian exports flowed north to China. That's a lot. And so you can see the kind of logic chain here from Beijing, which was if we squeeze you on the trade front, hopefully we'll get political compliance. In fact, anecdotally, I can tell you that friends who worked in government in Australia in the past prior to that moment would say that when the Australian government opened its mouth to complain about anything like freedom of navigation, like human rights, sometimes with China in the sentence, sometimes without China in the sentence, they could set their clocks. And within 10 minutes, there would be phone calls from mining executives in Western Australia, yelling at the foreign minister, yelling at the prime minister, yelling at the trade minister and saying, you are tanking our relationship. So this is not a crazy theory for China that if you squeezed Australia, you might get political, if not compliance, political silence on complaint. So 2020, as COVID begins to spread around the world, there are already some irritants, which we'll talk about later if you want. But basically, the Australian government, the foreign minister at the time, said what I would think would be a somewhat innocuous statement, saying there should be an international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 so that it can never happen again. We should all share information. Sounds innocuous. If you're in the Chinese Communist Party, it's probably not quite so innocuous. The Chinese went, frankly speaking, this is a term of our nuts. They complained about this, but they weaponized the trade. And they basically flipped everything off with the exception of the stuff they needed, the iron ore and the coal. And so the idea was, would they get political compliance on this? The shock, the trade shock was felt in Australia. Billions of dollars we're talking about. But instead of, I think, what the Chinese intended, that you would get political compliance and silence, you had Australian outrage on this. It united both political parties behind pushing back, assertively asserting their own rights to this. And it was one of those issues where if there was unease about the growing Chinese military footprint, now there was clear growing unease about the Chinese economic footprint in Australia. So the high point of this really started at 2020. It was fascinating to watch that public opinion polling in Australia tanked on favorabilities towards China. You had something like a 40 percentage point drop, 40 percentage point drop, right? Where at one point, Xi Jinping was polling lower than Kim Jong-un in Australia. That was then. Things have changed at this point. But if we're talking about a step change in what had happened, that moment of economic attempted economic coercion really kind of level set how many Australians were thinking about China. And ultimately, it seems like Australia ended up being kind of a successful case study of just waiting out Chinese economic coercion and letting things level out in the end, or is that a fair assessment? It is. There's more detail and nuance, of course, to this. Part of this is Australia had more resilience, I think, than even Australians thought, because many of the commodities that they sold them were fungible. You can sell them on a global market, number one. Number two, the Chinese actually needed this many of the commodities that they sold to them. And yes, to your point, I think it's a useful one that when you have political unity for this, in fact, political outrage for this, like things went into a tailspin between the two countries. There was a deep freeze that they called it where, you know, there were no official visits for quite a long time. And lo and behold, the Chinese, of course, did not back down and then looked for a moment to recalibrate their relationships. So they waited until there was an election in Australia. They waited until the parties had switched for the first time in a decade. And then they went about kind of resetting and slowly pulling off some of these trade restrictions and trade barriers, just as the Australian government watched its rhetoric more closely, decided that it wouldn't call out China by name. So there was a resetting on both sides on this, I think, but fundamentally a climb down on Chinese trade restrictions. While as the Australians like to say, they didn't change their security settings at all. I appreciate your use of the term security settings. I feel like it's very oceanic to talk about set policy settings. I hear that whenever I'm down there. So it seems like the tale you have illustrated here is a good example of how Australia can be a confounding factor for China. And it a strong middle power with its complex deep democratic politics allied to the U but then with this very strong economic relationship to China in a geography that very important to China but lying outside of the immediate periphery around which Beijing has increasingly structured its regional strategy. So how does Australia fit into China's broader order building project for the Indo-Pacific? Like, where does Australia fit into the community of common destiny for Asia? Yeah, well, it's not in the first island chain. It's not the first chip that will fall for from the Chinese perspective. It's it lies outside. And frankly, from a kind of a political assessment, I think we can say that at this point, while various Chinese leadership might attempt to entice, might attempt to wedge the Australians, for the most part, I think they've counted the Australians out, right? That the Australians are going to side with America, even if they'll do it ambiguously on certain things. So it's not the first thing that they'll look at