(MENAFN- Asia Times)
Official relations between Australia and China are worse now than at the beginning of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s term.
This isn’t opinion – it’s a statement of fact. These days, it’s easy to forget that only a month after winning the 2019 election, Morrison met with China’s president, Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of a G20 gathering in Japan.
In November of that year, he also sat down with the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, while the two were in Thailand for the East Asia Summit.
His foreign minister, Marise Payne, meanwhile, met her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in August 2019 – and again the following month .
This high-level political dialogue, albeit not in the form of official bilateral visits, came at a time when political relations were already strained after Canberra had taken a strong stand against Beijing’s…
