Tension Increases as China and Australia Grow Closer

BEIJING — China’s diplomatic relationship with Australia, so recently flourishing despite occasional spats, this month has taken a severe turn toward the governmental equivalent of thrown dinner plates.
Public exchanges between the nations, already testy after China’s detention of four employees of the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, grew sharper when Australia granted a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, the American-based rights advocate for China’s Muslim Uighur minority. Ms. Kadeer was accused by Chinese officials of plotting riots last month in China’s Xinjiang region.
The Australians recalled their Chinese ambassador to the capital, Canberra, for talks on Wednesday, after a week in which Beijing’s state-controlled news media excoriated Australia’s “Sinophobic politicians” and suggested that China’s billions were better spent trading with friendlier nations.
The Chinese also canceled planned visits by Vice Premier Li Keqiang, the heir apparent to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, and the vice foreign minister, He Yafei, who was supposed to attend a meeting of Asian nations. Columnists in the Chinese press have also advocated limiting Chinese tourism in Australia and curbing the number of Chinese students studying there.
Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, countered that the nations’ relationship is always “full of challenges” and that their broader ties will endure. “We share enormous common interests with our friends in China, but we have continuous differences,” he was quoted as saying.
Hardly all Australians are persuaded. “I really don’t think there’s anything that Australia can do,” J. Bruce Jacobs, a China specialist at Monash University in Australia, said of the tiff. “The Chinese seem to have various people they like to pick on — the French, because of the Dalai Lama, and us, because of Kadeer. I think all of this is driven by political imperatives within China.”
Mr. Jacobs was referring to China’s decision to boycott a European Union summit meeting last December because the union’s leader then, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, planned to meet the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans. The Chinese accuse the Dalai Lama of plotting to split Tibet from China.
In the latest case, China sought this month to keep Australia from granting Ms. Kadeer a visa to attend the screening of a film about her life, then tried to prevent her from making a speech to the National Press Club.
They were further examples of how Australians and Chinese have chafed at their inexorably growing ties. Trade between China and Australia has grown sevenfold this decade, making China Australia’s largest trading partner. Chinese investment in Australia, while still small compared with its investment in the United States, is mushrooming.
But Australians worry that Chinese investment is directed at their vast natural resources, turning them into a sort of open-pit mine for Chinese interests.
Mr. Rudd, who is fluent in Mandarin and was once an Australian diplomat in Beijing, has advocated deeper cooperation with China in global economic forums and with President Obama.
Despite that, the relationship has foundered lately on two issues that frequently divide Beijing and the West: Chinese industrial policy and human rights.
Many Chinese expressed frustration this summer after the collapse of a deal for a state-owned company to acquire a 19 percent stake in Rio Tinto, a crucial supplier of iron ore to China’s steel mills. Although economic factors stopped the deal, domestic suspicion of China’s intentions toward an Australian corporate icon was an undercurrent in the talks.
Relations deteriorated further in July after China arrested four Rio Tinto employees involved in iron-ore sales on espionage charges, accusing them of stealing state secrets about ore pricing. The Chinese later decided to pursue only lesser charges, but outraged Australians — including Mr. Rudd — warned that the prosecution would threaten China’s commercial relations with the outside world.
In Beijing, one political analyst said Friday that the rift was unlikely to cause lasting damage to Chinese-Australian relations.
“The mainstream of the two countries’ relationship remains stable and friendly, even though there are some kinds of problems,” said the analyst, Su Hao, director of the Center for Strategic and Conflict Management at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. The current spats, he said, are “technical” issues.