on this. However, as with a lot of other things, where does Australia sit? Well, it sits, as I kind of jokingly said, like not so close, right? It's a 13 hour flight. But if we think about historically where Australia has sat, although I guess where it has sat, the geography hasn't really changed. It's when we think about kind of from simply from a military campaigning perspective, Australia is a resupply hub for any type of contingency that might develop between the United States and China. If we think about that from World War II, the United States kind of based itself after it had to retreat out of the Philippines and elsewhere before it staged north into and then beyond Papua New Guinea and moving from there. This matters, I think, a lot to the Chinese when they think about their future Sinocentric order, one, to make sure that that is that much harder for both the United States and for China. So when I think, when the Chinese think about Australia strategically, they want to, if not neutralize it, make it as hard as possible, both for the Australians, but for the United States and Australia to use Australia when it stages North. It's also, as I said a second ago, Henrietta, I think that because Australia is seen as a real U.S. ally, but also as a real U.S. ally that has extraordinarily deep ties economically primarily, but also culturally with China, that the more you can wedge or diversify how allies would react to any type of contingency, the more challenges that creates for the U.S. I'm not sure if that's your question, but again, it's not the same, obviously, as Taiwan. It's not the same as the Paracel Islands. It's not the same as Vietnam because the rings get concentric and move further out. But again, and I should say too, we were talking about the economic coercion. We haven't yet talked about some of the acts of political influence that happened in Australia. There was a moment about eight, nine years ago where there was some overblown rhetoric writing that Australia was about to go red. Not true in any way, shape or form. However, the question about whether or not the Australians themselves would be willing to commit to use themselves as a base or use their assets is a live debate that still goes on here in Australia. And you mentioned the wedges that China may try to drive here. And so I think we all know and see in Asia, in Europe, really around the world, that a key priority for China is trying to drive wedges between the U.S. and its allies. And of course, now the United States is also driving some pretty significant wedges between the United States and its allies. So how is that playing out in Australia? Look, that's a complex question. I mean, on the US one, Australia is a deep, enduring ally. I mean, the nomenclature that I guess started under the last administration, then we persist now is calling the US Australian alliance, the unbreakable alliance. Yeah, okay, so that's the nomenclature of this, which means to say that the United States, if we think about kind of postured defense posture, military posture, in the entire region, the name of the game is diversity. diversification, right? Kind of scatter your forces so that they can potentially kind of attack from a range of different places, making them harder to target in any one. And particularly because Australia is so far away, makes it harder to target assets. So when we think about this is, I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, Henrietta, to your wedge question, but I'm starting on the defense side of things. When we think about in some ways, what China's strategy is here, what really what the US strategy is in Australia, a lot of people think of AUKUS, the submarine deal. That's only one part of it because there is a force posture ongoing series of moves between Australia and the US where it's not just submarines, it's US airplanes, it's US Marines that, by the way, began rotating through Australia up in Darwin, which is at the top end of Australia more than a decade ago. It's more ship visits that are there too. It's increasingly the ability to kind of build and resupply munitions, both to Australians and to the US, meaning that it could be in a contingency, a staging ground. The wedge for China is to make that as uncomfortable to Australia and the Australian body politic as possible. So look, there is a military element to this, but the way that China tries to make this uncomfortable to Australia is to really wedge that trade issue. Again, we talked about how at the high point, there was almost 40% of Australian exports going to China. It's not that high, but it has reset to a large degree. I mean, somewhere hovering between somewhere between 29, 35%. And so again, I think many Australians and particularly Australian businesses understand that they have commodities you can sell anywhere. But boy, do the Chinese pay a good price on things. And that's true in coal. It's true in iron ore. And it's really true in wine and rock lobster. So again, trying to wedge this is trying to condition trade to a lot of degrees. Look, I also mentioned earlier that the Chinese are no fools in any of this. They understand that they don't want to be reliant themselves on a single source. So they are looking to diversify where they source their commodities from. That is a frightening prospect to Australians considering just how much of their commodities they sell and their mineral wealth to China and just how slow they've been to diversify. When I think about diversification, maybe like the gold standard that comes to mind is Japan And having the first experience of China weaponizing critical mineral choke points quite a while ago over a dispute in the Senkakus, Japan