From resources booms to iron wars and Olympic highs to diplomatic death stares and detentions, the Australia-China relationship has been one of peaks and troughs.
Julie Bishop, then foreign minister, and her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, sat staring at each other in silence over dinner for an hour. It was December 2013 and theirsignalled an ominous change in what were usually cordial meetings between Australian and Chinese officials.
Bishop later recalled that Australia’s ambassador to China at the time, Frances Adamson, slipped her a note across the table: “This is going terribly badly”.While Canberra played down the tensions, China’s behaviour shocked the diplomatic community. It was an early sign of an emboldened China’s willingness to put polite protocol aside and throw its weight around when criticised.
“We’re not talking about the Australia-China relationship any more,” says Allan Gyngell, who was senior foreign policy adviser to former prime minister Paul Keating and is a former head of Australia’s top intelligence agency, which was then called the Office of National Assessments. The Whitlam government had come to power 16 days earlier. And the following year, in 1973, Whitlam travelled to Beijing to meet Mao.
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