China's Foreign Minister to Meet Former Australian PM Keating During First Visit Since 2017

Paul Keating, who led Australia as prime minister through the early 1990s, was preparing to sit down with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi this week—a meeting that carried symbolic weight in a relationship that had grown fractious and was now, tentatively, beginning to thaw. Keating, who has spent years as one of Australia's most vocal advocates for closer ties with Beijing and a sharp critic of the AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement with the United States and Britain, said he welcomed the chance to discuss regional matters with Wang. The meeting came as part of what would be Wang's first visit to Australia since 2017, a seven-year gap that itself told the story of how badly the relationship had deteriorated.

Wang's itinerary reflected the careful choreography of diplomatic repair. He was scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Penny Wong on Wednesday in Canberra, where he would also hold a roundtable with business leaders. Thursday would bring meetings in Sydney, though the government had not released those details publicly. The visit mattered because it signaled that China was willing to re-engage with Australia at the ministerial level after years of trade barriers and public friction. Just the week before, Beijing had announced it would lift tariffs on Australian wine—one of several agricultural products that had been caught in the crossfire of deteriorating relations.

Keating's involvement added another layer to the narrative. He had received what he described as an unexpected invitation from the Chinese Foreign Ministry to meet Wang at the end of the visit, and the Australian government was helping arrange it. This was not unusual, Keating noted—former prime ministers regularly met with visiting foreign officials. But his particular enthusiasm for the meeting, and his long record of defending China's interests, made it noteworthy. He had previously served on the board of the China Development Bank and had become a fixture in debates about Australia's strategic direction, consistently arguing that the country had moved too far into the American orbit.

The backdrop to all this was the Labor government's deliberate shift in approach since coming to power in 2022. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's administration had made stabilizing the relationship with China a priority, a marked departure from the confrontational posture of the previous Liberal government under Scott Morrison. Keating saw this as vindication. "Australia has moved substantially from the counterproductive baiting policy the Morrison government applied to China to now something much more civil and productive," he said. He framed his support for Albanese's efforts as consistent with his own long-held view that Australia needed to recalibrate its foreign policy around its actual region, not around distant alliances.

Yet the relationship remained shadowed by real disputes. The AUKUS agreement—through which the United States and Britain would help Australia develop nuclear-powered submarines—remained a point of acute tension. China had denounced it as inciting military confrontation. Keating had been unsparing in his criticism of Australian intelligence agencies and politicians who, in his view, had allowed themselves to be drawn into this arrangement. The Albanese government, despite its warmer tone toward Beijing, had not backed away from AUKUS; it continued to support the deal that Morrison had struck.

Then there was the case of Yang Hengjun, an Australian blogger whom a Beijing court had sentenced to death last month, though the sentence had been suspended. This was the kind of issue that could derail diplomatic progress. Wong would almost certainly raise it in her Wednesday meeting with Wang. It represented the human cost of the broader strategic competition—an Australian citizen caught in the machinery of Chinese state power, his fate a live question in bilateral relations even as both governments worked to improve the temperature of their engagement.

Keating's framing of the moment was optimistic. He said he had strongly supported Albanese's desire to "re-anchor" Australian foreign policy in the region. The implication was clear: the previous government had anchored it elsewhere, and that had been a mistake. Whether Wang's visit would actually produce the kind of sustained improvement both sides seemed to want remained to be seen. The diplomatic gestures were in place. The harder work of resolving the underlying conflicts—over submarines, over values, over Australia's role in a region where China's power was only growing—still lay ahead.