Tony Abbott says Australia would today never contemplate signing a free trade deal with China after "a hell of a wake-up call" in the years since his government inked the agreement.
Mr Abbott said after 40 years of "bide and hide", China was "asserting itself aggressively in what's at best a cold peace, and more likely, a new Cold War".
The UK Board of Trade adviser said he was not pushing against free trade but "distinguishing between countries that really are open for business, and those where business is more politics by other means".
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"Trade deals after all, are not just about the cost and the quantity of the goods exchanged. They're pledges of economic trust and partnership," he said, in a keynote speech to right-leaning UK think tank Policy Exchange on Tuesday.
"I can't imagine that China and Australia, for instance, would contemplate concluding a trade deal today."
In 2014, Mr Abbott described the trade deal as "history making" and hailed the greater access to Australian beef and wine the Chinese would have.
Both industries, along with many others from coal to lobsters, have recently been hit with staggering tariffs in a damaging and one-sided trade war.
China has sought to punish Australia economically over a series of comments and policy stands on issues ranging from crackdowns in Hong Kong and foreign interference in Australia to an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus.
Mr Abbot as recently as last year cited the China free trade deal and others he signed to bolster his credentials after an appointment to his key UK trade role.
On Sunday, he said the agreement was a boon for trade between the countries — Australian exports in particular — but that it was "hard to trust a country that uses spurious pretexts to block our exports to punish policy positions it doesn't like".
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He contrasted that with the confidence Australia and the UK could have in each other following their historic trade deal agreed to in principle earlier this year, and described Beijing's change in approach over recent years as "a hell of a wake-up call".
"As late as 2014, when that free trade deal was finalised, we did have a very benign view of China," he said.
"Now, in retrospect, it looks like wishful thinking.
"But at the time, we were confident that there would slowly be not just economic, but political liberalisation in China.
"We thought there would be, over time, considerable convergence and that China would become, in a sense, more like us. Perhaps we've become more like them, in fact."
In 2014, Mr Abbott hailed President Xi Jinping's desire to turn China into a "fully democratic by 2050", after the Chinese leader expressed a goal to "turn China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious by the middle of the century".
"I have never heard a Chinese leader commit so explicitly to a rule-based international order founded on the principle that we should all treat others as we would be treated ourselves," Mr Abbott said, but was quickly criticised for misunderstanding what the Chinese president meant by democracy.
"Plainly what he meant by democracy and what we mean by democracy are two different things," Mr Abbott said on Tuesday.
"But the mere fact that he used the word suggests that there was a willingness to engage on China's part, which has been almost entirely absent over the last few years."
