It is early days but, from Beijing's perspective, Bob Carr, the man who has replaced Kevin Rudd as Australia's foreign minister, appears to understand the Chinese perspective on the totemic issues like relations with the US and Tibet.
Carr, formerly the premier of Australia's most populous state New South Wales, certainly has some thinking to do about how Australia develops its relationship with China, given the release of an influential report co-authored by the Beijing-based China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and Canberra's Australian National University last week. It says major challenges confront the two nations faced with a resurgent US in the region.
Since Carr retired from politics in 2005, he has written and travelled extensively, indulging his long-held passion for international relations. And it is fair to say he has been more sympathetic to China than many in the Australian political and diplomatic sphere.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard agreed last year to US President Barack Obama's request to station 2,500 US troops in Darwin, a decision which China roundly criticised, Carr wrote that 'you would have thought Australians would be more nervous about having foreign military bases on their soil', and that it was not in Australia's interests to get wrapped into an 'unmistakable anti-China stance'.
Carr believes Australia 'should be cautioning America to plan for a peaceful accommodation of the inevitability of a greater Chinese strategic presence in the Pacific'.
On Tibetan autonomy, Carr is firmly in Beijing's camp. In 2010, he noted on his blog that the 'Dalai Lama is more a cunning monk than a holy man', and that 'Australian politicians should stop being intimidated into meeting this theological politician on his too-frequent visits'. The Dalai Lama's ambitions are to dismember China, Carr says.
