Australia and China might be on speaking terms

Today, Anthony Albanese and Chinese President Xi Jinping will sit down for a meeting that has already been relentlessly dissected and analysed, well before it actually becomes reality.To get more China latest news, you can visit shine news official website.

The talks will generate plenty of headlines, and for good reason: while Scott Morrison had brief discussions with Xi Jinping in 2018 and 2019, the last Australian prime minister to hold a full formal meeting with China's President was Malcolm Turnbull, way back in 2016.

That was only two years after the two countries had signed a "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership" in 2014, just before the buoyant optimism about the future of Australia-China's bilateral relationship curdled into a sour mess of suspicion and mutual recrimination.The meeting between Xi and Albanese marks an important juncture, and signals the diplomatic freeze imposed by China since early 2020 has now well and truly thawed.

Australia and China are, once again, on speaking terms.But that won't extinguish the profound differences between the two governments, or magically usher in a new era of amity and cooperation.

In fact, there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of an immediate reconciliation.It's worth remembering that Australian officials and advisers remain quite pessimistic about the prospects of a deep rapprochement with China.

This is not exactly a tightly held secret. The prime minister, the defence minister and the foreign minister have all said the same thing about renewed engagement with Beijing.

In brief ... we are happy to talk, but don't expect us to fold on any core issues.And the fact remains that Australia and China's interests are not aligned. Beijing and Canberra have radically different visions of how they would like the region to function over the coming decades.

To pick one example — Australia is intent on trying to help build a regional order in Asia that keeps space open for the US military, which would give smaller states (including Australia) the freedom to manoeuvre without having to defer to Beijing's demands, and which would balance China's military, financial and technological power.

China, on the other hand, would like to push the United States military out of Asia, and believes that it has every right to assume its historical position as the dominant regional power.The contours of this contest do not lean on raw military power alone, but Australia has already chosen a side in this particular battle, and Beijing knows it.

This reality first really swam clearly into view in 2018 when Turnbull decided to ban Chinese telco Huawei from Australia's 5-G network, in part because he just was not convinced that China wouldn't exploit the technology to cripple Australia in the event of armed conflict.

Some Australian officials still believe this decision – more than the furious outrage and the outbreak of "no speakies" in the wake of Morrison's call for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 – remains at the heart of the rancour between China and Australia.Labor accuses the Coalition of aggravating the situation by indulging in nationalist chest-thumping and overtly provocative rhetoric against China under Morrison.

It believes some of the sharper edges of the contest can be smoothed by more sustained and diplomatic engagement.

But there is a reason that the foreign minister chose a word as modest as "stabilised". Its scope is narrow and its ambition limited.

Government MPs tend to be somewhere between pessimistic and fatalistic when you ask them about the relationship.

The suspicion held across the political class is that nothing Australia can do or say will fundamentally alter China's trajectory, particularly as Beijing embraces an increasingly aggressive nationalistic fervour under Xi, and as strategic competition between China and the US intensifies.