Age of the Dragon | Australia's relationship with China needs just a bit of stability, thanks

The government is trying to take the volatility out of our relationship with China.

It's not trying to get back to the days before 2020 or even before 2017 - when, according to some, the relationship was healthy or, as more realistic people understood, we were a bunch of schmucks.

Confusingly, Labor is surely not aiming at restoring our trade with China, either, even though it is trying to get Beijing to remove blockages to our exports.

In statements about the relationship, by Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and other members of the government, you'll see "stable" or a related word time and again.

After meeting her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing on Wednesday, Wong said: "The government's made clear that we believe it's in Australia's interest for our relationship with China to be stabilised."

In fact, achieving stability won't amount to an earth-shaking improvement.

A toning down of language between the two countries, which we've already seen, is welcome, and we really hope there will be no more arbitrary arrests of Australians in China - and that two already held there will soon be released.

Also, it will be helpful if the two countries can talk about and cooperate on bits and pieces of international policy - regulatory stuff that gets little attention. And our embassy needs good contact with Chinese departments when little troubles arise.

Even that "stability" surely won't last, however.

Things will go off the rails again soon enough, and maybe someone will unfairly blame the government for failing to live up to its ambitions.

In the meeting, Wang told our minister: "China and Australia have no historical grievances and no fundamental conflicts of interest and should and can become partners in mutual need."

But of course there are fundamental conflicts of interest as China works relentlessly towards dominating this side of the world and as Australia and allies, mainly the US and Japan, work to resist it.

That's why the government is not talking about an actual revival in trade even as Wong does talk about getting Beijing to cease the obstruction of our exports.

The various forms of trade blockage began after Scott Morrison called in 2020 for an international inquiry into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Notice that these obstructions are not acknowledged as part of China's foreign policy. Officials simply told Chinese importers to stop buying Australian coal, for example.

That's when we saw that, when China buys lots of products from Australia that it can alternatively get from somewhere else, it holds a weapon against us. (This does not cover Australian iron ore supplies, incidentally; China can't economically replace them.)

So when Wong raised the trade issue in Beijing this week she was obviously just doing so on principle, going through the motions: we're being pushed around, so we must demand that the pushing stop. She could not have met Wang with any dignity while failing to say that obstructions to our wine, coal, lobsters and so on should be removed.

Also, China is a member of the World Trade Organisation and therefore obliged to be non-discriminatory in trade. Again, it's a principle we must uphold regardless of whether we actually want to sell more stuff.

If "stability" brings a restoration of trade access and perhaps, despite a lack of government interest, a revival in exports, wait to see what happens in the next big dispute. For example, sooner or later Canberra will tell the Chinese owner of the commercial port facilities at Darwin to sell up. There is sure to be a hissy fit from Beijing in response.

It's a fair bet that Labor, wanting to get on with stabilising the relationship, has temporarily set aside the Darwin port problem, which arose under the Coalition government.

The opportunity to make progress with Beijing was available because Labor came to office as a cleanskin. It would have instantly lost that status if it had moved on Darwin Port.

The pandemic seems to be racing through China pretty much as apprehensively described by this column last week.

The country's people themselves know little of how many are dying as hospitals are overwhelmed, because the Chinese Communist Party is ensuring that local media are reporting only what is agreeable to it - that it is doing a splendid job, as always.

But foreign reporters have cottoned on to the clever idea of staking out crematoriums.

By last weekend, no doubt before the peak in deaths in Beijing, the crematorium there assigned to take the bodies of COVID-19 sufferers was operating 24 hours a day.

Reuters reported that several hearses a minute were arriving at just one funeral parlour, which suggests it was receiving well over 1000 bodies a day.

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On Monday the authorities announced that two people had died of COVID.

The incredibly sharp wave of infection that flooded Beijing is now well and truly subsiding, because great majority of people there have already been infected.

But this week cities, towns and villages elsewhere were at or moving towards their peaks. Across China now, crematoriums are running flat out, according to reports.

Last week, foreign epidemiologists' modeling predicted that 1 million could die.

The CCP will no doubt never say how many excess deaths occurred in the chaotic end of its three-year zero-COVID policy.

But maybe demographers will work it out in coming years as they scrutinise population figures and notice how many people suddenly disappeared in 2022.