‘An important book for the future of Australia
PROFESSOR JOHN FITZGERALD
===
CLIVE HAMILTON
Clive Hamilton AM is an Australian author and public intellectual. His
books include Growth Fetish, Silencing Dissent (with Sarah Maddison)
and Whut Do We Want: The Story of Protest in Australia. He was for
14 years the executive director of The Australia Institute, a think tank
he founded. For some years he has been professor of public ethics at
Charles Sturt University in Canberra.
‘Anyone keen to understand how China draws other countries into
its sphere of influence should start with Silent Invasion. This is an
important book for the future of Australia. But tug on the threads
of Chinas influence networks in Australia and its global network of
influence operations starts to unravel.’
—Professor John Fitzgerald, author Big White Lie: Chinese Amtraluins in White Australia
====
SILENT INVASION
CHINA’S INFLUENCE IN AUSTRALIA
CLIVE HAMILTON
With research by Alex Joske
==
Published in 2018 by Hardic Grant Boolts,
Preface ix
1 Dyeing Australia red 1
2 How China sees itself in the world 8
‘Brainwashed’ 9The party is the nation 11Sick man no more 14‘Twisted patriotism’ 16The great rejuvenation 17China’s claim to Australia 21
3 Qiaowu and the Chinese diaspora 25
Mobilising overseas Chinese 25Bob Hawke’s gift 27The United Front in Australia 29Chinese-Australians resist 34Contesting Chineseness 36Chinese Hansonism 40Controlling the news 40Chinese voices 45The long arm of China’s law 47‘They can do anything. They don’t care.’ 52
4 Dark money
Huang Xiangmo in ChinaChinas crony capitalismXi s corruption crackdownHuang in AustraliaBipartisan guanxiChau ChakWingZhu MinshenZhu and the Olympic torchZhus role in Dastyaris downfallPolitical plants
5 ‘Beijing Bob’
The ‘China-Whatever’ research instituteACRI under pressureA true friend of ChinaMedia dealsCredulous journos
6 Trade, invest, control
How dependent are we?The party-corporate conglomerateBeijing’s Australia strategyTrade politicsAssets for saleOne Belt, One RoadThe Australian OBOR connection
7 Seduction and coercion
Chinas fifth column in Australia‘China is our destiny’Norway and the Dalai Lama effectChina’s geoeconomicsCoercing Australia
8 Spies old and new
Spying on ASIOA thousand spies and informantsHuawei and the NBN I 54Huaweis reach I 59Honey traps 161The Fitzgibbon-Liu affair 163Hikvision 165Cyber theft 168Racial profiling 172Cyber warriors 173
9 Malicious insiders* and scientific organisations 177
‘Mobilising Ten Thousand Overseas Chinese’ 177HUMINT (human intelligence) 179Professional associations 182CSIRO 18810 Engineering souls’at Australia’s universities 194Thought management 195Funding PLA upgrade 200‘Make the foreign serve China’ 203More PLA collaboration 206Carrying the torch at UNSW 210Ethnic enclaves 213Academic malware’: Confucius Institutes 215The party in our classrooms 219Patriotic students 220‘Denounce and inform’ 223What to do? 227
11 Culture wars 230
Chinese voices 232Sally Zou’s gold 235Real estate woes 237Patriot writers 239Co-opting God 243Chinese Anzacs 244The People’s Liberation Army of Australia 248Digital totalitarianism 249Beijing’s Antarctic designs 252
12 Friends of China
The China club 255The innocents 255The ‘realists’ 258The capitulationists 260The pragmatists 262Dear friendsThe appeasersAustralians against democracy
13 The price of freedom
^ 276
Acknowledgements ^
Notes 284
Index
Preface
On 24 April 2008, the Olympic torch arrived in Canberra on the last
leg of its worldwide relay in preparation for the Beijing Games. I went
along to the lawns outside Parliament House to lend quiet support to
the Tibetan protesters. I had no idea what I was walking into. Tens
of thousands of Chinese students had arrived early and their mood
was angry and aggressive. As the torch approached, the pro-Tibet
protesters, vastly outnumbered, were mobbed and abused by a sea of
Chinese people wielding red flags. Everyday Australians who’d turned
up complained later that they were jostled, kicked and punched. Some
were told that they had no right to be there. The police presence was too
small to maintain order and 1 feared a riot would break out and people
would be severely beaten or worse.
What happened that day left me shocked. Where did all of those
people come from? Why were they so frenzied? And I was aflFronted.
How dare they arrive, on the doorstep of our parliament, the symbol
of our democracy, and shut down a legitimate protest, leaving me and
a few hundred others feeling intimidated for expressing our opinion?
I had no answers, the world moved on and everyone seemed to
forget about it. But the incident left a nagging question at the back of
my mind. Eight years later, in August 2016, a political storm engulfed
Senator Sam Dastyari (which would a year later lead to his exit from
parliament). Among the many revelations to emerge over the
couple of weeks was that a handful of very rich Chinese and Chines
Australian businessmen had become the largest donors to our major
political parties. They had bought a lot of influence; our politicians
were in bed with them and there were photos to prove it.
China and Australian democracy had collided again. Something big
is going on, I thought. I decided to investigate and write a book so that
Australians could understand what has been happening to our country.
I had no inkling when I began that publishing this book would prove
so challenging. My usual publisher, Allen & Unwin, was enthusiastic
about the book when I proposed it and we soon signed a contract. But
just as the revised manuscript was about to be sent to be typeset, Allen &
Unwin told me they were pulling the plug. They were afraid of retalia¬
tion from Beijing, or people in Australia acting on behalf of the Chinese
Communist Party. When their withdrawal became public it attracted
worldwide media coverage, but it left me without a publisher. Other
publishers were scared off. Fortunately, Sandy Grant at Hardie Grant
Books took up the challenge. In 1987, Sandy published Spycatcher, a
book the British government attempted to ban.
‘What about the Yanks?’
When I mentioned to some that I was writing a book about the grow¬
ing influence of the Chinese party-state in Australia, this was their first
response. What about the Pine Gap spying base, they said, and how we
slavishly followed the Americans into the Iraq War? We’ve already given
up our independence, haven’t we, so what’s the big issue with China?
I hope those people will read this book and see that there is a world
of difference. Australia may have sacrificed some of its independence,
mainly in defence policy, to be in an alliance with the United States,
although the degree is open to debate. But after decades of ‘American
colonialism do we really feel that our daily lives or democratic freedoms
are constrained by this foreign power?
We share the guilt with the United States for the post-2003 disaster
in Iraq, but through the decades of the close relationship our big ally has
never threatened to take away our freedoms.
- The United States never had the kind of economic leverage over Australia that China has, nor made threats to damage us if we did not toe its line.
- It hasn’t endangered our democratic system of elected governments, and its government has never used money to buy off our politicians.
- The United States hasn’t attempted to erode the rule of law. Nor has it attempted to mobilise a diaspora to oppose Australian policy.
- The United States government has never shut down dissenting views in Australia, even ones harshly critical of the USA.
- Can we imagine a United States government using our laws to frighten publishers into dropping a book criticising it?
Within the alliance, the rights of women and gay people have blossomed
because of a flourishing civil society, and the rights of minorities have
been protected.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, people in the West breathed a
sigh of relief because we would no longer have to live under the cloud of
Cold War thinking or with the ideological divisions that troubled our
societies. Who wants to go back to that?
But the Cold War never ended in Asia. In fact, as we will see, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe gave rise to a fierce intensification of China’s ideological war and a consolidation of the Leninist party, especially under President Xi Jinping.
Many in the West, especially after the eclipse of Maoism in the 1980s,
have looked upon China as a friendly giant beset by insuperable internal
challenges, whose political rhetoric of ‘running dogs’ and ‘imperialist
wolves’ was a kind of theatre. Now that China is the second-ranked
economic power in the world (first by some measures), condescending
attitudes towards the Middle Kingdom have become dangerous. They
blind us to the deadly seriousness with which Beijing sees its rivalry
with the West. The Cold War in Asia may no longer be about commu¬
nism versus capitalism but it remains just as firmly rooted in the deeper
that pitted the West against the Soviet Union—the struggle
over who will prevail.
XI
1 Dyeing Australia red
When I began researching this book in late 2016 there were a handful
of people who argued that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is
engaged in a systematic campaign to infiltrate, influence and control
the most important institutions in Australia. Its ultimate aim, they said,
is to break our alliance with the United States and turn this country
into a tribute state. I knew we had a problem, but this seemed far¬
fetched. As I delved deeply into the problem—including speaking to
dozens of experts, specialists and close observers in Australia, China and
elsewhere—the evidence for these claims began to seem robust.
According to one person extremely well placed to know about this
campaign (named below), it all began in the middle of August 2004
when China brought together its envoys from around the world for
a conclave in Beijing. Communist Party Secretary Hu Jintao told
the gathering that the party’s all-powerful Central Committee had
decided that henceforth Australia should be included in China’s ‘overall
periphery’. Looking me in the eye, my informant said: ‘This means
a lot.’ China has always devoted special attention to the countries
that have a land border with it—its ‘overall periphery’—in order to
neutralise them.
The attention devoted to controlling bordering countries arises
from Chinas historical sense of vulnerability. Australia, of course, was
1
SILENT INVASION
always seen as across the ocean and far away. But now Austral’
be treated as a neighbour, within its overall periphery. In
its territory now extends far to the south of its land border to enT*
almost the entire area of the South China Sea. Its recent occu
of islands, and the building of military bases on them, brings Chil^^
southernmost border close to the northwest coast of Borneo.
And so in February 2005 Zhou Wenzhong, a vice-minister in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arrived in Canberra to communicate
the Central Committees new strategy to a meeting of senior officials
in the Chinese embassy. The first objective of including Australia in
its overall periphery, he told them, was to secure Australia as a reliable
and stable supply base for Chinas continued economic growth over
the next twenty years. The longer-term goal was to drive a wedge
into the America-Australia alliance. Those present were given the
task of working out how China could most effectively attain what my
informant called ‘comprehensive influence over Australia economically,
politically, culturally, in all ways’.
The plan would involve frequent meetings between senior leaders
from both sides ‘to build personal friendships, and exchange personal
advice’. China would also use economic measures to force Australia to
make concessions on a range of matters, including military affairs and
human rights. The combination of close personal relationships, coupled
with threats of punishment, is the standard Chinese modus operand!.
Beijing hoped to turn Australia into a ‘second France’, ‘a western country
that would dare to say “no” to America’.
