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Malcolm Turnbull has urged Chinese leaders not to slip back into old ways as Australia positions to take advantage of lucrative new opportunities in a services hungry economy set to be the world's largest within the year.
Just hours before meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing, Mr Turnbull used a major speech in Shanghai to 1000 Australian and 800 Chinese business leaders to set the stage for those bilateral talks, and for Friday's meeting with President Xi Jinping.
Amid widespread concerns that personal freedoms have been reduced under Mr Xi's leadership, and instances of trade barriers re-emerging in some product-lines in recent weeks, Mr Turnbull set out the broad basis of Australia's historic relationship with China, and stressed the need for a renewed commitment to the rule of law.
Establishing greater legal certainty for Australian businesses operating in China is a priority for the Turnbull visit, and the emphasis on rule of law is also seen as a framework to broach more sensitive issues in his high-level meetings, such as China's commitment to an international rules-based order in the South China Sea and increasing criticism over China's deteriorating human rights conditions and internet censorship.
Mr Turnbull said it was in China's interests as well as the world's that this opening up continues, declaring the country's "long journey towards the rule of law would be worth the challenges along the way".
"Freedom, enterprise, open markets, embrace of the global community in all its diversity - those are the qualities that have delivered progress, rising living standards, and growth," he told the gathering.
The speech took place as China faces more direct criticism over its internal restrictions, abuses of human rights, and its increasing assertiveness in enforcing territorial claims in the disputed South and East China seas.
The Prime Minister said that just as China faced unprecedented challenges to transform its economy after a decades-long construction-fuelled boom to a more sustainable footing reliant on domestic consumption, Australia's economy also had to adapt.
"This rebalancing is as necessary as it is inevitable," he said. "And this structural change is driving parallel changes in our economy."
Praising the economic miracle of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty within a generation, Mr Turnbull urged the Chinese leadership towards continued openness and the rapid development of the rule of law, which he argued is a fundamental requirement of progress.
"In 1990, two in every three Chinese people lived below the World Bank's poverty line, but now that figure is only one in 10 - the scale and pace of China's economic transformation in little more than a generation is unprecedented in human history," he said.
Earlier on Thursday, Mr Turnbull announced the AFL would play a regular home-and-away season in Shanghai next season as part of a commercial sponsorship agreement struck by Port Adelaide. He also announced an innovation landing pad and further tourism initiatives, including the launch of the Australia-China Year of Tourism.
Mr Turnbull was due to hold the annual leaders' meeting between the two countries with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday evening before meeting with President Xi Jinping on Friday.