took real steps, said, OK, well, clearly this is a national security vulnerability that we can't accept, made real investments, put real money, real policy behind diversification. And now, you know, it's not perfect, but Japan has more resilience in their critical mineral supply chains than any of us. They've been insulated from a lot of the worst effects of the Chinese policies from the past year because they took these steps. So Australia also seems to have had a relationship with China where the vulnerabilities inherent in certain areas of the economic relationship where they may be overexposed to the Chinese market has been illustrated very clearly for the business community, for the government. Have you seen that kind of and therefore we will de-risk or in certain sectors or how is the policy response evolving? So you've actually answered the question already, because it's the governmental understanding, and this is true of both the government and the opposition is, and therefore we will de-risk, although it is hard to do. And we're kind of finding our way towards that, particularly in the critical mineral space. And then also depends on which sector we're talking about. So let me take both of those briefly, Henrietta. So I'll give you a quick story that in 2019, in the summer of 2019, so July, August 2019, so that is approximately six to eight to nine months, depending on how you count before the onset of COVID, before the onset of the weaponization of trade from China to Australia. A friend and I wrote a report of the future of US-Australian relationships in an era of great power competition, otherwise known as China. That was not in the title, it just what obviously was the subtext to the report. We briefed the report, amongst other things, to a whole slew of business leaders in Sydney and Melbourne. And the basic argument was economic diversification strategies are obviously going to look different for the United States than they are for Australia. In the United States, we're going to have a long debate about what decoupling looks like or de-risking looks like. but the throw weight of our economies mean that's going to be a long and drawn out process. And we'll come to it eventually, but it's going to play out over a number of years. In Australia, it's about diversification because you're over leveraged on a single market and you have commodities that you can sell elsewhere. And I thought this was a pretty brilliant report. And as I briefed it, I was pretty sure that I was brilliant on this. And the response that I got uniformly was, thanks for the report rivers of gold made. I said, what? And they said, look, yeah, okay, got it, geopolitics matters, but not that much because we're selling it for such a good price to the Chinese. And I said, sure, that makes some sense. But wouldn't you want to begin to hedge your risk as a business person or people? You hedge risk all the time on capital, on talent. Now we're just making the argument that geopolitics is another area where you have to begin to hedge risk. And so wouldn't you rather do it now than under duress? And again, I got the good boy, go back and play in the geopolitics lane. We're making so much money. Fast forward eight, nine, 10 months, and they did it. Some industries better than others, but they did it under duress. So when I say certain sectors and certain, you know, the wine industry really got hurt by this. The rock lobster industry really got hurt by this, didn't reset as quickly as some of the others. When we talked about the first point though, that therefore the writing is on the wall, we need to have an alternative approach to this, the government, I think, got this. The challenge is, how do you create an economic diversification strategy when private sector doesn't necessarily want to do this? So the government's tried a bunch of things, as they have, frankly, in Japan, as the United States, frankly, is trying to do as well. And so one is to create economic incentives that can go with floor prices, offtake agreements. Another is to brief some of these companies by the government's, by the government's intelligence agencies so that they understand what's happening a little bit better. And the work has been slow, but I think recognizable in many of the sectors. And so it's playing out most clearly in critical minerals that obviously the West writ large does not have the ability not only to mine, but clearly to refine critical minerals, a key input to the future economy in so many ways in the 21st century. Australia knows this, the United States knows this under the Biden administration. They came out with a third pillar of the relationship beyond defense, beyond trade. It was now going to be, it's a word salad, but basically climate, critical minerals, economic resilience, like a whole bunch of things. But this is going to be one of the pillars. And it worth pointing out that I mean an Australian company Linus has stronger rare earths processing capabilities than probably anyone else outside of China or outside of the Chinese supply chain Well they the only one that managed to make a profit in rare earths because they set up a refinery in Malaysia, amongst other places. And their CEO, their soon-to-be sapping-down CEO, Amanda Lacaz, has been outspoken about how important it is not only to do this, but to have governmental support for this. So they started this then, but you can see this happening, too, under the Trump administration. So when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came to Washington to visit Donald Trump this past fall, yes, they talked about AUKUS. Yes, they talked about, but they talked about critical minerals and how they were going to