https://www.salisburyreview.com/subscribe/
'You May Have the Good Life But Not the Free Life':
Clive Hamilton’s Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia came as a double shock when it was published in 2018. Firstly, Hamilton himself, an academic at the Australian National University, was known to the general public as a left-wing ‘public intellectual’, an Anthropogenic Global Warming catastrophist who stood (unsuccessfully) as a Greens candidate for parliament only a decade before. Now he was foretelling not the end of the planet but the end of Australia as a sovereign power. Hamilton persuasively argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has inserted itself into the very fabric of our society. Silent Invasion shows agents of the regime leveraging trade and investment, bribing influential Aussies, controlling young Chinese nationals at our universities, undermining genuine scholarship with their so-called Confucian Institutes and even doing old-school and state-of-the-art espionage. Australia was being drawn step by step into Red China’s version of Japan’s WW2 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Hamilton’s Silent Invasion has become an international seller, a remarkable feat by a non-fiction book intended primarily for a domestic audience and published by a local company. China’s stealthy takeover of a sovereign Western state caught the attention of the world. Could a ‘silent invasion’ happen in the UK? Or Canada? Is that what Candidate Trump had been going on about in the 2016 election? Hamilton’s sequel, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World, suggests it is more than possible. Fast forward to 2020. Sino-Australian relations now interest the wider world not because of CCP’s stealthy arrogation of Australia but its undisguised enmity towards us. The CCP’s fury at Prime Minister Scott Morrison calling for an independent global enquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 has turned everything on its head. For the vast majority of ordinary Australians, now enduring a second wave of the pandemic and bearing major retaliation against all our key industries, barley, beef, wool, coal, iron ore, wine, overseas students, tourism et al, are not only bewildered at Beijing’s volte-face but fearful and angry.
Beijing continues to double down on its offensive against Australia. It has even played the racist card. China’s education ministry, in June 2020, warned its young nationals not to return to Australian universities after the pandemic recedes on ‘account of multiple discriminatory incidents against Asians’. The only recent multiple discriminatory incidents against Asians, of course, is Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kongers, Tibetans and Uighurs. Nevertheless, the PRC will do anything to intimidate Australia, including the tarnishing of our global reputation and undermining our $19 billion-dollar business educating overseas students. Within a few weeks Australian universities and tourist operators united to generate an ‘Australia Welcomes You’ message on China’s Weibo and WeChat social-media platforms. Given the CCP’s control of China’s media, our insipid ‘Australia Welcomes You’ campaign will have about as much affect as the proverbial snowflake in hell. The real point, of course, is that the Party Politburo wants us to bend the knee.
Significantly, tensions between Australia and China pre-date Covid-19 by at least two years. In July 2018, for instance, the conservative-leaning Coalition government, then led by the progressive-leaning Malcolm Turnbull, passed into law the Foreign Espionage & Interference Act. The new law was intended, in part, as a response to the revelation that a senior Labor politician had been bribed to do Beijing’s bidding. All the usual suspects were quickly on the case. Beijing’s media mouthpieces expressed their hurt as this example of anti-China bigotry. In Australia, similarly, spokesmen for the mining industry, including Fortescue Metals Group’s Andrew Forrest, implored Canberra to repair the damage to Sino-Australian relations. Labor stalwarts criticised Turnbull for putting Australia’s most important economic relationship in jeopardy on account of partisan politicking. Paradoxically, Turnbull, replaced by Morrison as leader of the Coalition government in 2019, is now criticising his successor for partisan politicking.
