Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia met with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Tuesday, as he sought to balance strengthening ties with his country’s largest trading partner and growing pressure from the United States to do more to deter Chinese military aggression in the Asia-Pacific region.
“Australia values our relationship with China and will continue to approach it in a calm and consistent manner, guided by our national interest,” Mr. Albanese told Mr. Xi ahead of their closed door talks.
Mr. Xi said: “China is willing to push forward China and Australia’s relations to move forward together.”
Mr. Albanese was also scheduled to meet with Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest official, on Tuesday. He was traveling with executives from the Australian mining, tourism and education sectors, underscoring the trip’s emphasis on business. China buys roughly a third of all Australian exports, which range from iron ore to wine.
But questions about security loomed over the six-day visit. Earlier this year, a weekslong deployment of Chinese warships near Australia’s waters caused alarm in Canberra. On Saturday, Mr. Albanese’s arrival in Shanghai coincided with a report in the Financial Times that the Pentagon was pressuring Australia and Japan to specify what they would do if China and the United States were to go to war over Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing.
Both countries are U.S. allies, but disclosing how they would respond to such a scenario would be highly detrimental to their important trade relationships with China — not to mention, also highly unusual. Even the United States itself will not say whether it would go to war for Taiwan, as part of a decades-old policy known as strategic ambiguity that aims to both deter China from attacking and dissuade Taiwan from seeking formal independence.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Mr. Albanese said his government supported the status quo in Taiwan and opposed “any unilateral action there.” In Australia, Pat Conroy, the country’s minister for defense industries, said Canberra would not commit troops in advance to any hypothetical conflict.
But Washington could try to exert pressure on Canberra. Last month, the Pentagon said it was reviewing whether a three-way security pact with Britain to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines aligns with the Trump administration’s “America First criteria.”
Mr. Xi’s team will likely underscore to Australian officials how U.S. calls for greater commitments over Taiwan make Washington an increasingly unreliable partner.
“The United States’ attempts to interfere in their strategic calculations, particularly by pressuring them to commit to hypothetical future scenarios, demonstrates a profound lack of respect for their autonomy,” said Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University in Shanghai.
Beijing is also trying to persuade countries like Australia not to enter trade deals with the United States that would restrict Chinese exports. China has been casting itself as a defender of the global trading system and criticizing the Trump administration for disrupting the global economy by threatening tariffs.
The dueling demands illustrate Australia’s predicament of dealing with its biggest security ally and its largest trading partner, said James Curran, a political and diplomatic historian at the University of Sydney.
“The tightrope along which it’s been walking between the U.S. and China just got pulled tighter at both ends,” he said.
Mr. Albanese’s first visit to Beijing as prime minister in 2023 marked a significant step in thawing relations with Beijing. It came after several years of barbed rhetoric and punishing trade restrictions on Australian exports under an earlier government. Since then, Australia has sought to quietly stabilize the relationship with China, largely playing up the importance of the economic relationship while remaining restrained in talking about China as a security threat.
But Mr. Albanese’s approach is risky, said Michael Shoebridge, an analyst at Strategic Analysis Australia and a former Australian defense and intelligence official.
“The thing that he overlooks is the enormous vulnerability and risk in deepening Australia’s already extraordinary level of trade dependence,” Mr. Shoebridge said. “It turns out that greed beats fear every time.”
Another point of contention that may be raised behind closed doors between the two leaders is the lease of the port of Darwin, on the northern tip of Australia, that has been held by Landbridge, a Chinese company, since 2015. It sits near military bases where a rotational force of U.S. Marines trains each year, and the U.S. has expressed concern that the 99-year lease could be a strategic risk.
Mr. Albanese pledged during his recent re-election campaign that he would return it to Australian control.
China’s ambassador to Australia said earlier this year that a forced sale of the port would be “ethically questionable.”
Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region.
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