collaborate. The Australian Embassy, which is across the street from CSIS. We have great neighbors. Ambassador Kevin Rudd. He never tires of saying Australia equals the periodic table. Maybe yes, maybe no. But there are a lot of resources in Australia. The challenge here, which is, I think, what we saw at that big conference that CSIS held just the other week about critical minerals. The challenge is, how do you come up with something that runs counter to market forces because China has distorted the market? How do you create the incentives for companies to do things that will not be immediately profitable? Is it by creating price floors? Is it by having offtake agreements where the government will buy a certain amount of these? And the Australians are experimenting with this, but it's still early days. So you mentioned earlier the Australian prime minister had a big trip to China somewhat recently over the summer last year with stops in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, which are not places that are all that close to each other. it shows like a real commitment to spending time in the country. The messaging seemed to focus very heavily on the trading relationship and the prime minister traveled with a large business delegation. What were your takeaways from that trip in terms of the direction of China, Australia, diplomacy? Yeah. So look, this is the prime minister's second trip to China because he took one during his first term. The name of the game, and we haven't really discussed this, and it's a critical part of the Australia-China discussion, is in the aftermath of that very rocky period where China attempted to weaponize trade, the Aussies were across the board, I think, very upset by this. There was, I think, quite a lot of public support for a tougher policy from the Australian government. But then, as we discussed too, this had a real impact on Australian businesses. During that election campaign, not the recent one, but back in 2022, the then opposition, the now government, Labour, led by Anthony Albanese, their critique of the sitting government was, we don't disagree with anything you say, but why do you need to say it so loudly? It's hurting Australia. It's hurting Australian businesses. Turn the temperature down. And what that morphed into was a call for China and Australia to stabilize relationships, their relationship, a stabilization policy. We can debate about whether or not stabilization is actually an objective or a means, but that was the critique. That's what they ran on. And so the government under Anthony Albanese has been very, I think, disciplined in taking the temperature down, which means not saying China by name nine times out of 10, seeing if they could dance a little bit to reset the economic relationship while not necessarily backing down from the security settings. I'm going to keep saying that phrase, Henrietta. In case we weren't clear that you are located in Australia. Because I'm located in Australia right now. But they had a willing dance partner in the Chinese who I think realized that their approach had backfired. So over Albanese's first term, you begin to see some of the trading restrictions fall off. You saw the release of some political prisoners who were Australians, you know, hostage taking that the Chinese tend to do from time to time. And so Anthony Albanese went up to China. I'd also note that he didn't go up with a full contingent. You know, it was a, I think the Chinese were ready to kind of roll out the red carpet and the Australians weren't quite ready. They just want to normalize relations. Fast forward to Anthony Albanese's reelection this past May with a whomping majority, feeling very confident, not only in his own political skills, but in the policies that the government has undertaken. And you had a trip to China, which looked quite different from the first trip. So this is the one that you asked about that he undertook just a couple of months ago. He stayed for a longer time than people were expecting. He went to Chengdu, you know, beyond Shanghai and Beijing. Also to meet with pandas in part, which shows the tenor of the relationship. Well, you're laughing, but you know this. Panda diplomacy matters, certainly from the Chinese perspective. They love to dangle their pandas. They love to take away their pandas when they need to. But Anthony Albanese did this for a couple of different reasons, I think. One, to kind of solidify the stabilization narrative. Two, to see if they could kind of celebrate or at least peel back the last couple of restrictions, which they were getting to. Three, to encourage the economic deep engagement. So when he was there, Albanese said, amongst other things, that he wanted more Australians to have this visit, this type of trip. He encouraged Chinese students to come back. the deep freeze between Australia and China had also affected the tertiary economic sector, which overwhelmingly flows from Chinese students coming to Australia. That's a separate topic, but that's a big one in Australia too. And so we wanted the visuals to be very good on this trip. It also coincided with the anniversary of Australia's opening to China or China's opening to Australia, depending on how we say this, where a Gough Whitlam, who was a Labour Party member, just like Anthony Albanese traveled to China. And so a lot of the visuals of the trip beyond the pandas, the walk on the wall, the some of the Zhongnanhai stuff were actually visuals attempted to recast Albanese as Gough Whitlam, this kind of legendary figure within Australian politics. You know, on the other side of the ledger, so it was received pretty well, was a warming, and some of the last trade restrictions