Everyone interested in re-establishing business-as-usual relations with the PRC is playing the new ‘Who lost China?’ blame game. The answer, same as it was in the early days of the First Cold War, is Chiang Kai-shek. His Nationalists (GMD) lacked the acumen to see off Mao Zedong’s tyrannical Chinese Communist Party. Today’s ‘technocratic’ incarnation of the CCP might be capable of constructing a high-speed rail (HSR) network 30,000 kilometres long but it is no less totalitarian for that impressive achievement. Anybody in China who questions the party’s success at identifying the virus and stopping its spread by warning the people of the world in good time is ‘disappeared’. No wonder the Party Politburo regards Australia’s demand for an independent inquiry into Covid-19 as ‘panda bashing’ and ‘adventurism’ and irretrievably wrecking Sino-Australian relations. In other words, the pandemic of 2020 has simply highlighted, to paraphrase Mao Zedong, contradictions already existent between China’s imperialist-Leninism and Australia’s liberal-democracy.
The solution to this fundamental socio-political incongruity is either the PRC becomes more democratic or Australia relinquishes it traditional commitment to democratic principles. Since President Xi Jinping has categorically rejected the former, the resumption of good relations is dependent on Australia adopting a more ‘Leninist’ position on independent enquiries and free speech. In some cases, it is working. China’s abrupt suspension of our beef imports from four key Australian abattoirs, accompanied by its imposition of tariffs on Australian barley, received the tacit support of Premier Daniel Andrews’ state (or provincial) Victorian government. His Treasurer, Tim Pallas, agreed with Beijing that the Morrison’s federal government had used ‘language’ in its call for a global enquiry on Covid-19 which ‘seemed to vilify China’. Victoria, we might note, is run by a radical left-wing outfit that has signed de facto Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) protocols contrary to the wishes of Canberra.
The attitude of the post-Mao CCP towards its own captive people could summarised as: ‘You can have the good life but not the free life’. For a population that experienced the Great Famine (1959-61), the psychosis of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and endured Third World-style poverty for decades, that might almost sound like a reasonable deal. For Australians, who have always enjoyed both the good life and the free life, less so. Last year, twenty-year-old Drew Pavlou, a student at the University of Queensland, led a small protest to commemorate the 30th anniversary of ‘the June 4 Incident’ – also known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre – and found himself being assaulted by Chinese nationals. The University of Queensland, according to a subsequent investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, enjoys ‘lucrative arrangements with the Chinese Government including its Confucius Institute’. Pavlou was suspended from the University of Queensland.
The case of Drew Pavlou might have gone under the radar at a different time but not now. Pavlou’s politics are mostly along modishly progressive lines, from championing the Black Lives Matter movement to supporting the anti-Israel Boycott, Diversify, Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Pavlou only struck a raw nerve with the UQ’s ‘woke’ establishment when his Third-Worldism collided with the CCP’s oppressive practices in Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang et al. Pavlou, now something of a symbol of resistance in Australia, has talked of launching a grassroots BDS campaign aimed at the PRC. However, the freedom-loving people of Australia, as I outlined in ‘The Make-It-In-Australia Movement’ (Salisbury Review, Summer 2020), are already taking matters into their own hands without recourse to the acrimony of BDS tactics. Meanwhile, key Australian agricultural exports to the PRC, beef, sheep, fruit and nuts and so on, have already rebounded from the lows recorded earlier in the year. Selling to the insatiable Chinese market is possible without bending the knee to Beijing.
Australian has been ahead of the curve in realising the peril of Xi Jinping’s imperial ambitions. Boris Johnson, who as recently as 2019 blithely described himself as ‘very pro-China’, now has the China Research Group and the Huawei Interest Group in his parliamentary ranks to curtail his enthusiasm for Xi Jinping. Canberra’s equivalent alliance of backbench PRC-sceptics has fashioned itself as ‘the Wolverines’, the name of the American teenagers who fought a guerrilla war against a Soviet invasion force in the 1984 movie Red Dawn. Pointedly, the Wolverines include parliamentarians from all political parties. Beijing’s Global Times has demanded the Morrison government ‘silence’ the Wolverines, but silencing its critics is still much simpler to effect back in the socialist motherland than here in our democratic nation. Australia, as the propagandists at Beijing’s Global Times like to carp, is still ‘gum stuck to the bottom’ of their communist boot.
