Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, has struck an optimistic tone beyond his meeting on Monday with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The meeting would call for cooperation while putting emphasis that both the countries will continue to have their differences.

Albanese is the first ever Australian Prime Minister in the last seven years to visit China, while both the countries have recently started to repair their relationship that was crashed over security differences and trade.

“What I’ve said is that we need to cooperate with China where we can, disagree where we must and engage in our national interest,” Albanese said while in Beijing. “I think there are promising signs we’ve already seen, a number of the impediments to trade between our two nations removed and an uplift already, substantial uplift in the trade between our two nations.”

His visit is greatly symbolic and came near to the 50th anniversary of the first ever trip by an Australian prime minister to China. He is all set to meet up with Xi later this Monday.

Australia and China’s relationship nose-dived in the current years as the doubts about Chinese interference in Australian politics rose. China, in turn, had been angered by Australia’s call for an inquiry into the coronavirus origins.

China had levied official charges and unofficial trade hurdles, which were estimated to cost the Australian exporters around 20 billion dollars for a single year for commodities like wine, coal, beef, lobsters, and barley.

In the last couple of months, Australia and China have publicly given signs of a resolution in regard to the trade issues. Furthermore, the Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who was in detention for espionage charges, was released after three years in October and became a focal point of tensions.

While Albanese appeared quite upbeat during the visit, Australia continues to actively pursue a security partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom, which is considered to be countering the influence of China in the region.

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