We know all this because my informant Chen Yonglin, first secretary
for political affairs from the Chinese consulate in Sydney, was at the
meeting and read the documents.' Months later, in June 2005, Chen
walked out of the consulate and sought political asylum in Australia.
At the time, what he would say about the People’s Republic of Chinas
( RCs) goals and operations in Australia was hard to believe; yet as the
y s have passed, and evidence has accumulated from a wide variety of
sources, his warnings have proven justified.
stratepir P^^oly. Essentially, in accordance with their fixed
effort to instate Ausmr""' begun a structured
2 m a systematic way.’^ Australia (along with
2
DYEING AUSTRALIA RED
New Zealand) was seen as the ‘weak link in the western camp’ and has
been the site for the Chinese party-state to test its methods of infiltra¬
tion and subversion. He noted that Australia’s openness, relatively small
population, large number of Chinese immigrants and commitment to
multiculturalism have weakened our capacity to recognise and defend
against this threat. In short, we have opened ourselves up to it.
The erosion of Australian sovereignty by Beijing is recognised by
a handful of Sinologists, political journalists, strategic analysts and
intelligence officers. While some are unwilling to say anything in
public for fear of retribution, a few have been sending clear warnings.
Those alert to the danger find themselves up against a powerful lobby
of overlapping business and political elites who share an outdated and
self-serving understanding of China—as a real-world El Dorado to
which our economic destiny is tied. These ‘panda buggers’ are backed
by China sympathisers in the media, universities, business lobbies and
parliaments who are quick to accuse anyone who rings an alarm bell
of being motivated by xenophobia or anti-Chinese sentiment. We will
meet many of them.
The rest of this book will describe and document the unfolding
process by which we are being robbed of our sovereignty. We have been
allowing it to happen under our noses because we are mesmerised by
the belief that only China can guarantee our economic prosperity and
because we are afraid to stand up to Beijing’s bullying. So we must ask
the question: What is Australian sovereignty worth? What price do we
put on our independence as a nation? In practice, it’s a question we are
answering every day, and the answer is ‘not much’.
I think most Australians will begin to think quite differently, as I
did, when they realise that Australian institutions—from our schools,
universities and professional associations to our media; from industries
like mining, agriculture and tourism to strategic assets like ports and
electricity grids; from our local councils and state governments to our
political parties in Canberra—are being penetrated and shaped by a
complex system of influence and control overseen by agencies serving
the Chinese Communist Party.
Huge, swiftly developing, successful at reducing poverty, ideo¬
logically rigid, hypersensitive and essentially benign. That has been the
3
SILENT INVASION
con^ption of China in the Australian public mind. We can aa
the belief (much exaggerated) that only China saved us f u ''
global recession and has been the main source of our roreri
since. Its a view that’s been actively promoted by the ‘CMnrio^^^^
Australia, a loose coalition of businesspeople, politicians, policy IdZ
bureaucrats, journalists and commentators.
In recent years, the Australian public has become agitated b
perceptions of some negative aspects of our relationship with China
Cashed-up Chinese bidders are taking houses from Australians. The
rate of immigration from China is too fast to allow assimilation, so that
parts of Sydney no longer feel like Australia. Chinese-heritage (and other
Asian) students are monopolising places at highly desirable selective
schools. Chinese tourists are buying up infant formula to take home,
creating shortages and driving up prices. And Chinese billionaires have
bought themselves too much influence over our politicians.
Unfortunately, the term ‘Chinese’ is often used indiscriminately so
that all Australians of Chinese heritage are tarred with the same brush.
Among those most alarmed by the growing sway of the Chinese party-
state in this country are those Chinese-Australians who see themselves
as Australians', in other words, those who feel loyal to the country they
have made their home. They have watched with dismay and a sense
of foreboding as new waves of Chinese have arrived—billionaires with
shady histories and tight links to the party, media owners creating
Beijing mouthpieces, ‘patriotic’ students brainwashed from birth (but
still seeking residency), and professionals marshalled into pro-Beijing
associations set up by the Chinese embassy. And, among many, a per¬
vasive sentiment that ‘their hearts lie in the Chinese motherland , as the
CCP likes to put it.
In the course of researching this book 1 have spoken with Australians
of Chinese heritage who are deeply worried about the growing influ¬
ence of the Chinese Communist Party in the million-strong diaspora in
this country. They are worried about the coming backlash, when Anglo-
Australians wake up to what is happening. They are acutely aware of
^e anti Chinese riots that have plagued countries like Indonesia and
y a, and can see themselves caught up in the backlash even though
y ve no love for the Chinese regime and count themselves as loyal
4
DYEING AUSTRALIA RED
Aiissies. As John Hu, the founder of the Australian Values Alliance,
an organisation of Chinese-Australians dedicated to resisting Beijing’s
growing influence, put it to me; ‘If we don’t stop it, and wait for white
people to do it, we will be in trouble.’
For writing this book I will be accused of racism and xenophobia,
epithets flung at anyone who raises the alarm about the influence of the
Chinese Communist Party in Australia. The accusation can be made
only by conflating the CCP with Chinese people so that being anti-CCP
must mean being anti-Chinese. (It’s exactly what the CCP wants us to
think.) Its a cheap accusation, but it serves as an effective silencing device
in this country because of the widespread, and quite proper, sensitivity
to inflaming racial tensions. However, that sensitivity is exploited by
those who do not want attention drawn to what the CCP is doing.
They exploit what might be called our xenophobia-phobia, our fear
of being accused of racism. There is, nevertheless, a genuine concern
that bigots will use this book to vilify all Chinese-Australians. When I
expressed this anxiety to a Chinese-Australian friend she told me that
we need to confront the ugliness of what the CCP is doing here. ‘We
want you. to publish this book. We’re in the same boat.’
Chinese-Australians like her and John Hu have learned to prize
the freedom, openness and rule of law of this country, and they want
all Australians to know that they have no truck with those people of
Chinese origin in Australia, whether citizens or not, who put the inter¬
ests of the Peoples Republic of China first. They can see that as each
year passes the number and influence of Chinese-Australians loyal to
Australia are being swamped by the number and influence of Chinese
in Australia loyal to Beijing and who regard the PRC motherland as
their true home.
You will notice that I wrote ‘loyal to Beijing’ rather than ‘loyal to
China. There is nothing wrong with expatriates anywhere, and their
children, feeling affection for the home country. But, as we will see,
patriotic Chinese in Australia have been conditioned by decades of
propaganda to believe that China and Beijing, that is, the Chinese
state under the iron rule of the Communist Party, are the same thing.
For many new Chinese arrivals in the West, one of the hardest concepts
to understand is the distinction, essential to democracies, between the
5
1
SILENT INVASION
nation and its government. When they do grasp the diff
are open to becoming critics of the party-state without
betraying their homeland. They may even become dissidents wK,’"
China but hate its government. ^
When I spoke to John Hu about his compatriots who are ‘lo al
Beijing he corrected me by saying ‘loyal to money’. In his view, none
of the businessmen who do Beijing’s bidding do so because they are
committed to the objectives of the Communist Party; they do what
they are told because without official backing they cannot do business
in China. And unless they serve the party they may well find their
business dealings in Australia and in China targeted by the Chinese
government, which may ‘make trouble’ for them, like leaning on others
to boycott them.
Apologists for China in Australia know that the Chinese state is
repressive. They know it tightly controls the media, suppresses free
speech, sanctions abuses of human rights and tolerates no challenge to
the party. But they manage to set it all aside, often because they have a
material interest in taking an ‘optimistic view’, focusing instead on the
economic opportunities China presents. They rationalise the repression
by telling themselves that it’s not as bad as people say or that there is
nothing they can do about it or that, while regrettable, it doesn’t affect
us. The last of these is not true and is less true by the day. As we will
see, the repressive apparatus of the Chinese state is making itself felt in
Australia, and unless Australians begin now to push back and protect
our rights and freedoms we will soon find that it is too late. Otherwise
our institutions will become so corrupted that we will no longer be
able to rely on them to put Australia first when the CCP’s interests
are involved.
Some still believe that the PRC is on the road to democracy and
that the repression is just a stage it is going through. All of the evidence
19^^*^^ wishful thinking. Since their high point in
) p democracy sentiment and organisation in China have never
the Cult 1 deeply entrenched than at any time since
^Jinpine.Ever^ becoming more severe under President
is its astounding econ ^^o^inant fact about modern China
' ~ -^-h has seen hundreds of millions
6
DYEING AUSTRALIA RED
of people pulled out of poverty and misery. They say that against this
achievement (which is undoubtedly of historic significance) repression
pales into insignificance. Some actually believe that authoritarian rule
has been necessary to achieve it. And so we should be celebrating and
profiting from that achievement rather than harping on about Tibetan
autonomy or the arrest of human rights lawyers. Even the building of
military bases in the South China Sea is out of our control, so let’s get
on with making money. I hope by the end of this book the reader will
understand how dangerous these arguments are to our freedom.
7
2 How China sees itself in the world
As the 1990s dawned, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to
confront the possibility of its imminent demise. After Chairman
Maos death in 1976, the people began to face up to the catastrophes
of Maos Great Leap Forward (1958—62) and the Cultural Revolution
(1965-75). As the truth spread and the people became restive, the
legitimacy of communism and the Communist Party were shaken.
For the party, communism became optional, but giving up power was
not. It began to drift, not knowing what it stood for and what its goals
should be. In the 1980s the challenge was dubbed the ‘Three Belief
Crises the crises of faith in socialism, of belief in Marxism and of
trust in the party. How could the party mobilise the people to support
it in the new ideological and spiritual vacuum, one that something else
threatened to fill?
When in the late 1970s and early 1980s President Deng Xiaoping
iscarded many orthodoxies and began to open up the economy to free
Western ideas began to flow into the Peoples Republic
demn • intellectuals and many students called for liberal
irperc pro-democracy movement found
ns peak expression in the 1 Q«o ^
Tiananmen Square in central Beijing"'
8
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
For a party that had lost its mandate to rule in the eyes of the people,
pro-democraq^ thoughts represented a profound threat. As the crisis
intensified, a fierce internal struggle racked the party over how to
respond. The hardliners under Premier Li Peng, backed by paramount
elder statesman Deng Xiaoping, prevailed and the tanks were sent in.
The suppression of dissident thought began and has only intensified
since. As Stalin is reputed to have said: ‘Ideas are more powerful than
guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them
have ideas?’
Yet the leadership knew that after the brutal suppression of the
movement it somehow had to regain a mandate to rule if it were to sur¬
vive. Months after the Tiananmen crackdown, the party leadership was
jolted by another shock. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989
and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe crumbled, the Soviet
Union itself, the great bastion of socialism, disintegrated. In Beijing
the message was unmistakable: communism in Europe had collapsed
because of its own weakness in permitting glasnost, the opening up of
government and greater freedom of speech.
