Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spent a week in China from July 12 to 18. After his landslide second election victory and the careful groundwork of recent years, this investment of time in China—unmatched by any other world leader in recent years—clearly signals that Australia wants to pursue an agenda for growth in the relationship.

After strained Australia-China relations under former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who aligned closely with the U.S.' hardline stance on trade and security under the first Donald Trump administration, Australia-China relations have now stabilized.

It's time to be more ambitious and lay plans for the future.

Ties of mutual benefit 

After all, Australia and China are highly complementary economies. Australia is a resource-rich nation that for decades has supplied China with minerals, energy, food and other critical supplies for China's modernization. Both countries are committed to free trade and stable, rules-based economic cooperation in the region.

With Australia's multicultural population, including a longstanding Chinese community, the two countries enjoy close people-to-people links. Both nations share a common interest in continued peace, development and economic interdependence in the Asia-Pacific region, which has delivered unprecedented prosperity in recent decades.

With wise leadership and strategic thinking, these areas of common ground should be a sound basis for greater practical cooperation. Australia has prospered when it has pursued pragmatic trade with Asia and cooperated with its diverse neighbors in building regional cooperation. Australia cannot afford to turn its back on Asia, despite the strong pull of cultural connections to more distant powers.

It was a pragmatic and farsighted Australian leader, Gough Whitlam, who trailblazed a visit to China to forge the relationship 54 years ago, just days before then U.S. President Richard Nixon made his famous visit to China in February 1972. The Albanese government is in this tradition of pragmatic as well as farsighted regional engagement and it is in an unassailable position, after winning a record 94 seats out of 150 in the Australian federal election in April. Count on stability in Australia's leadership for at least two more electoral cycles, until early in the next decade.

Albanese has noticeably and trenchantly been repeating the mantra of Australia's national interest, in the face of daily attempts by Australia's notoriously febrile media to force a false binary choice between the U.S. and China. As with its other Asian neighbors, choosing one partner over another would clearly not be in Australia's interest. As the world's 12th largest economy and a continent in itself, positioned in the world's fastest growing region, Australia has great capacity to chart its own course, even if its media continues to imagine otherwise.

Under normal circumstances, Australia would be expected to continue to cleave to the U.S. on matters of national security, which is a firm bipartisan consensus. However, it remains equally clear that Australia has a vital interest in preserving strong economic ties with China, its largest trading partner.

Australia's priorities 

The Albanese administration, in the tradition of Labor governments, seeks to find Australia's prosperity and security in Asia—rather than against Asia. Australia can therefore be expected to deepen its interdependence with China and, at the same time, with its other important regional partners such as Japan, the Republic of Korea, India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. 

The areas of pragmatic economic cooperation between Australia and China are potentially transformative. The two countries are natural partners in the transition to green steel and green energy. Australia welcomes Chinese products such as electric vehicles, which face tariff barriers in the U.S. and Europe. China welcomes Australian fine food and wines, for which there is a growing middle-class demand.

Albanese launched a tourism campaign and indeed tourism in both directions has plenty of potential to grow considerably given the many direct flights and attractive food, destinations and experiences both countries offer to the other. Australia and China have long had strong education and research links and indeed Australia may benefit from the more restricted environment now for Chinese students and researchers in the U.S.

Whereas political and cultural differences between Australia and China remain, Albanese's visit to China has underlined a commitment to dialogue, which is the most robust and constructive way to build better mutual understanding.

As Albanese visited the Great Wall during his recent China trip, re-treading the path of his predecessor Whitlam, he must have reflected on the last half century of growth and the potential of the next half century for Australia-China relations. To achieve as much as previous decades, it will require farsighted leadership to ensure stability and sustainability. Whitlam correctly observed that, for Australia, national independence requires international interdependence. 

The author is president of 1Earth Village, a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, and a former Australian and multilateral diplomat. This article was first published on Cnfocus.com

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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