The Australian prime minister’s arrival into China will lend a sheen of respectability and stability to President Xi at a delicate time for the country.
Anthony Albanese arrives in China to cap the stabilisation of relations, but at an unsettled moment for China itself. It’s been a week of “ghosts and ghouls of Halloween mixed with the ghost of a dead premier”, in the words of the Australian sinologist Geremie Barme.
Other political spookiness included people wearing charts of the loss-making sharemarket. Graduates bearing begging bowls in protest at the state of youth unemployment, now so high that the authorities have ceased publishing the statistics. The bloke who went as a surveillance camera. The death of a former leader is a dangerous moment. It was the death of former president Hu Yaobang that provoked the explosive student movement of 1989. It came to a bloody end when the People’s Liberation Army massacred students in Tiananmen Square.
“There is no sign he was taken to the hospital in Shanghai that boasts China’s most advanced technology and its best cardiologists,” writesIn a political system so opaque that it makes a cesspool look like a model of transparency, conspiracy theories abound. Some called for a full investigation. Instead, Xi ordered a quick cremation.
“This is Stalin’s logic – once you’ve eaten up all your enemies, you start eating your friends,” explains Barme. “Constant, low-level terror is used to maintain authority and control.”Enter Anthony Albanese. To a Chinese president wary of his people and purging his party, while dealing with economic stagnation and a collapse of housing prices, a visit by an Australian leader is a welcome endorsement of Xi’s own standing and international credibility.
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