Singapore: Three hours after Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced a ban on Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok on government devices, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reportedly received an in-principle invitation to Beijing.

The ban, which until last year would likely have been met with swift condemnation and potential retaliation by the Chinese government, was greeted with little more than a whimper: “TikTok general manager in Australia and New Zealand: very disappointed,” headlined the Global Times, Beijing’s most aggressive state media outlet.

ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company had already weathered bans on government devices in the United States and Canada in February, and the United Kingdom, European Union, New Zealand and Belgium in March.

Australia, once a leader of COVID-19 inquiries, foreign interference legislation and a ban on Huawei, has fallen back in the peloton.

With a prime ministerial visit to Beijing in the second half of this year, the Albanese government is treading carefully by taking diplomatic protection where it can.

Having endured $20 billion in trade strikes, a three-year ministerial freeze and helped awaken leaders in Europe and North America to Beijing’s coercive tactics, the loudest voices in the global China debate are no longer in Canberra, they are in Washington and Brussels.

“China has now turned the page on the era of ‘reform and opening’ and is moving into a new era of security and control,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said last week. She is due to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday.

The Biden administration has threatened to extend the ban to all devices in the US unless ByteDance divests its stake and places the video-sharing app into a US-based company. That is likely to be an intolerable kowtow to US demands for ByteDance and the Chinese government.