MICHAEL SMITH | Australian Financial Review | Extracts
SYDNEY - On a Qantas flight from Sydney to Shanghai last week the Chinese passengers returning home from a sun-drenched break watching Sydney's New Year's Eve fireworks or eating oysters in Tasmania only had praise for their time in Australia.
But the perception of Australia in China's state-sanctioned media this week was a far cry from that of a friendly trading partner.
A Turnbull government minister's public criticism of China's aid funding in the South Pacific escalated on Friday when China's People's Daily ran a prominent editorial accusing Australia of adopting a "sour grapes psychology" because it had competition in a region where it has long been top dog.
"This kind of arrogance shows Australia has not tolerated other countries having normal cooperation with the Pacific Islands for a long time," the newspaper said in the editorial on page three.
It is not unusual for an increasingly assertive China to take Australia to task, but the series of barbs between the two countries over the past week dashed hopes that the relationship could start the new year with a clean slate.
Tension between the two countries peaked in the in the final months of last year after the introduction of Australia's new political interference laws and a political storm over Labor Senator Sam Daystari's China connections.
International Development Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells kicked things off on Wednesday when what appeared to be off-the-cuff remarks to the media escalated into a full-blown diplomatic row with Australia's biggest trading partner.
The junior minister told The Australian and the ABC that China's Pacific aid program was a "white elephant" that had saddled small island nations with huge amounts of debt.
The publicity around an issue that usually attracts little attention prompted a rebuke from China's Foreign Ministry, which called the comments "irresponsible" and said it had lodged a formal diplomatic complaint.
Any hope that peace would reign during the usually quiet period between Australia's Christmas and Chinese New Year next month was dashed.
While Australia's role in the Pacific is shaping up to be another headache for the Turnbull government's relationship with Beijing, alongside the South China Sea and the new foreign interference laws, former diplomats and China watchers believe a more serious threat is the impact Beijing's reaction could have on the way Chinese people view Australia.
"I was at the Westin [hotel] in Guangzhou the other day and the doorman asked me why don't Australians like China. It never used to be this," Geoff Raby, Australia's former ambassador to Beijing, told the AFR Weekend.
"What is clear is that more and more Chinese are developing a view that Australia is hostile and unfriendly to China. The risk for us is that starts to spill into decisions that individual parents might make about sending their kids to study or whether Australia is a good place to go on holidays.
"It says something about a government where junior ministers feel like they are free to comment on Australia's most complex and important relationship. There seems to be a lack of discipline around the Australia-China relationship. It needs a circuit breaker and [Malcolm] Turnbull needs to come to Beijing for a bilateral visit."
Richard Rigby, executive director of the China Institute at the Australian National University, described Fierravanti-Wells' comments as "undiplomatic, ill-timed and rather out of date".
"I am not surprised the Chinese are angry. It doesn't help at a time when we really have some quite serious bilateral issues to work through for this to come in from behind left-field," he said, noting that Chinese aid to the region had become more sophisticated in recent years.
Liu Qing, the head of Asia-Pacific research at the China Institute of International Studies, a think-tank under the Foreign Ministry, called the comments "unreasonable and irrational" and was not optimistic about a dramatic improvement in the relationship.
"The current Turnbull administration has nearly used up all the hard-earned achievements made in Australia-China relations [in the past]," he said by telephone from Beijing on Friday.
Still, there are genuine concerns about Chinese loans to Pacific Island nations and some experts say Fierravanti-Wells raised legitimate concerns, although they were raised clumsily.
The events this week are unlikely to significantly damage Australia's relationship on their own, but risk compounding existing anxieties.
Even before Fierravanti-Wells' comments were published on Wednesday, China's media was targeting Australia's record on racial discrimination. The People's Daily, in a less prominent comment piece published on Tuesday, suggested racial discrimination was deeply rooted in Australia and cited the now-abolished White Australia policy.
On December 27, a survey, conducted by Chinese news portal huanqiu.com, found that Australia was voted by the Chinese citizens surveyed as the "least friendly country to China in 2017", followed by India, the United States and Japan.