China should explain why it appears to have singled out Australia with a range of import restrictions that have disrupted trade flows and undermined trust in the economic relationship, Australian Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment Simon Birmingham has said.
With Australia and its largest trading partner locked in a stalemate over how to end the tensions, Birmingham also used a television interview yesterday to accuse the Chinese embassy in Canberra of taking a number of unhelpful actions this year.
A Chinese embassy official on Friday told Guardian Australia that “the problem is all caused by the Australian side” and Canberra should stop treating China as a strategic threat if it wants to resume ministerial-level talks that have been frozen since early this year.
Those comments came after the embassy provided Nine News with a list of 14 areas of dispute with Australia last week, including public commentary by the government of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison about human rights or territorial issues in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang, the blocking of numerous Chinese foreign investment proposals, and “antagonistic” media reporting by Australia’s free press.
Birmingham yesterday told Sky News that he did not think “that a number of the actions from China’s embassy in Australia have been particularly helpful this year.”
He cited remarks made by Chinese Ambassador Cheng Jingye (成競業) in April in which he warned that Australia’s forthright push for an international investigation into the origins and early handling of COVID-19 could sour bilateral ties and affect consumer sentiment.
Cheng told the Australian Financial Review that “if the mood is going from bad to worse,” Chinese tourists might rethink travelling to Australia, parents might reconsider sending their children to Australia to study, and consumers might rethink drinking Australian wine or eating Australian beef.
Birmingham said the ambassador’s comments “essentially were threats of coercion,” while the embassy’s subsequent list of “claimed grievances” contained the “types of things that any country rightly does in terms of providing for rules around foreign investment to make sure it’s in the national interest, rules to protect critical infrastructure and security provisions in nations.”
When asked why some Asian nations — including those with territorial disputes with China — could maintain workable relations and yet Australia’s relationship had deteriorated so much, Birmingham said it was something for Beijing to explain.
“In many ways you’re asking a question that is a question for Chinese authorities as to why they may have chosen to seemingly single out Australia in some way for commentary and/or action in different ways,” he said.
Birmingham said there were a number of areas in which China and Australia could continue to successfully cooperate in their mutual interest, particularly at a time when the global economic recovery is so crucial.
He said the Australian government was “so deeply concerned at the fact that the number of regulatory interventions China has taken this year that seem to have disrupted the flow of trade do then undermine that economic cooperation.”
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