Although few can fault the prime minister for trying to generate more imports and exports with our biggest trading partner, everyone — ranging from an obscure Chinese social media influencer wannabe to Australian opposition luminaries such as Barnaby Joyce — has an opinion about the visit, and everyone seems to be ready to offer the prime minister a wealth of warnings and free advice.

Albanese’s political opponents such as Angus Taylor and hawkish media commentators complain about the timing of his visit: why is he going to China for the fourth time, when he hasn’t been to the US once since President Trump was re-elected? And soon after Albanese had landed in China, the Opposition leader Sussan Ley, clearly not wanting to be left out of the public eye, decided to offer Albanese some unsolicited advice, urging him not to pursue friendship with China at the cost of Australia’s national interests – advice that must be as welcome to Albanese as a buzzing mosquito on a humid summer night in Beijing.

In the midst of all this cacophony — not to mention the maddeningly humid heat of early July in China — the person whose mind is most in need of focusing is the prime minister himself. He needs all the laser focus he can muster to help him to cut through all the noise and distractions.

China is widely understood to be a crucial factor in Australia’s economic prosperity, but at the same time it is also seen as a potential security threat. Because of this tension, there’s nothing like a week-long prime ministerial visit to China to focus the minds of his opposition, foreign policy makers, Australian journalists reporting on the visit, and the Australian experts the journalists speak to.

But the truth of the matter is that Albanese doesn’t need to care too much about what the China hawks or doves back at home say, or how much noise and confusion our media generate, whether they be from the left, the right or the centre.

This is because he knows that ultimately the only debt he owes is to those voters who put him in power, and that in order to make sure he has their continuing support — and hopefully to win some more — he needs to deliver the goods, whatever those goods turn out to be.

Albanese is visiting China only two months after a massive electoral win. As he travels from Shanghai to Beijing and then to Chengdu, he seems to keep his eyes on the prize in deciding what to say to Chinese leaders, business stakeholders and his media entourage in response to whatever curve balls are thrown at him.

For instance, hot on the heels of Albanese’s arrival in Shanghai, our most important strategic ally tried to pressure Australia to declare its willingness to join the US should the US and China go to war over Taiwan.

Meanwhile, although the Chinese ambassador to Australia and official Chinese media have viewed the visit as a positive step towards furthering the bilateral relationship, online punters based in China have remarked on the “two-faced” nature of Australia’s dealings with China – encouraging Chinese tourists to spend money in Australia while hosting the Talisman Sabre military exercises back at home; and talking about growing trade with China while also wanting to rescind the commercial lease of Port of Darwin to the Landbridge Group, a privately owned Chinese company.

Even those in Australia who advocate for constructive engagement with China can’t bring themselves to give the prime minister a high score on his overall report card. They worry that Australia’s commitment to AUKUS could effectively sign our sovereignty over to the US, thereby jeopardising our trading relations with China, while also making Australia a likely target in the event of a US-China war.

But Labor leaders and their advisers know that foreign policy is seldom front and centre of voters’ minds, but economic benefits that happen to depend on effective foreign policy are. Albanese knows the fundamental logic of “it’s the economy, stupid”. For this reason, he must be reassured by Lowy’s latest poll, which found that, on a wide range of foreign policy-related issues, Australians favoured Labor over the Coalition. And he is probably quite confident that his political capital only stands to grow if he continues to manage the tension between trade and security better than his opponents have.

In Albanese’s political calculus, visiting China before the US may upset his opponents and critics, but he would be on safe territory in electoral terms. This is because, as shown in the aforementioned Lowy poll, even though 61% of respondents feared a military conflict between the US and China over Taiwan, there were still more Australians who saw China more as an economic partner (50%) than as a security threat (47%). The difference here was small, to be sure, but it is still meaningful when we take into account the fact that it represents a rise of six percentage points for those who see China as more of an economic partner, compared to Lowy’s previous poll, and a fall of six points for those who see it as more of a security threat.

Similarly, by deciding to visit China ahead of the US, Albanese must also have been informed by the fact that even though 80% of survey respondents continued to see our alliance with the US as important for Australia’s security, there was a noticeable 20-point drop in trust towards the US, which marks a new low in the Lowy Institute Poll’s two-decade history.

Labor is criticised by some as not hedging enough and by others as hedging too much [paywall], when it comes to navigating between China and the US. But perhaps in the prime minister’s own mind, how much hedging his government decides to pursue and how it will go about pursuing it will be decided by which side his bread is buttered on, according to his understanding of the expectations of those who voted him in. Call it the pursuit of “national interest” or “progressive patriotism” if you like, but, like most other governments, it is the blatant imperative of delivering the goods to the people who vote at the ballot box.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.