fell off. The critique of this trip was it was overly indulgent by the prime minister. It was too long. He didn't out loud bring up any of the irritants of which there are many, particularly on the security side. And this looked like a taxpayer, this is the quote, right? A taxpayer funded political trip to recreate some of these visual images to which the prime minister has said, well, what does it matter? I just want a whomping victory here. But that was kind of the context for this as business started to reset, too. How do you think China felt about the visit? China felt mostly pretty good about this. They got the visuals that they wanted. They didn't feel quite as good about this as some of the other trips that they got out of the Aussies, not coordinated by the federal government. So, you know, the Chinese are masters at propaganda. When they had their military parade last year, the Aussies didn't send anyone. I mean, they mined a representation there. So we have in the US some problems at the federal versus state level. The Australians have bigger problems or have had bigger problems about non-coordinated policy. So a former premier that's a governor of Victoria went basically because he's a businessman now too and like stood next to Vladimir Putin. A former foreign minister, Bob Carr, also went up and then realized he probably shouldn't be there and stepped out of the picture. The Chinese were much happier with that trip because it gave them everything they wanted propaganda wise than they were with Albanese's. But they were pleased by the Albanese trip. However, and there is a big however, if you kind of track Chinese state media on this, there's a little bit occasionally of befuddlement from the Chinese on the Aussies about we don't understand. And like there's pretty good goodwill between the governments, good people to people ties, extraordinary business ties. why don't you guys just get over it on the US thing? And so, you know, some of the kind of, I love reading Global Times headlines because they're like just so good. So at the low point of the relations back in 2020, Australia was referred to as just chewing gum stuck to the bottom of the US's and China's foot. Like it doesn't matter. It's something you step on. Charm offensive. Clearly. In the aftermath of the Albanese trip this past year, good signs from the Chinese press Lots of glowing, you know, editorials about the reset, the recalibration, the stabilization, the Australian word, not the Chinese word. But then a couple of comments saying, Australia, you cannot continue to butter your bread on two sides, which is the debate within Australia, frankly, too, about there are two different partners, one economic, one defense wise, and the Chinese a bit of consternation and befuddlement, but not really, because I think they understand fundamentally where Australia sits on the ledger. You hear this lecture from Beijing to many U.S. partners, like for the Europeans, it's like, well, you can't be both partners and rivals with China because that's their framework, that we are partners and rivals and a lot of concern about the sides of bread that receive butter. Yeah. Let me just note that the Australian government under Anthony Alvarez, he clearly under the foreign minister, Penny Wong, has said that their very disciplined approach to stabilization has allowed them to condition the Chinese to accept that they will have more friendly relations. They will stabilize. They want to build in space for inevitable ups and downs in the relationship, but that Australia won't stop doing what it's going to do in the security space. It's not going to stop partnering with the US. AUKUS is now baked into how they look at things. They will bring up issues that are uncomfortable for the Chinese. And as Penny Wong says pretty regularly, in Oceania, particularly in the Pacific Islands, which matter enormously to Australia, there's a permanent contest underway between China and Australia for influence. So when we talk about stabilization from the Australian perspective, and certainly from the government's perspective, if not the opposition's, it's allowed them to condition the Chinese for walking and chewing Ghana at the same time, or as the Chinese say, buttering your bread on both sides. We had a great episode last fall with Sarah Barron, who I'm sure you know well, on U.S.-China diplomacy. And we talked about how much pain and thinking and deliberation goes into the two to three adjectives with which you describe a summit meeting. So I feel like I have to just note that Australia's approach to this summit is, according to the Australians, patient, calibrated and deliberate. And the relationship is stable and constructive. I love how you can feel the amount of meetings that went into that formulation. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I would throw off is, sure, like governments, all governments over the world, like do lots of work on adjectives and have lots of ways that they frame the narrative or attempt to frame the narrative. But of course, there are other things that intrude on that, too. So I think the last thing that you read, Henry, was kind of stable and constructive, the relationship. But of course, that's not always true. And that's not always the case. So in the aftermath and even in the kind of run up to Albanese's visit, there are things that are irritants to the Australians about the relationship. That's clearly true on the defense side, as you have multiple kind of close encounters between the Australian and Chinese militaries. Despite stabilization, there have been multiple instances of unsafe intercepts with Chinese jets flying right in front of military aircraft