But how would the CCP, now desperate, convince the people of its
right to rule them? The economic growth and rising prosperity of the
1990s went some way to restoring its legitimacy, but it would not be
enough, both because the benefits would take time to spread through
the population and because a shared ideology binds a nation together
far more powerfully than self-interest. And so in the early 1990s, with
remarkable speed, the CCP built a new ideology around a new narrative
for the nation. Its essence is captured in the titles of two books: Never
Forget National Humiliation by Zheng Wang and The Hundred-Year
Marathon by Michael Pillsbtiry.' The messages of these books, echoed
by some of the sharpest China watchers, have the most profound
implications for Australia’s future.
‘Brainwashed’
Children’s beliefs can be moulded more easily than those of adults.
Education campaigns are more effective than re-education campaigns.
And so the CCP set out to create a generation of patriots through the
teaching, from kindergarten to university, of the nation’s history and
9
SILENT INVASION
/
/
its destiny. In 1991. two years after the Tiananmen Square m
the Patriotic Education Campaign began in earnest. Party
Zemin himself outlined the new master narrative.^ The basi
was simple: China had suffered a century of humiliation at th^haT
of foreign powers. For a century after the Opium Wars of the mid
nineteenth century, China was bullied and humiliated by foreigners'
Although feudal rulers were corrupt, many brave Chinese people laid
down their lives to defend the nation. The CCP led the fight against the
imperialists and liberated the nation in 1949, proving that ‘the Chinese
people cannot be bullied’. (In reality, the Communists left the fight
against the Japanese invaders to its rival, the nationalist Kuomintang,
and it was the Allies that finally defeated Japan in 1945.) In 1949, the
narrative went, the party had set the nation on the path of regaining its
past glory as a great nation—indeed, as the world’s greatest civilisation.
The new narrative was a radical reinterpretation of China’s history.
For decades the CCP had woven a story of class struggle against feudal
power and the continuing influence of reactionary forces in China
who oppressed the people. Now it told a story of struggle against the
bullying and humiliation imposed on the nation by foreign powers.
It was no longer an internationalist story that united the oppressed of
China with the oppressed around the world but a nationalist story that
set the Chinese people against the rest of the world. If the Tiananmen
generation had seen themselves as victims of the CCP, the new gen¬
eration would see themselves as the victims of colonialism. The new
patriots would turn their anger outwards instead of inwards.
And so in August 1991 the powerful PRC National Education
Council issued an edict requiring all schools to reform history educa¬
tion to stress that China’s purpose is to ‘defend against the “peaceful
evolution plot of international hostile powers’. This would be the
most important mission for schools’. The curriculum guidelines begin:
Chinese modern history is a history of humiliation in which China
^adually degenerated into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.’
owever, the Chinese people under the leadership of the Chinese
. 1 engaged in struggle to achieve independence and
writes:'’‘Chtee Humiliation Zheng Wang
y e ucation in national humiliation”—has
10
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
become one of the most important subjects in the national education
system.’^ It is this belief in Chinas history of humiliation, and now the
‘great rejuvenation of the nation, that is the key to understanding
die role of China in the world today.
Through the Patriotic Education Campaign the party set out to
unite the nation and ‘rally the masses’ patriotic passions to the great
cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This was how
the party would rebuild its legitimacy in the eyes of the people, by
embodying the aspiration of the Chinese people to outgrow but never
forget the ‘bitterness and shame’ of their humiliation and once again
become a great nation. No longer victims, they would be victors.
From the early 1990s every child who began school became the
subject of an intense and unrelenting program of patriotic education
that would continue until they left high school or university. Previously,
to gain entry to university, candidates had to pass an exam in politics
focusing on Marxism, the thoughts of Chairman Mao and the policies
of the CCP. According to one observer, while students had always
resisted classes in Marxist doctrine, they proved far more amenable to
patriotic education.'* Zheng Wang concludes his book by noting that
the campaign for patriotic education goes a long way towards explain¬
ing ‘the rapid conversion of China’s popular social movements from the
internal-oriented, anti-corruption, anti-dictatorship democratic move¬
ments of the 1980s to the external-oriented, anti-Western nationalism
of the 1990s’.^
When I asked intellectuals in China about the younger generation,
some said, with a dismissive snort, ‘brainwashed’. Others told me that
some young people are able to distance themselves from the lifelong
propaganda. But they are hard to find. The effectiveness of the Patriotic
Education Campaign is the clue to understanding that day in Canberra
in April 2008 when, at the Olympic torch event outside Parliament
House in Canberra, tens of thousands of Chinese students demonstrated
their patriotic feelings for China in such a fervent and belligerent way.
The party is the nation
The campaign of indoctrination, built on a newly shaped sense of
Chinese national pride, has enabled the CCP to continue to strengthen
11
SILENT INVASION
Its rule it jettisoned Marxist notions of revolution el¬
and proletarian internationalism, while retainina the '
the Leninist party structure. And it has not let up !„ 2o7r
education minister. Chen Baosheng, declared that theedne- ’
i. ,h.
hostile forces were attempting to ‘penetrate’ the nation’s schn i ''
‘sabotage your future’/’ ^
While the campaign aimed at reshaping the Chinese peo y
narrative of the nation’s history has been most intensive in schools^
jingoistic message has gone well beyond the classroom. From the earl^
1990s it spread into a ‘nationwide mobilization’. As Zheng Wang writes-
‘Patriotism, along with history and memory, has become the most
important subject for ideological education of the party-state system
In its 1994 planning document, the party declared that patriotic
thoughts are to become ‘the core themes of our society’.® Controlling
people’s thoughts obviates the need to control their behaviour and
the party has striven constantly to implant patriotic thoughts into the
minds of the people.
Today, wherever one goes in China there are reminders of the
nation’s century of humiliation at the hands of the brutal Japanese
and the arrogant Westerners, and the resurgence of the Chinese people
under the leadership of the Communist Party. Monuments, memorial
halls, historical relics and museums have sprouted, all reinforcing the
new narrative. And everyone whose job involves advancing the cam-
paign—teachers, military officers and soldiers, and all employees of
state agencies—is required to attend regular classes aimed at reinforcing
their patriotic enthusiasm.
When the party leadership decided that patriotic education must
be made the foundation project of the construction of socialist
civilization, the audience included overseas Chinese.'^ In Australia, as
here, the new kind of patriotism has become more dangerous as
onomic power and wealth have grown. A powerful sense of
^ humiliation, combined
goes a lone ^‘sj^nguish between the nation and its government,
g 'nere-Ausiiahan citizens, remain loyal to the PRC and
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
defend its actions even when they conflict with Australia’s values
and interests.
The shift since the early 1990s from demanding loyalty to the
Communist Party to demanding loyalty to the nation has been possible
because for the CCP the party is the nation. Reinforcing this identity
has been essential to the campaign, but it was not manufactured by it.
It skilfully traded on a powerful historical sense of Chinese nationalism
and exceptionalism. Zheng Wang writes: ‘Many Chinese share a strong
collective historical consciousness regarding the country’s century of
humiliation, and this is a central element in shaping Chinese national
identity.’’® In general, this belief in Chinese exceptionalism and histori¬
cal destiny is not left behind when its people migrate to other parts of
the world. It takes a long time to fade.
The inability to distinguish between nation and government is not
universal in China, despite the sustained efforts of the party over some
decades. When Chen Xiankui, a party loyalist and professor at Renmin
University, wrote an opinion piece proclaiming that ‘love of party and
love of country are one and the same in modern China’, a storm of
dissenting voices blew up among netizens." The nationalist tabloid that
had published Chen’s article. Global Times, rounded on the critics with
an editorial accusing those who do not equate love of country with love
of party of being ‘brainwashed public intellectuals’.
Today, in addition to the CCP’s iron grip, it is nationalism that holds
Chinese society together and justifies the rule of the Communist Party.
The party has come to symbolise and represent the Chinese nation.
For President Jiang Zemin, those who did not express their patriotism
ardently were traitors, ‘the scum of a nation’.’^ Jiang’s campaign was
taken up readily by Xi Jinping when he became president in 2013.
Of course, some reject the party’s exploitation of national pride, and
none more vehemently than Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese literary critic who
was awarded the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize for his eloquent and powerful
defence of human rights. He characterised modern Chinese patriotism
as ‘a complaining, compulsive sort of nationalism, rather like that of
a jilted lover’.In the 2000s, he wrote, the regime managed to whip
up this kind of ‘bellicose, expansionist patriotism’ in segments of the
population by portraying a long history of humiliation at the hands of
13
SILENT INVASION
/
foreigners and a popular longing for revenge, all built on a histor*
feeling of vanity arising from the conviction that China once ruleT^l
Under Heaven. Liu diagnosed a national psychology that altern
between extremes of self-abasement and self-aggrandisement.''*
Sick man no more
The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games provided the CCP with an irresistible
opportunity to reinforce the ‘party = nation identity, and to take the
publics commitment to the party-state to a higher level. Winning
the right to host the Olympics and then topping the gold-medal tally
became a national obsession in which the ugliest forms of national
pride were on display. In the words of a party sporting official, ‘to win
Olympic glory for the Motherland is a sacred mission entrusted to us by
Party Central’.'^ Liu Xiaobo saw it differently: ‘The gleam of gold can
help a dictatorial regime to tighten its grip on power and to fan flames
of nationalism that it can use for other purposes.’"^
The jingoism of the Beijing Olympics had deeper psychological
roots, according to Zheng Wang.‘^ In the nineteenth century, the
Ottoman Empire was described as the ‘sick man of Europe because
of its state of decrepitude. When China under foreign pressures was in
disarray, someone borrowed the term to label China ‘the sick man of
Asia’. In the twentieth century, many in China interpreted the phrase as
a humiliating insult concerning the poor physiques and ill health of the
Chinese people. The Beijing Olympics would be the occasion to prove
to the world that the contemptuous epithet is wrong, that the Chinese
people could compete physically with the best in the world. The Beijing
Olympic Organising Committee even published an article entitled
From sick man of East Asia” to “sports big power’”. So much was
riding on Chinese success at the Olympics that failure was unthinkable.
