Allan’s personal moment in China revealed her big difference from Andrews

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Shanghai: Victoria’s relationship with China has become remorselessly transactional.

Our two biggest export services, education and tourism, are centred on bringing hundreds of thousands of Chinese people here and emptying their pockets. The stuff we buy from China is mainly just that – stuff that can be made in other places but not so cheaply.

Mandarin is taught in Victorian schools but most of us can’t read a word or speak much more. We might travel to China for business but rarely for fun. Aside from food, we aren’t particularly interested in Chinese culture, history, film or literature. We all rely on China, in one way or another, for our wealth and comfort but don’t think of modern China as a friend.

Former premier Daniel Andrews and his successor Jacinta Allan.

With his gift for remorselessly transactional politics, Daniel Andrews was a premier well-suited to extracting value for the Victorian economy from this relationship. Now that he no longer holds public office, he is leveraging the access he gained during a decade running the state to line his own pockets.

He is not the first politician to do this and it seems unfair to begrudge his desire to return from China with a suitcase stuffed full of Yuan.

It was galling for Andrews to claim, after he posed in a family portrait with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un at his month’s hyper-phallic display of military hardware in Beijing, that he was acting in the national interest, rather than his own. But two weeks after all the hullabaloo, it seems of little consequence.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan poses with China’s Minister for Education Huai Jinpeng after securing a formal agreement.

There is nothing quite so ex as an ex-premier.

Jacinta Allan, in her first trip to China as premier, is approaching Victoria’s relations with China in a different way.

She is no less hellbent on bringing more Chinese students to Victorian schools and universities – “I won’t be deterred!” she declared on her first day in Beijing – but her emphasis is different in tone and pitch. She is bringing warmth to an engagement that has grown hard and cold.

Her China Strategy, released in Beijing at the start of the trip, is less focused on export dollars and the monetary value of two-way trade than its previous iteration published in 2016, when Andrews was positioning Victoria to get a slice of Xi’s massive Belt and Road infrastructure spend.

It places greater value on cultural and community exchanges and the need for Chinese Australians to shape the way we engage with their country of birth. It stresses human connection above trade targets.

Allan’s travelling party includes a parliamentary secretary and four backbench MPs chosen not because of any particular expertise in Chinese affairs, but the number of Chinese voters in their electorates.

There is an obvious political dividend in this for the re-election prospects of Paul Hamer (Box Hill), Matt Fregon (Ashwood), John Mullaly (Glen Waverley), Meng Heang Tak (Clarinda) and Mathew Hilakari (Point Cook) but there is also a genuine desire among 427,000 Victorians of Chinese heritage for their local MPs to better understand the place they came from.

This is part of the feedback the Victorian government received from Chinese Victorians when framing its China Strategy.

Allan has taken personal ownership of the strategy and there is plenty of her in it.

The backstory of her hometown of Bendigo and the gold rush influx of Chinese migrants is well known in Victoria but Allan has this week been recounting it from Beijing to Nanjing to Shanghai. Rather than just selling Victorian university places, tourist attractions and produce to the Chinese, Allan is emoting the benefits of shared history, language and cultural appreciation.

During a stop in Shanghai on Wednesday, Allan expanded on her China thinking. “At a time when there can be many concerns about global instability, that’s how you get stability — by having a shared understanding of culture built on language and friendship, and then forging future economic opportunities that come out of those relationships,” she says.

“We should never be transactional in these relationships. We should deepen these relationships. We should respect these relationships.”

Allan’s meeting with Beijing’s Minister for Education Huai Jinpeng on the first day of her trip is a case in point. This was the Victorian premier’s highest level direct engagement with China’s ruling communist party. The meeting was formal and a little stiff – until Allan mentioned her 13-year-old daughter is learning Mandarin at school.

According to a source present, the mood changed in that moment. Huai Jinpeng, a 62-year old, highly educated minister responsible for the schooling of 300 million young people, launched into a passionate speech about the importance of language in unlocking cultural understanding. Allan left the meeting with a newly signed agreement to promote student exchanges and a personal connection with a member of the CCP Central Committee.

Allan does not have Andrews’ mastery of state politics but she is much better at people.

Few understand the importance of education to Victoria’s relationship with China better than Guosheng Yang Chen. When Allan arrived in Nanjing on a sweltering day to visit the Langya Road Primary School, a member of the Jiangsu-Victoria Sister School Exchange program, Chen was waiting patiently at the entrance. Nearly 40 years ago, she was a member of Victoria’s first education mission to Jiangsu.

Chen was teaching in Nanjing, China’s ancient capital now recognised as a UNESCO City of Literature, when she was chosen by the provincial government to work in Victoria. She stayed in Melbourne, became an expert in international education and a staunch advocate for multilingual learning. At the age of 76, she remains firmly invested in strengthening the China-Australia relationship.

“Through education, you are telling your kids to look beyond your national boundary to understand your neighbouring countries,” she says. “Strategically, it is so important for these two countries to understand each other and find common ground.”

China Hawks will scoff at Allan’s approach to China – as they did Andrews’ contentious decision to sign a memorandum of understanding on Belt and Road. It is clear from travelling with Allan this week that she is on different path to her predecessor. It is unlikely to make her rich in retirement but it might help more young Victorians better understand a country certain to loom large throughout their lives.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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