on the Australians and releasing chaff right into them like a really unsafe way to do things There was an instance last year where an Australian diver was in the water and Chinese ships came around and kind of sonic pulsed them. And like it was very injurious to that diver. These are things that are uncomfortable. And then that's before we even begin to talk about things like China wants Australia to know consistently that they can reach out and touch them. And so there was a big to-do last May when the Chinese, for the first time ever, sent a naval task group to circumnavigate Australia with a just like, hello, we're here. We can reach out and touch you in a way that they hadn't given any advance notification. In fact, they did live fire drills between Australia and New Zealand that they didn't give any notification to that the Australian and New Zealand government found out about because commercial airline pilots were calling in that they were being diverted from airspace because there were going to be missiles flying around. There are irritants in the defense space, in the economic space, in the political space, despite the Australian government, despite the Chinese government's attempt to frame this as constructive. And I should say the press release goes on to say that we will disagree where we must and engage in our national interests. So I don't want to be too selective, but I can't stay away from some good adjectives? Well, you are, look, the Labour government has been nothing if not very disciplined. I mean, their critique of the former government, the centre-right coalition, was that they were undisciplined in their language. Therefore, they've imposed discipline. This feels very disciplined. Well, I will say that it's, I think, if you ask any China analyst in Australia, any Australian foreign policy analyst about, they'll all, they all know immediately what stabilisation means because they'll say, yes, we engage where we can, disagree where we must, and pursue the Australian national interests. I mean, like it's boring because it's been said so many times, which is the point from the government, but it does feel a little stale at times as well. I want to talk about climate because the fight against climate change has been such a signature priority for Prime Minister Albanese. And China is such a complicated player on that issue as the world's largest emitter of carbon, but also the world's largest producer of clean energy. And then there's the risk of Chinese overcapacity in clean tech effectively wiping out the rest of the world's green manufacturing bases since the rest of the world struggles to compete on price. So how does Australia think about this? It's complicated, as they say, but there are a couple of different ways that they think about this. So the first is, right, there's not necessarily an automatic reaction to everything China does. and in clean tech, clean energy, there is a natural attraction in some ways. And forget about the natural attraction. There's just a pragmatic approach that many of the inputs to a decarbonizing strategy, if you look down the supply chain, emanate from China at this point. So you need it for some of the things that you want, even if you're aware of the Chinese strategy, which is more than just an energy strategy that's coming to eat your industries as well. So there's a pragmatic approach. There's also a clear, I think, de-risking approach to how Australia will pursue a cleaner agenda. That's obviously less true in its relationship with the United States under Donald Trump, but under the Biden administration too, because this is a clear priority for Australia. The idea to pursue a clean energy strategy in tandem with other allies and partners, comment, not the United States right now, was a higher agenda item, particularly as they look to de-risk some of their trade dependencies and their supply chain dependencies with China. And then there's frankly one that the Australians are still at the outset of thinking through, which is just as the United States had a made in the US approach, we know that the Chinese had their own industrial approach dating back almost a decade at this point, the China 2025 strategy. The Australians are thinking the contours of that through so that there's now a made in Australia approach, where there are certain industries that are beginning to be subsidized. That's still a live debate within Australia that's still just beginning to play out. But when we begin to look at particularly some of the production of and refinement of minerals, that clearly fits into the made in Australia. Some of the support is clearly not as clean tech driven. But as we said, it's complex because part of what the Albanese and labor government has done is taken a very different approach to energy. There was a hard fight between Australia and Turkey this year about who was going to host a COP 2026. That's important for this government. It's also important for the Pacific Island nations of which play a huge strategic role in the Australian mind. So how they kind of grapple with this is ongoing, is complex with the Chinese. We're almost out of time, but I want to talk just a little more about the Western Pacific, Taiwan, South China Sea, because Australia does seem to have taken a much stronger sense of responsibility when it comes to upholding deterrence, maintaining peace and stability in the Western Pacific in recent years. And so I'm hoping you could help us understand how Australia looks at Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea, recognizing that, you know, Australia has a little more geographic space between itself and those issues than countries like Japan or the