When the Chinese body triumphed, the historic shame would be wiped
away in a surge of national honour. The passions of the Olympic torch
event in Canberra leading up to the 2008 games become explicable
hen we understand that the students who arrived to give vent to their
^ subjects of a campaign of mass brainwashing
r L that even their bodies had been regarded as a
source of shame. ^
14
I M MWBr
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
When China topped the medal tally, the wave of patriotic elation
that broke was visceral in origin. Eight years later, Australian swimmer
Mack Horton had no idea of this cultural history when at the 2016
Rio games he dismissed his PRC rival. Sun Yang, as a drug cheat. (In
2014 the Chinese champion had served a three-month doping ban.)
The backlash against Mack Horton was instant and brutal as Chinas
army of online trolls launched a frenzy of ultranationalist abuse and
threats, much of it on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Horton is
reported to have received over 243,000 angry comments on his Weibo
account (similar to Twitter).'® One hoped he’d be killed by a kangaroo;
another wished him luck at the 2020 Paralympics. It’s believed that
many of the hostile comments came from ethnic Chinese living in
Australia. He became the target of what Liu Xiaobo had described as
the ‘thuggish language that unabashedly celebrates violence, race hatred
and warmongering passion [that] now haunts the Chinese Internet’. For
its part, the state tabloid Global Times attacked the southern land as one
that had been settled by ‘the UK’s unwanted criminals’ and was now
stained by ‘white supremacism’ and a ‘tinge of barbarism’.'^
In addition to the Horton-Sun affair, patriotic Chinese watching
the 2016 Rio Olympic coverage in Australia found much to complain
about. When Channel Seven’s coverage of the opening ceremony cut
to an ad break as the Chinese team entered the stadium, patriots with
a chip on the shoulder took to social media complaining of racism
and the insult to the nation. Anti-China conspiracy theories went into
overdrive when a technician accidentally put Chile’s flag next to China’s
name on the tally board. (If Channel Seven had mistakenly put Austria’s
flag next to Australia’s name, Australians would have greeted it with
amused ridicule.)
One of the oddest protests ever seen in Sydney was staged in reaction
to Channel Seven’s slip-ups. Half a dozen members of the Construction,
Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) turned up outside the
station’s studio brandishing a Chinese flag and demanding an apology.
A union statement quoted CFMEU organiser Yu Lei Zhou as saying
that Channel Seven’s actions were ignorant and discriminatory.^® Why,
one might ask, would Australia’s major construction union bother itself
with a glitch in a TV broadcast? As we’ll see, trade unions number
15
SILENT INVASION
among the organisation, in this country targeted for i„fi,,,, ,
CCP s agencies.^' ‘"‘tration by
Noticing these stories of misguided patriotism Ch'
have argued that some Chinese people are driven bv
hidden fear of their own inferiority, one that can only be sX'd^k
approval of the rest of the world. ‘If the approval is not gran^d ■
Zheng Wang, ‘or is granted only with qualifications, initial pride"'"'
suddenly morph into resentment, anger, and deepened insecuti
Uncontrolled, such passions can threaten the CCP too. ^
‘Twisted patriotism*
In creating the surge of patriotism, the CCP has found that it is ridin
a tiger. After twenty-five years of patriotic education through every
medium that Chinese people have access to, segments of the public have
absorbed an acute sense of victimhood and nationalist rage, causing them
to overreact to any slight from foreigners. Online, ‘red bloggers’ have
launched unapproved but coordinated attacks on Taiwanese websites
whenever Taiwan looks as if it has taken a step towards independence.^^
In 2012, in response to an escalation of tensions with Japan over the
Senkaku Islands, nationalist protesters went on rampages in dozens
of Chinese cities.^"^ Although the protests seem to have been officially
sanctioned, Japanese restaurants and supermarkets were smashed up,
Japanese vehicles were damaged and a Panasonic factory was set alight.
The police had trouble controlling the mobs, with one group climbing
onto the roof of a hotel in Guangzhou to wave the flag, sing the national
anthem and chant ‘Japan, get the hell out of China’.
The government had lost control and cracked down. But the popu-
ar anger also forced its hand so that party leaders had to show greater
ermination to resist Japanese imperialism’ than they might have,
nt Jinping, who has fanned the flame of nationalism, has to
which**'o be responsive to its demands,
In contend with,
by the intetnron I 'I’" ^016 ruling
so.,h ch,„. s.., .h!
restaurants. Alteady some protests outside KFC
y -me protesters had harangued KFC customers fo,
16
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
being ‘unpatriotic’. A China Daily editorial distinguished between right¬
ful patriotism and ‘jingoism that does a disservice to the ... nation’.^^
Young people who posted online photos of themselves smashing
iPhones were described, with no sense of irony, as ‘angry youth’ fed on
aggressive nationalism from birth. Perhaps anticipating further disorder
as Beijing pushed its expansionist agenda more aggressively, in early
2017 the party announced that public outbursts would be nipped in
the bud so as to ‘properly handle the relationship between the people’s
patriotism and social stability’.
Even the hypernationalist Global Times has found the need to hose
down the patriotic belligerence it has done so much to inflame. When
in December 2016 an anti-Japanese protester was prosecuted, it warned
of the dangers of‘twisted patriotism’.
In nations like Australia where parts of the Chinese community
retain their loyalty to the PRC, these dangerous sentiments of paranoia
and wounded national pride are acted out. As a senior academic com¬
mentator in Shanghai expressed it to me: ‘If they are patriotic, Chinese
think they can do anything.’
The great rejuvenation
The Australian journalist Philip Wen tells the story of a boozy banquet
he attended at which the brother of a billionaire confided, ‘In time, this
world will be China’s.’^® The billionaire in question now controls the
Port of Darwin through his company Landbridge Group. This kind of
sentiment is not uncommon in China. It captures an ambition beyond
a simple assertion of patriotism. The century of humiliation that ended
in 1949 was succeeded by a hundred-year marathon in which China will
resume its place at the centre of the world. Jiang Zemin, president from
1993 to 2003, developed a new catchphrase, ‘the great rejuvenation
of the Chinese nation’, conjuring up the historical memory of China
as a great power in the world.President Hu Jintao would take up
the historic cause, reminding the people about foreign bullying and
declaring that ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has become
the unswerving goal that each Chinese generation has striven to realise’.
But Hu’s strategy, following the ancient advice of The Art of War and
that of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping, was to keep the ambition under
17
SILENT INVASION
/
wraps and bide ones time until China was strong enough to act on itj
intention, a strategy that became known as ‘hide and bide’.
After he’d been anointed the next president in late 2012, Xi Jinping
announced that achieving the China Dream of ‘the great rejuvenation
of the Chinese nation’ would be his grand ambition. China would
no longer hide and bide but assert the nation’s newfound power for
all to see. While Xi himself has not spelled out his China Dream,
scholars understand it to mean the ‘revival of Chinese glories of the
past’, including economic dominance, and making China the world’s
dominant power.^®
Xi is thought to have borrowed the phrase ‘China Dream’ from
a famous military hawk, the retired People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
colonel and military academic Liu Mingfu. Lius book published in
English as The China Dream: Great power thinking and strategic posture
in the Post-American ‘defines a national strategy to restore China to
its historical glory and take the United States’ place as world leader’.^'
In the first decades of the twenty-first century China must aim to
surpass the United States ‘to become the world’s No. 1 powerV^ Liu’s
2010 book became a nationwide bestseller in China, appealing to a
public ready to embrace a global master narrative in which the revival
of the Middle Kingdom would restore China to its proper place as the
centre of the world, and from where it would spread harmony through
its culture, language and values, an empire that, in the words of another
scholar, ‘values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance
over democracy and human rights’.
Veteran US strategic thinker Michael Pillsbury argues that Xi, who
has long and deep links with the PLA and who arranged for himself
to be appointed as commander-in-chief, ‘is closely connected to the
nationalist “super-hawks” in the Chinese military’.^'* His China Dream
singles out a ‘strong army dream’. The influence of the hawks is seri¬
ously underestimated in the West. They have become dominant under
Xi, in whom they find a leader sympathetic to their understanding of
Chinese history as the Hundred-Year Marathon that began in 1949 and
through which China will avenge its previous century of humiliation
by eclipsing the United Sates as the dominant economic, political and,
eventually, military power.
18
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
The rise of Xi Jinping has given confidence to those who favour this
imperial interpretation, justifying Chinas global domination with the
traditional notion of tianxia. Although open to differing interpreta¬
tions, tianxia or ‘all under the heavens’ describes the world ruled over
by the Chinese emperor and around which all else revolves. It is not
just an archaic notion, for as Zheng Wang observes, ‘the Chinese feel a
strong sense of chosenness and are extremely proud of their ancient and
modern achievements’.^^’
These appear to be the sources of Xi’s ‘China Dream’, and it is not
too difficult to see this grand vision guiding China’s more assertive
intervention in the world, from the vast investment program of the
One Belt, One Road Initiative, to the infiltration of CCP values in
Western institutions, to the rapid expansion of the PLA Navy, and to
the aggressive annexation of the South China Sea. Although perhaps
part braggadocio, Liu Mingfu himself claimed in 2015 that the ‘sleep¬
ing lion’ of China has been awakened and ‘Xi Jinping is the leading
lion of the lion packs, who dare to fight anytime’.The more hawkish
of the elites believe that the 2008 financial crisis in the United States,
brought on by its own institutional decay, marked the turning point
beyond which a ‘Chinese-led world order’ became unstoppable. They
may be right. The Hundred-Year Marathon may take only eighty years
to complete.
All of this has been obvious to one of Asia’s most longstanding
and acute observers, the late Singapore president Lee Kuan Yew. ‘It
is China’s intention to be the greatest power in the world,’ Lee said.^®
China is pursuing a long-term ‘peaceful rise’ strategy, but this is not
commonly understood in the West. It means that China aims to achieve
global dominance not by direct military confrontation with the United
States but by pursuing economic domination, via what Liu calls a ‘non¬
conquering civilization’, which in time will give it the same result.
Beijing’s judgement is that it’s better not to deplete one’s own resources
by attempting to match the vast sums spent by the US on maintaining
its bloated military forces. Pillsbury describes China’s strategy to defeat
the United States militarily by other means. Even so, China’s military
spending has been growing quickly, with emphasis on dominating the
seas. Pressure on its neighbours is being ratcheted up daily.
