BEIJING, July 17, (AP): Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited a panda breeding facility in the final stages of an extended state visit that has cast China as a fellow champion of a global fair trade system under threat from the United States. The panda diplomacy stop Thursday in the central Chinese city of Chengdu highlighted Australia’s special status as the only Southern Hemisphere country to host a pair of the rare Chinese native animals.

Albanese and his fiancée Jodie Haydon visited a pen where they saw Fu Ni, a giant panda who had been on loan to Australia’s Adelaide Zoo until last year. "A great ambassador for China and a great friend of Australia,” Albanese said of Fu Ni as she chomped on bamboo. Premier Li Qiang used a visit to the Adelaide Zoo last year to announce Fu Ni and her partner Wang Wang would be replaced by another China-born pair that will hopefully breed.

The new couple, Xing Qiu and Yi Yan, made their public debut in January at the zoo in the South Australia state capital where they are a major tourist attraction. Albanese’s China, which began Saturday and ends on Friday, is extraordinarily long compared with Australian state visits over the past decade and marks a normalization of bilateral relations that plumbed to new depths under the previous Australian government.

Albanese said he had visited Chengdu and the Great Wall of China, as well at the usual diplomatic destinations of Beijing and Shanghai, as a show of respect to the Chinese people. "The Great Wall of China symbolises the extraordinary history and culture here in China, and showing a bit of respect to people never cost anything. But you know what it does? It gives you a reward,” Albanese told reporters.

"One of the things that I find about giving countries respect is that you get it back,” he added. In 2020, Beijing banned minister-to-minister contacts and imposed a series of official and unofficial trade barriers on commodities including wine, beef, coal, barley and lobsters that cost Australian exporters up to 20 billion Australian dollars ($13 billion) a year.

This was a response to Australia’s previous government demanding an independent inquiry into the causes of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic was the final straw, relations had been deteriorating for years over issues including laws banning covert foreign interference in Australian politics and Australia banning Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei on security grounds from involvement in the national 5G network rollout.