Philippines. But even when, as you mentioned, Australian ships and service members have had very dangerous interactions with Chinese counterparts when operating in those geographies, they seem to maybe even more so because of that feel that it's important to be a player. So can you tell us about that? It's a big question because we're talking about a lot of different geographical locations there. I think so. I'm going to give you a really ham-handed, oversimplified answer because I'm good at that, if not the details. No. So look, when I was last in government, Henrietta, the Aussies were very good on supporting the rules-based order. So for instance, on your question about South China Sea, the Aussies were kind of first off the mark on kind of supporting the Hague Tribunal's decision on the South China Sea. However- And this is the tribunal that ruled that China's claims are entirely unlawful in the South China Sea. Bogus, unlawful. Exactly. Thank you for spelling that out. I think if they were good at supporting rules because middle-sized power like rules, it's useful for them. There was a general sense, too, that even if their ships transited, their planes would fly through those areas, that their policy was, you know, maybe a little bit slower, a little bit less developed than the United States. than Japan's and others, and probably because of geographical reason, as you had said. And I think the change that we have seen evolve over the last decade or so is one that when you would talk to a lot of Aussies, they would say, look, what's happening in the South China Sea looks really bad. It also looks really far away. And I think the change that has been noted is that what happens in the South China Sea doesn't stay in the South China Sea. That this is a model in some ways. This is a template for how China builds out and expands what it does politically with other countries and then therefore what it has the ability to do militarily to kind of push itself out. And so there's a developing debate about what China is up to in the South Pacific. But I think the idea has been that if this has happened in the South China Sea, this could happen much closer to Australia's borders that could really affect its strategic calculus. We haven't really talked about the kind of clarion alarm bell that was rung right before the May 2022 election about a secret deal signed between the Solomon Islands and Australia. Secret because to this day, the Solomon Islands has not released the text of that. We got it because the Chinese actually leaked it. And the concern was that a dual use military facility would set up on the northern approaches to Australia, which would totally scramble their geographical, their geographic and therefore their strategic calculus. Can't do a lot else if the Chinese are staging from your northern approaches. So again, a big answer to your question is the evolution of this has been the idea that as China continues to push further south, further east and further west, that increasingly is going to affect Australian interests. and therefore they need to be thoughtful and perhaps more forward in the region themselves. So now to your question, that's prompted, I think, changes in what Australia has done in how it's conducted itself with its Pacific neighbors. This government has been hyperactive in its approach to kind of nailing down new arrangements, new security arrangements with its Pacific neighbors. That's been true in Tuvalu. It's been true in Papua New Guinea. They're working very hard in Bonawatu. They've been very active on this front. It's true with how they've approached Southeast Asia. So we've seen a complete step change in Australian relations with the Philippines. We're moving towards a reciprocal access agreement. It's true with how Australia has approached its relationship with Japan, which now looks like a quasi-alliance at this point too. So then we get to the question of Taiwan. And it's true that the Australian position on Taiwan is evolving, certainly not in the public space, certainly not in the public space behind closed doors. The question is whether or not it's evolving quickly enough. And I would point you amongst other things to the Japan chair and the Australia chair. We ran a conference, we produced a report about a year and a half ago about how Australia, the United States and Japan might collaborate further on Taiwan specifically, with the prompt question being what else and what more. This is an active debate within Australia behind closed doors, a little bit less out in the public, although there is conversation about this too. Does Australia do Taiwan straight transits? Do they send ships through the straight? They do. I mean, that alone is not an insignificant public facing step. They don't talk about it, but they sail through. I think we'll have to wrap there. Thanks so much, Charlie, for coming on the show. And I didn't specify this, though we have alluded to it, that Charlie is based in Australia. So he has joined me virtually at an ungodly hour. No, no. Charlie's based on an airplane, Henrietta. So thank you. Thank you for that. To learn more about Australia and Australia-China relations, you can follow Charlie's work at the Australia Chair webpage at csis.org. And as always, we would love to hear what you thought of today's conversation, especially for our Australian listeners. Welcome your critiques and also would love to hear what issues you hope to hear the show address in the future. You can send ideas to peckingology at csis.org. If you haven't already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show, and we will be back in your feed soon. If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.