19
SILENT INVASION
/
The CCP leadership ,s aware that announcing its
ambition would provoke resistance and so it conceals i, H
behind a story of peaceful economic development and en'
the world. Every now and then, however, the secret
the deputy director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office^'r^
He Yafei, gave a speech to senior cadres.'*" As we’ll see, the
a leading organ of the State Council, the PRC’s chief admini
authority, with the primary task of mobilising the Chinese^dill^'*^^
to serve Beijing’s goals. A report of the speech (in Chinese) sor^h^^^
made its way onto the website of the State Council Information
He Yafeis theme was the need to propagate ‘China’s voice’ through
out the world. The first of six areas he covered was the domination of
international public opinion by Western media groups and the need
‘to carve out a bloody path and smash the West’s monopoly and public
opinion hegemony’. He then set out the need to replace with ‘China’s
value system’ important ideas invented by America and the West like
‘soft power’ and the ‘clash of civilisations’ as well as ideas like ‘freedom
democracy [and] equal human rights’.
The lumping of academic inventions like soft power together with
fundamental rights into a single category of ‘Western ideas’ to be
replaced with Chinese ones is disturbing enough. But what is truly
revealing in He Yafei’s speech is his caution to senior cadres about the
‘shortcomings and contaminations’ of overseas audiences: ‘If we simply
stress our own dominance ... then we will find it difficult to achieve
good results in our external propaganda’. Can we just dismiss this
revelation by such a senior CCP leader—He Yafei previously served as
deputy foreign minister—as one man’s aberrant patriotic enthusiasm?
Or has he given the game away? The evidence that he expressed the true
ambitions of at least the dominant faction of the CCP is overwhelming
and is set out further in the subsequent chapters of this book.**'
Yet here in Australia some of our most senior figures have fallen
^mpletely for the propaganda. One. former Labor prime minister Paul
Keating, reassured us: 'Unlike the Soviet Union before it Chin. ■
" e- -"W .0 .. in. ,;nM^
20
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
precinct/'*^ Tell that to the nations that wake up to find the Chinese
military occupying islands in their traditional waters, like Vietnam and
the Philippines, or the Tibetans whose territory has been occupied. As
we 11 see, Keating frequently echoes CCP propaganda.
Unlike the ‘friends of China’ in the West, some scholars in China have
serious misgivings about the emerging triumphalism of China under
Xi Jinping, as one of the more acute and well-informed China analysts
David Kelly points out.*^’ In necessarily veiled criticism, they argue that
China is not sufficiently mature to assume a world leadership role and
the triumphalism of the party and the media is dangerous. One com¬
pares it to German triumphalism in the 1930s. Instead of posing as the
saviour of the world’, China should focus on domestic development.
Kelly argues that their ‘realistic’ stance is ‘a more sustainable big power
strategy in the current situation’.
Yet the hawks are in the ascendant. The Chinese are ‘the finest
people on earth, declares Liu Mingfu, and with its greater civilisation
China will become ‘the world’s leading nation’, ‘the uncontested global
leaderA great unknown of this century is raised by China watcher
Jamil Anderlini:
The logic of China’s great rejuvenation is essentially revanchist
[revenge-seeking] and assumes the country is still a long way from
regaining its rightful level of power, influence and even territory.
The dangerous question for the rest of the world is at what point
China will feel it has reached peak rejuvenation and what that will
look like for everyone who is not included in the great family of
the Chinese race.^^
China’s claim to Australia
Soon after his first meeting with Xi Jinping, Donald Trump told a jour¬
nalist that the Chinese president had told him that ‘Korea actually used
to be part of China. Trump’s gullibility is unsurprising, but the Koreans
knew what Xi was up to. Korea has never been part of China. A scathing
editorial in the respected and widely read Chosun newspaper noted that
at the root of this nonsense lies a powerful hegemonic nationalism’
21
SILENT INVASION
traceable to tlie days of the tribute system.'*^ The PRC’s pressure
South Korea is 'motivated by nothing more than a bully's bclicriha"
Korea somehow owes it obeisance’. ^
Other Asian nations are well aware of the highly dubious and
confected ‘historical rights’ China says it has to the South China Sea
and the islands in it. It claims to have discovered, named, explored and
exploited the whole of the South China Sea some 2000 years ago. This
is the basis for its sovereignty, which it reclaimed by hand-drawing the
nine-dash line around most of it in 1947. Reviewing the situation, one
expert concludes that ‘such a claim not only has no basis in interna¬
tional law, but also no basis in China’s own history. It is nonsense.’"'^
Historical nonsense, however, is no deterrent to China’s hawks. And so
they dismissed the ruling of the Arbitral Tribunal in The Hague, which
concluded that even if China’s historical claims about fishing in the sea
were valid, they are irrelevant to any claim to the islands in the sea.'^®
Professor John Fitzgerald, one of Australia’s leading Sinologists and
president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, has summed
up the CCP’s thinking as follows:
In laying claim to disputed territories, Beijing reaches back centuries
to establish historical ownership over land and maritime territories
that can then be forcefully ‘reclaimed’ as its own. A country can
never invade itself, and so China’s leaders believe that by claim¬
ing to be recovering ‘lost’ territories they can never be accused of
invading anyone.**^
It would be a mistake for Australians to believe that spurious
historical claims to justify territorial ambitions are confined to China’s
traditional sphere of influence. China is using fake history to position
itself to make a future claim over Australia. When in 2003 President
Hu Jintao addressed the Australian parliament, he began with a piece of
outrageous historical revisionism.
The Chinese people have all along cherished amicable feelings about
the Australian people. Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets
of China's Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries.
HOW CHINA SEES ITSELF IN THE WORLD
the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they
called Southern Land, or todays Australia. They brought Chinese
culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people,
contributing their proud share to Australia’s economy, society and
its thriving pluralistic culture.’®
Hu’s claims may have been based on the junk history penned by
Englishman Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The year China discovered
the world, which claimed a fleet led by Admiral Zhou Man sailed the
world, stopping off at all major continents where the Chinese sailors
mixed with the natives, including in Eden, New South Wales. The evi¬
dentiary holes in Menzies’ claims began to be pointed out even before
his book was published,” and in 2006 an ABC Four Comers program
eviscerated Menzies and his history.” Maps that Menzies has produced
to prove his propositions have been shown to be fakes. Chinese scholars
have been as assiduous in their testing and debunking of Menzies’
historical claims as Western ones.” In short, there is no evidence that
a Ming Chinese fleet came anywhere near Australia. (Having wrung all
he could out of the 1421 story, Menzies moved on, discovering the lost
city of Atlantis.)
A commentary published by the Australian Parliamentary Library
in 2008 noted that, while President Hu Jintao did not use the word
discovery, he was putting forward a counter-narrative of Australian
history, one in which history began when the Chinese reached Australian
shores and engaged in the symbolically meaningful and, in CCP think¬
ing, legally significant acts of naming, mapping and settling the land.”
Hu’s intervention worked on some. Carried away by feelings of
harmonious cooperation. Liberal Senator David Johnston proposed a
few days later that the history books be rewritten to acknowledge the
Chinese admiral’s 'monumental voyages of exploration and discovery’
and to concur with President Hu Jintao’s statement that the Chinese
fleets of 1421 did in fact visit our shores’.”
Although Menzies 'history’ had been thoroughly debunked, two
years after President Hus address to parliament the Chinese ambas¬
sador Fu Ying told the National Press Club that 'Australia has always
been on Chinas map of world voyage’.” In the same year, a Central
23
SILENT INVASION
Office of Foreign Propaganda website claimed that it is likely Ad
Zheng He’s fleet arrived in northwest Australia centuries before
James Cook or Abel Tasman.In case we thought the Chinese
have found Australia had faded away, in 2016 former foreign mini
Li Zhaoxing arrived at the Australian National University (ANU) ^
give a speech in which he claimed an explorer in the time of the Yu
dynasty (the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) discovered Australia
No one challenged this fabrication of Australian history.
24
3 Qiaowu and the Chinese diaspora
‘As the standing of overseas Chinese rises abroad, and as their ethnic
consciousness awakens, they will have the desire as well as the ability
to collect their power in order to push forward the development
and advancement of China
Mobilising overseas Chinese
^^ith these words the deputy chief of the Overseas Chinese Affairs
Office (OCAO), He Yafei, revealed the vital role expected of over¬
seas Chinese in fulfilling the Communist Party’s ambitions of global
ascendancy. Tentatively from the year 2000, and totally since 2011, the
party revised its attitude towards overseas Chinese—from distancing
itself to the ‘embracing of every foreigner of Chinese descent as one’.^
To mobilise the vast Chinese global diaspora, numbering over fifty
million people, the CCP has developed a highly sophisticated, multi¬
faceted plan, implemented by several well-resourced agencies targeting
overseas Chinese, including over one million residing in Australia.
The history, goals, plans and tactics of this program have been
laid out in detail by James Jiann Hua To, a New Zealand academic
of Chinese ethnicity, in an important study based on a painstakingly
thorough doctoral dissertation.^ It is indispensable for understanding
what is taking place in Australia. James To could describe in intimate
SILENT INVASION
detail the CCP s policies and practices towards ‘Oversea, rk-
only after managing to obtain access to a large trove of s
in Beijing.^ Overseas Chinese management is known
nounced chiow-wu), literally translated as ‘Overseas Chfn'^''*^''
and can be described as ‘a massive operation involvinH^
tion and cooptation of the OC at every level of society,
their behaviour and perceptions through incentives or disinc"'^”^^''^^
suit the situation and structural circumstances that the
While reading James Tos eye-opening account, I realised I had
fully understood the CCPs overseas objectives. I had assumed
the primary objective of the various programs devoted to infiltrati
and guiding ethnic Chinese in Australia was to counter and eliminat
dissident and critical voices. But this ‘negative’ goal has a positive
counterpart—to use the diaspora to transform Australian society in a
way that makes us all sympathetic to China and easy for Beijing to
control. Australia will then assist China to become the hegemonic
power in Asia and eventually the world.
The qiaowu program provides the context in which we should
understand, for example, the influence of wealthy Chinese businessmen
in our political system through donations and networking. The docu¬
ments reveal that, in the longer term, qiaowu work involves mobilising
ethnic Chinese as voting blocs and placing Chinese candidates loyal to
the PRC in parliaments and senior public positions.^’
In fact, Beijing sees Australia, along with New Zeiiland, as the ‘weak
link in the Western world and the ideal place for testing its strategies
for breaking up the global reach of the United States and so helping
to realise Xi Jinping’s China Dream. It’s for this reason that, in com¬
plete contrast to the policies before the 2000s, the CCP now promotes
emigration of Chinese nationals.^ And it helps explain why Beijing
so vigorously presses countries like Australia to relax labour market
regulation as part of its free trade agreements. The more Chinese loyal
to eping that live in Austtalia, the more inHiience the CCP will have
over Canberra.
