In a first in 7 years, Australian minister to visit China amid signs of mending ties

Treasurer Jim Chalmers will this week become the first Australian government minister in that key economic role to visit China in seven years, in the latest sign that strained bilateral relations are mending.

Chalmers flies to Beijing on Thursday for a two-day visit. The last Australian treasurer to visit China was Scott Morrison in 2017.

Morrison rose to become prime minister a year later and bilateral relations further soured under his rule until his conservative government was replaced by Prime

Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor Party after the 2022 general election.

Chalmers said Wednesday that the main purpose of his visit was to co-chair the Australia-China Strategic Economic Dialogue on Thursday with He Lifeng, chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission.

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Discussions will focus on growing trade and investment with China and opportunities for Australian and Chinese businesses to cooperate, government documents say.

“This is another really important step towards stabilizing our economic relationship with China,” Chalmers told reporters in Brisbane.

“It will be part of the Albanese government‘s methodical and coordinated efforts to reestablish dialogue with China, Australia’s largest trading partner,” Chalmers added.

The dialogue was last held in 2017.

The bilateral relationship plumbed new depths in 2020 after the Morrison government called for an independent investigation into the origins of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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China imposed a series of official and unofficial bans in 2020 on Australian products, including coal, cotton, wine, barley, beef, lobsters and wood that cost Australian exporters up to 20 billion Australian dollars ($13 billion) a year.

Most of those trade obstacles have been removed since the conservative government was ousted after nine years in office.

In November, Albanese became the first Australian prime minister to visit China in seven years. In June, Li Qiang became the first Chinese premier to visit Australia in seven years.

But Australia remains wary of China as a trading partner despite improving relations and is keen forge closer economic ties to the world’s most populous nation, India.

Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal met with his Australian counterpart Don Farrell in Australia on Wednesday to discuss progress on a new bilateral free trade deal that furthers a 2022 pact.

“As a testimony of the importance that the Australia relationship is to India, we are looking at significantly upscaling our partnerships in trade, investment, tourism and technology and therefore one of the first announcements I’d like to make is that we shall shortly be setting up in Sydney an office covering all these four areas,” Goyal told reporters in Farrell’s hometown of Adelaide.

Australia has had a free trade agreement with China since 2015.