A 2006 internal State Council document noted that there are more
migrants leaving China illegally than legallv “Chinn ‘ I m
to combat illegal migration’ (Lludi
ng pursuit of corrupt or allegedly
26
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
corrupt officials and businessmen), although some claim PRC authori¬
ties turn a blind eye.^ For example, James To reports that in the early
2000s there were ‘at least forty “Chinese only” brothels in Suva, Fiji,
staffed by Chinese on visitor or student visas working on the side while
trying to gain entry into Australia’.'® (In 2017, seventy-seven Chinese
nationals, said to be prostitutes, were deported from Fiji." When
Chinese police took the hooded victims from their houses and put
them on a plane, questions were raised about the violation of Fijian
sovereignty.) After studying his cache of documents. To concludes
that Beijing is relaxed about illegal emigration. Although there is some
anxiety about the poor ethics and values of ‘lower-class, uneducated
illegal migrants, party cadres are urged to tend to the needs of illegal
migrants because in a decade or two they will become an accepted part
of the diaspora and thus useful to the party.
Before looking at qiaowu activities in detail, it’s worth briefly revisit¬
ing a slice of Australian history for the light it sheds on the problem we
now confront.
Bob Hawke’s gift
No one could have foreseen the profound effects that the crushing of the
1989 protests centred on Tiananmen Square would have on Australia.
As we will see, they have been immense. Let’s begin, though, with one
of the immediate consequences of the decision to send tanks to crush
the students.
When Prime Minister Bob Hawke, deeply shaken by the images of
brutality, tearfully told Chinese students in Australia that they would
not be sent home, his decision led to 42,000 Chinese obtaining perma¬
nent residence rights and, with close family members following, some
100,000 Chinese immigrants. Like me, most Australians regarded this
act in benevolent terms—after all, who would want to be responsible
for sending those students back to a place where their fellow students
had been killed or jailed?
The reality was not as it appeared. Hawke’s unilateral decision, taken
against strong advice from officials, continues to reverberate through
the nation. Some of the hidden history was explained to me by a former
public servant who was close to the action at the time. For a start.
27
"EVASION
three-quarters of the students were not .
were here for short-term language training
Htted to work iin 1 ^ ^ ^ monhk„
'll
permitted to work up to twent/hour^reU:: '
enforcement, and many worked foll-ti^e «r,2N
Immigration department officials regarded th
.rivals-seen as a cash cow by education provy^r""
thousands of Chinese to come to Australia to work for ^
enrolhng m a language course. The department wanld -f
tests for short-term language students but was outgunnl" "'"V
bureaucrats who only saw a pot of gold. Nearly half of th ^
overstayed their visas. ^ ^^^dents had
After Hawke had granted temporary visas to stay, the im •
department was flooded with thousands of applications foT^'^'''”'
status. The applicants wanted permanent residency and uhr^'*^"
citizenship. With a system set up to cope with only a couple o'!-hTd"'’'
asylum applications a year, the department was overwhelmed. Anced
evidence from members of the Chinese community suggests tLr**
support their applications some of the students, who'd nev... k^r
been active, began joining pro-democracy groups, attending protes
and waving placards while their friends took photographic eviden^
The department had to find ways of rubber stamping most applications
Why did Bob Hawke along with most of us believe that all of the
Chinese students in Australia on 4 June 1989 were pro-democrac^
activists who faced persecution if they returned home when their visas
expired? In fact, pro-democracy activists, or even supporters, were
less likely to have been let out of China to study abroad. It’s been
estimated that among Chinese students in North America at the time
only ten per cent wete actively anti-CCfl'^ Yet there, as in Australia
virtua y all of them were allowed to become permanent residents
because It seemed inhumane to send them back. In truth, most wete
economic migrants. ^ ^
LX.*.”.”' z„f r
28
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
their anti-CCP activism, many others allowed to stay either backed the
crackdown or were indifferent to it. I have been told by some who have
witnessed it that each year on 4 June groups of Chinese-Australians
get together to drink a toast to the Tiananmen Square crackdown
for getting them permanent residency. The CCP soon realised that
these overseas Chinese had not turned against the party and could
be made into allies serving the motherland from abroad. A few of
those granted political asylum would become some of the most effec¬
tive agents of influence in Beijing’s campaign to transform Australia
into a tribute state.
While some, like Hawke’s education minister, John Dawkins, saw
the post-Tiananmen influx as ‘a bit of quick intellectual improvement’
of Australia’s skill base, and others, like migration advocate James Jupp,
welcomed it as a way of forcing ‘a whole new middle class’ onto the
‘musty and limited’ Australian middle class, the real long-term effect of
Hawke’s decision was to lay the foundations for Beijing’s plans to have
Australia conform to its wishes.*'* How it has been doing this is explored
later. First, we have to understand what is driving modern China and
what its true ambitions are.
The United Front In Australia
Much of the qiaowu work is conducted by the United Front Work
Department (UFWD) of the CCP Central Committee and ‘is based
upon Marxist-Leninist mass line tactics, techniques and strategies’.’^
The UFWD targets Chinese social organisations, Chinese-language
media, student associations, professional associations and business
elites. While the UFWD is a party organ, all government agencies are
expected to pursue qiaowu objectives. The Overseas Chinese Affairs
Office (a government agency as opposed to a party one) is responsible
for drafting qiaowu policy and planning, and implementing overseas
Chinese policy. The Propaganda Department of the CCP (whose
overseas functions are explained by China scholar Anne-Marie Brady'^)
is also central to the campaign.’® Already at the centre of power, the
UFWD has grown in importance under President Xi Jinping, who
described United Front work as a ‘magic weapon’ in the great rejuvena¬
tion of the Chinese people.’** A full account of United Front and related
29
• Ili a
SILENT INVASION
//
activio^ in Australia would need a book in itself, so this chapter ca„
point out some of the more significant activities. Anne-Marie r"'’’
has provided an extensive account of United Front activities in N
ZrCtiKind, which in some respects are more advanced than in a ^
and ate meeting less resistance.*
Along with Chinese-language media, Chinese-Australian social and
professional organisations are the primary means of guiding people of
Chinese origin and promoting Chinas soft power. The China Council
for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification (CCPPNR) is ^
central organ of the United Front Work Department.^' The Australian
arm of the council is the Australian Council for the Promotion of
Peaceful Reunification of China (ACPPRC), the peak body of dozens
of overseas Chinese organisations in Australia.^^ The council’s executive
positions are filled by people the embassy trusts to advance the interests
of the PRC. When the ACPPRC was founded in 2000 as part of the
CCP s renewed United Front effort, its aim was to eclipse the older
Chinese social organisations run by ethnic Chinese whose loyalty to
Beijing was questionable. The old groups had been created by what
qiaowu analysts disparagingly called the Three Knives’, poorly edu¬
cated Chinese migrants who worked in restaurants, market gardens and
the garment industry.^^ The Three Knives’ would be pushed out by the
‘Six Masters’—lawyers, engineers, doctors, accountants, professors and
scientists—^who, united by the new organisations, would spread China’s
new vitality.
The billionaire political donors Chau Chak Wing and Fiuang
Xiangmo have held senior positions in the ACPPRC, but its inaugural
president in 2000 was William Chiu. Chiu was a radical Maoist as a
student, persecuted in his Malaysian homeland, who would become an
eminent citizen of New South Wales and an important Liberal Party
political donor who hobnobbed with the state’s great and good. He was
also a loyal Chinese Communist Party cadre. When he died in 2015
Liberal Party grandee Philip Ruddock spoke at his funeral and deliv¬
ered a eulogy in federal parliament. New South Wales premier Bar
O’Farrell laid a wreath. Chiu’s ashes were laid to rest at the Babaoshan
Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, reserved for revolutionary her
and cop officials, including Xi Jinping’s father. His corpse was dr^^^^^^
30
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
with the flag of the ACPPRC, brought from Australia. Comrade Yu
Zhengsheng, one of the seven members of the Standing Committee
of the Politburo, chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of
Peaceful National Reunification and chairman of the Chinese Peoples
Political Consultative Conference, sent flowers to the ceremony. Senior
cadres from the United Front Work Department and the Overseas
Chinese Affairs Office also paid their respects. The Peoples Daily hailed
William Chiu as a ‘great China patriot’.^'*
The PRC does not necessarily exercise direct control over the dozens
of United Front organisations in Australia. It prefers to guide and
assist them with money, embassy support and links to the homeland.
These tasks occupy the time of cultural and educational attaches at the
embassy in Canberra and the consulates in the capital cities.They
practise psychological and social techniques developed over decades that
usually obviate the need for explicit coercion. As a result, writes To,
qiaowu work is an effective tool for intensive behavioural control and
manipulation, yet qiaowu appears benign, benevolent and helpfiil’.^^
Groups that cannot be persuaded in these ways, like Falun Gong prac¬
titioners and Tibetan autonomy supporters, are subject to aggressive
and coercive methods, including denunciations, blacklisting, cyber
operations and harassment.
In Australia, United Front organisations like the ACPPRC do
Beijings work, allowing the CCP to conceal its guiding hand and
present a friendly public face. As a result, many prominent politicians
have been happy to associate themselves with them, accepting honorary
positions, attending functions and so on, access that allows their ears to
be filled with subtle Beijing propaganda.
Patrons of the ACPPRC have included Gough Whitlam, Malcolm
Fraser and Bob Hawke. Honorary advisers have included the ALP
federal minister and now China lobbyist Nick Bolkus, New South
Wales Labor luminary Meredith Burgmann, and a collection of state
and federal MPs from both major parties. Ernest Wong, the key link
between the New South Wales Labor Party and Chinese billionaires,^^
who was nominated by the party to fill a seat in the New South Wales
Legislative Council, is an honorary adviser to the ACPPRC and seems to
be heavily involved with the body. Chris Bowen, Labors federal shadow
31
SILENT INVASION
treasurer from the New South Wales Right, is a patron of the ACPPRq
or was until the 2016 Sam Dastyari affair (discussed later) when hij
name was removed from the website. Bowen has so far managed to fly
under the radar but his Chinese links are wide and deep.“
Among ACPPRC activities are the teaching of ‘Chinese culture to
children, partnering in multicultural events, and in 2015 organising, in
collaboration with the Sydney consulate, a celebration of ‘Chinas vic¬
tory over Japan’. (Actually, it was American atom bombs that defeated
Japan in 1945, but that does not fit well with the PRC narrative.)^
Former New South Wales premier Mike Baird often turned up to the
council’s events and in 2015 the council persuaded his government
to allow it to celebrate Chinese New Year by lighting up the Sydney
Opera House in a shade of bright red matching that of the PRC flag.
As Australians congratulated themselves on our multicultural openness,
the symbolism was not missed by the Peoples Daily. ‘Sydney Opera
House was draped in red with Chinese characteristics’, it announced,
quoting a pleased consul-general on how Chinese culture is being
absorbed by Australians.^®
The annual celebration of Chinese New Year was renamed from
Lunar New Year by the Sydney City Council, thereby expropriating it
from other Asian cultures that have lunar calendars, including Vietnam’s
and Korea’s. It has become a high-profile event in United Front work in
Australia. The use of traditional festivals for propaganda and networking
purposes is recommended in the secret OCAO documents uncovered
by James To, not least as a means of bringing older Chinese expatriates
suspicious of Beijing into the fold so that they can together promote
the interests of the PRC.^' Under President Xi’s leadership, money and
manpower have poured into building China’s soft power, spearheaded
by the Ministry of Culture, which has successfully multiplied Chinese
New Year events around the world from 65 in 2010 to 900 in 119
nations in 2015.^^
Recent Chinese New Year celebrations in Australia, featuring the
traditional dragons, fireworks, dumplings and red gift envelopes, have
been funded by the OCAO in Beijing through a payment of millions
of dollars made through the Sydney-based media group Nanhai Media,
as revealed by Fairfax journalist Philip Wen.^^ Breaking out of the
32
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
confines of Sydneys Chinatown, they are now held in every capital city,
with Sydney staging eight across the metropolis and Melbourne five
in 2017.3^
What was for decades a celebration of popular East Asian culture
and the contribution of the Chinese-Australian community has been
turned into a propaganda display for the Chinese Communist Party and
an opportunity for its proxies in Sydney to gain greater influence over
our political leaders, who turn out in droves, usually led by the prime
minister. If politicians turning up to Chinese New Year celebrations are
now unwitting dupes, corporate Australia has joined the bandwagon,
proving its multicultural credentials and appealing to the million-strong
Chinese-Australian market. In 2017 ABC television carried scores of
plugs for the Chinese New Year between programs, playing perfectly
into the hands of the OCAO.
In April 2016 a group named the Australian Action Committee
for Protecting Peace and Justice called a meeting of sixty community
leaders ‘to bring together [in Sydney] forces which could protect the
core interests of the Chinese nation, namely, Beijing’s claim to islands
in the South China Sea.^^ The committee’s head, Sydney-based busi¬
nessman Qian Qiguo, is active in various United Front bodies.^^
When in 2016 Prime Minister Turnbull was making his first official
trip to China, Chinese ‘community leaders’ got together and urged
him to ‘firmly safeguard the sovereign rights of China in the South
China Sea’.^^ A spokesperson, Lin Bin, warned darkly of the risks of
antagonising the homeland. According to Philip Wen, one of the best-
informed observers, the community leaders were affiliated with Huang
Xiangmo’s ACPPRC and the Chinese embassy. Its pressure on Turnbull
was amplified by Chinese-language newspapers like Sydney Today and
Chau Chak Wing’s Australian New Express Daily
In Melbourne one of the dominant groups is the Federation of
Chinese Associations (FCA) (Victoria), which is unapologetic about
its aims:
While propagating Chinese culture the FCA will also not forget to
protect the Ancestral Nation’s dignity and interests, promptly organis¬
ing many kinds of meetings in order to strike back against anti-China
33
silent invasion
groups and behaviours. Even though we’re fat
hearts remember the nation with p.assi„n front begtl"
FC^ members hold Australian passports yet their ardent „
feelings are directed towards another country. The FCA ^
deleg-ations from the Overseas Chinese Affairs Offices
and Guangdong and often refers to its contacts with the'^M
consulate in organising patriotic events, like the one in 2016 ceLb-''^
the ‘War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression’ where those^
could ‘commemorate martyrs and never forget the national
don As we saw, feelings of national humiliation have been stoke^r
the CCP for its own purposes. ^
The FCA’s president is Su Junxi. When in 2016 she ran (un
cessfully) for deputy mayor of Melbourne (on the Phil Cleary team)
she nominated Melbourne’s previous ethnic-Chinese mayor and deput^
mayor as her models.'^’ The federation is ‘a base for fostering’ political
leaders, she said, noting that the previous two mayors ‘came out of
the Chinese Association’.'^^ Su’s speech at a July 2016 march against the
Hague tribunals ruling on the South China Sea was quoted approv¬
ingly by the People's Daily: ‘all the islands of the South China Sea are
inherently China’s territory, and China has always had the right to
administer these islands, history cannot be overthrown.
At the Melbourne rally at which Su Junxi spoke, some 3000 overseas
Chinese demonstrated in support of Beijing. They waved Chinese flags
and called for ‘peace’. With only a couple of days’ notice, the demon¬
stration was said to have been organised by ‘169 associations of overseas
Chinese in Melbourne’As we’d expect, the protest organisers sought
and obtained permission from the Chinese embassy.The organisers
declared that the Hague ruling ‘makes the Chinese people filled with
righteous indignation!’—except that many were Australian citizens
Chinese-Australians resist
In September 2016, United Front groups planned to stage cortcerrs
glorifying the charming personality and heroism of Mao 7 .1 ,
Some Chinese-Australians took strong exceotion m k , •
of rhe most fearful Chinese tyrant’. For them, celebr'ad
“g Mao Was
34
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
opposed to what they love about Australia. The concerts were booked
to be staged in the Sydney and Melbourne town halls but were cancelled
after an online petition and planned protests foreshadowed trouble.
In February 2017 anti-Communist Chinese-Australians mounted
protests against the planned performance of a ballet named The Red
Detachment of Women. The ballet glorifies the Red Army and romanti¬
cises the Communist Party. Carrillo Gantner, speaking for the sponsor,
the Sidney Myer Fund, said that the ballet had ‘lost its propaganda
power’. For those Chinese-Australians who retain vivid memories of
‘die nightmares of the past’ it hadn’t.'*^ Nor has it for Xi Jinping, who
has instructed the party to spread Chinese culture abroad as a form of
soft power. Protest organiser Qi Jiazhen, an author and former political
prisoner, said that the ballet promotes hatred and preaches slaughter.
She warned that China is using cultural exchanges to infiltrate Western
societies.'*^ The protests failed to stop the performances.
The creeping and almost complete takeover of Chinese organisations
in Australia by people loyal to Beijing has caused alarm in the traditional
Chinese-Australian community. Those who migrated to escape persecu¬
tion or simply to live freely are feeling outnumbered. But they are not yet
defeated. A new ‘pro-Australia’ movement of Chinese-Australians who
abhor the growing influence of the Chinese party-state was launched in
September 2016. The Australian Values Alliance believes that if someone
decides they want to live in this country then ‘you should agree to the
values of Australia’, in the words of its founder, John Hu.'*'* Hu stands
firmly against the aims of the qiaoivu program and the way it conflates
‘China’ and the CCP: ‘if you don’t like this country’s values, and think
constantly of another place as your country, then go back there.’
These are strong words, and make some of us feel uncomfortable.
So for me it was fascinating to spend an hour and a half listening to
John Hu talk about the Chinese community in Australia. We met in
the cafe at the Museum of Contemporary Art, looking across Circular
Quay to the Sydney Opera House. Among other roles, Hu was at the
time a Liberal Partv member of the Cit\' of Parramatta Council. He
* ^
described to me the kinds of activities the PRC consulate in Sydney
engages in to manipulate overseas Chinese, and how wealthy Chinese
businessmen do the consulate’s bidding because it’s profitable for them.
35
SILENT INVASION
Intriguingly, when I asked about big donations by those businessmen to
Australia’s political parties he said: ‘There is no such thing as a private
donation.’ One way or another the consulate is mixed up in them.
After numerous meetings with Chinese-Australians I began to
understand that the community is pervaded by a constant low-level
fear. Loyalty to ‘China’ is expected by powerful people who can punish
them. Australians are used to being able to turn up to a demonstration
without having any concern about what might happen to them. But for
Chinese-Australians, to attend a public protest against a Beijing policy
requires courage and a decision to accept the possible consequences.
They know they may be photographed, identified and have their name
sent to the Chinese embassy. They may receive phone calls from ‘power¬
ful people’ issuing warnings. They may be denied a visa to visit their
sick mother. Or their brother’s business in China might be raided by
the police. Their name, personal details and activities will stay on a list
somewhere and could come up at any time.
When I asked John Hu if the takeover of Australia by forces loyal to
Beijing already has too much momentum he replied, ‘It is stoppable.’
But, he believes, Anglo-Australians have to wake up to what is happening
in their country. With a handful of others, he had formed the alliance
to show that there is no single ‘Chinese community’ in Australia, and to
give ‘white Australians’ the jolt they need.
Contesting Chineseness
The party documents seen by James To distinguish between Chinese citi¬
zens living overseas (known as huaqiao) and ethnic Chinese with foreign
citizenship {htiaren). Yet all are regarded as Chinese with their first duty
to the motherland, and so the party has developed methods to strengthen
the ‘Chineseness’ and ethnic affinity of all ethnic Chinese living abroad."*^
The CCP leadership is sensitive to the perception that it is manipulating
the loyalties of overseas Chinese,^® and so the true objectives of the qiaowu
program are, in James To’s words, ‘carefully shrouded in secrecy’.^'
The CCP takes special interest in younger Chinese whose educa¬
tion or business endeavours have taken them abroad. Compared to
earlier emigrants, they often have a much stronger affinity and ties to
the ‘ancestral home’, seeing themselves not as a minority cut off from
36
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
the motherland but as a part of China in another country.’^ They are
perf^t recruits to the CCP’s international goals, even more so if they
have high-level capacities in business or science and technology.
The China correspondent of the Financial Times, Jamil Anderlini,
has argued that a more accurate translation of Xi Jinping s favourite
phrase is ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese race’.^^ That is what
Chinese people, Han and non-Han, hear. (On the mainland, ninety-
two per cent of the population is ethnically Han.) Some China scholars
believe this is not accurate, and the best rendering is ‘the great reju¬
venation of the Chinese people’. Geoff Wade argues that the idea of
Zhonghua minzu (the Chinese nation) was invented in the twentieth
century ‘to validate Chinese domination and control of other peoples
across Eurasia’ including Tibet and Xinjiang, and often encompassing
overseas Chinese too.^*^ Even so, minzu can mean a nationality, a people,
an ethnic group or a race, depending on the context. Beijing is promot¬
ing the notion of a Chinese people to justify Han rule over non-Han
regions.
Whatever the translation, most would agree with China scholar
Daniel Bell when he writes of the view deeply ingrained in contempo¬
rary China that ‘to be Chinese is to belong to a race’.^^ Senior leaders,
like Premier Li Keqiang, are making troubling references to how love
of the motherland is ‘infused in the blood’ of all people of Chinese
ethnicity.And when Xi Jinping spoke of there being no DNA for
aggression in ‘Chinese blood’,it was a statement with a worrying
undertone of racial essentialism.
Further evidence for the CCP’s expectation that the first loyalty of
ethnic Chinese in Australia is to the motherland despite their Australian
citizenship came in a revealing article in the Chinese-language edition
of the Global Times in June 2017.^*^ It reported domestic intelligence
sources accusing Australia of attempting to persuade Chinese overseas
to defect (more specifically, to switch sides and spy for Australia).
It used the word huaren, meaning all people of Chinese ethnicity. So
Beijing is worried that Australian citizens will defect to Australia.
First-generation migrants living abroad and their children, even if
they do not speak Mandarin and know little about China, are targeted
for recruitment. Even Chinese babies adopted and raised by Western
37
SILENT INVASION
families become natural targets for enlistment to the cause of the China
Dream.^’ On weekends some ethnic Chinese children in Australia
attend Chinese schools that teach a CCP view of the world. Free
summer camps take teenagers back to China for two weeks of subtle
reinforcement of their Chineseness and indoctrination in party views.
While other developing nations have lamented the departure of
their best and brightest as a brain drain, as early as the 1980s the CCP
began to view it differently. While the brains may stay abroad there is
no reason why the products of those brains, especially in the science and
technology area, should not contribute to the homeland. With access
to better labs, colleagues and resources, those brains can do a lot more
than at home. So why not, as CCP general secretary Zhao Ziyang put it,
store brain power overseas’?^® In 2001 the CCP formalised the policy of
‘serving the nation from abroad’. As James To writes: ‘By contributing
to China from abroad, because of certain innate Chinese moral qualities
and loyalty to China, migrants represent a new quintessential mobile
modernity of “Chineseness”’.^' (In Chapters 9 and 10 we will see how
this is working in Australia.)
The trick is to keep Chinese brains abroad patriotic. It’s not so hard
when those brains have since kindergarten been subjected to the sys¬
tematic brainwashing of the Patriotic Education Campaign. Against the
liberal expectation that Chinese students will have their minds opened
by studying abroad, the evidence shows that those returning from
abroad are ‘no less jingoistic than those who have never gone abroad’.^^
President Xi Jinping was therefore confident in telling a 2015 confer¬
ence of United Front cadres that it is no problem if Chinese students
studying overseas decide to stay abroad. From there, he said, they can
‘serve the country in multiple other ways’.'’^
Chinese law forbids dual citizenship, demanding the undivided
loyalty of its citizens. The law, however, is inconsistent with the CCP’s
aim of keeping and strengthening the ties of overseas Chinese to
the motherland. So in practice large numbers of Chinese who carry
Australian, American and other passports retain their PRC passports,
allowing unimpeded travel between the ancestral homeland and the new
country of citizenship. The CCP s aim is to persuade or induce overseas
Chinese to owe allegiance to Beijing. As more Chinese-Australians enter
38
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
politics (which in itself is to be welcomed), section 44 of the Australian
Constitution (the cause of so much parliamentary angst in 2017) will
become increasingly germane. It renders ineligible for federal parlia¬
ment anyone who owes ‘allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign
power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of
a subject or citizen of a foreign power’.
In recent decades, Chineseness has been reconstructed by the CCP
power elite as a way of strengthening its incumbency, as well as its
global reach. It does so by promoting a ‘common ethnic consciousness
based on biology, culture and nostalgia, one that overseas Chinese are
< increasingly identifying with.^ The hugely popular song Descendants
of the Dragon’, a karaoke favourite approved by the party, exalts those
with ‘black hair, black eyes, yellow skin’. Qiaowu work, writes James
To, ‘seeks to penetrate OC communities and individuals, and instil
amongst them nationalistic, patriotic, or ethnographic sentiment that
converge with Beijing’s political identity’.This proved much easier
with the new waves of Chinese migrants in the 1990s and 2000s who
came not to escape political oppression, as earlier waves often did, but
to get ahead in the world while retaining links to the motherland.
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, qiaowti work received
much greater emphasis and much better resourcing. The party lead¬
ership felt threatened by the surge of pro-democracy sentiment and
activity in the diaspora. It immediately began planning how to deal
with the students. Amnesties would be provided to those who had
engaged in anti-CCP protests but wanted to return to China. Those
who stayed in Australia would not be regarded as enemies but as a
valuable resource that could be mobilised to advance China’s inter¬
ests. Intractable elements would be attacked and marginalised.^’^’ The
extraordinary success of the strateg}' of winning over the diaspora in
Australia is apparent when we compare its rebellious mood in 1989
with the massive outpouring of nationalist and pro-party sentiment in
the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games.
The vigorous promotion of a single national Chinese identity that
‘gathers a nation’ across borders works against Australia’s multicultural
policy of integrating new migrant groups into the Australian commu¬
nity while recognising cultural diversity. New citizens are required to
39
SILENT INVASION
pledge their loyalty to Australia, yet the Chinese Communist Party •
successfully working at securing the loyalty of many Chinese-Australia
for China. As long as it is allowed to continue in this way, the integra
tion of Chincse-Australians into a diverse but unified Australian societv
will likely fail.
Chinese Hansonism
In a conversation with a Chinese-Australian loyal to Australia, I was
astonished when he said that, among those he mixes with, there is a lot
of sympathy for right-wing populist Pauline Hanson. I reminded him
that she made her name in the 1990s by warning darkly of Australia
being swamped by Asians, sparking a spate of racial abuse against people
of Asian appearance. Yet for some Chinese-Australians Hanson’s blunt
defence of Australian values’ is appealing.
‘The Chinese,’ I have been told several times, ‘are the most racist
people in the world.’ There was sympathy for the Chinese cafe owner
in Kings Cross who was pilloried in the press for refusing to employ a
black man. He hasn’t yet learned that you can’t do that kind of thing in
Australia. And Chinese historically have seen themselves as superior to
other Asian people. They have no sympathy for Muslims, and Hansons
strident attacks are appreciated. Although few would vote for her,
Hanson’s calls for unpatriotic residents to be kicked out of the country
ring true for those anti-Communists who would like to see Beijings
agents, operati\"es and supporters in Australia put on the next plane
back to their motherland.
For these Chinese-Australians, ‘the Communists’ are much more
powerful than Muslim radicals, and they have a long-term plan to grad¬
ually exert their power. For them, this hostile power is a greater threat
than racist outbreaks sparked by Hansonism. They are more afraid of
the consulate than of being hassled in the street. There’s a bit more to it
though. In the late 1990s the Sydney consulate used the Hanson threat
to try to unite the Chinese community under the consulate’s influence.
Controlling the news
Should a foreign government be permitted to secretly own radio stations
m Australia that broadcast Communist Party propaganda? It’s illegal
40
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
in the United States—the businesspeople who own radio stations are
required to register as ‘foreign agents’. A 2015 Reuters investigation
uncovered a global network of radio stations across fourteen countries
including Australia that are majority owned by the state-run China
Radio International, which Sinologist John Fitzgerald describes as ‘the
Central Propaganda Bureau’s international media arm’.*'^
The documents uncovered by James To reveal that the takeover
of Chinese-language media in the West has been a carefully planned
component of the broader strategy of controlling overseas Chinese, a
‘core goal’ of qiaowu work that has gained greater importance in recent
times with President Xi Jinping’s call to increase China’s ‘soft power’.*’®
Media companies are offered inducements to adopt a pro-Communist
Party position, including ‘subsidies, cash injection, content sharing,
infrastructural, technological and resource support’.^’ Those that refuse
are subjected to an aggressive campaign to win them over or close them
down, including regular threats to advertisers and distributors of media
outlets that refuse to buckle.
James To reports that the consul general in Melbourne called Chinese
media leaders to a meeting in 2000 where he issued strong warnings
against publishing anything sympathetic to Falun Gong, the Chinese
spiritual practice suppressed by the CCP,^° Journalists who don’t toe the
party line are blacklisted from official events and pro-PRC functions.
If officials expect an anti-CCP event to be held they may stage their
own to divert attention, such as the ‘spectacular’ held at the Sydney
Opera House to coincide with the seventeenth anniversary of the
4 June Tiananmen Square massacre. When the president of the Tibetan
government-in-exile visited Canberra in August 2017, many of the seats
at his ANU event were booked out by Chinese students who then failed
to turn up, leaving the room half empty.
Independent Chinese-language media have to be particularly deter¬
mined and well resourced to resist the intense and unrelenting pressure.
Virtually none has been. The only substantial newspaper the PRC has
failed to take over or run out of business is the Falun Gong-backed
Epoch Times, now a thorn in Beijing s side and subject to frequent cyber
attacks. In the United States, journalists with The Epoch Times have been
physically attacked and had their computers destroyed.’’ It’s alleged that
41
SILENT INVASION
m 2010, CCP supporters were responsible for a drivc-by shootin
newspapers offices in Brisbane/^
gat the
Australia is now covered by a network of Chinese-languagc radio
srations that never broadcast any criticism of China and carry stories
following the party line on everything from the South China Sea to pro¬
democracy protests in Hong Kong and the Dalai Lama. The stations are
owned by a Melbourne-based company, CAMG Media Group, which is
controlled through a company owned by China Radio International and
is probably heavily subsidised by it.^^ CAMG is active in New Zealand
too, and consulate officials are even more brazen in their manipulation
of Chinese-language media.^'*
The man behind CAMG is Tommy Jiang. Jiang arrived in Australia
in 1988 (and probably benefited from Bob Hawke’s invitation to
Chinese students to stay).^^ He set up Australia’s first 24-hour Chinese
radio station, 3CW, in 1999 and built a Chinese-language media
empire, including eight newspapers and a number of radio stations.^^
Jiang has since become a prominent Chinese-Australian, receiving a
Multicultural Award for Excellence from the Victorian government
in 2007.^
Yet he maintains strong connections with the ancestral homeland.
A 2004 Xinhuanet article described an ‘Overseas Chinese Associa¬
tion’ delegation including Jiang visiting Jilin province to attend an
event organised by the United Front Work Department.^® In 2006,
he attended a gathering in Beijing of overseas Chinese media groups
to commemorate the first anniversary of China’s controversial anti¬
secession law, which mandates that if Taiwan should attempt to secede
then the mainland will go to war against it.^^ Xinhuanet reported Jiang,
together with three other Chinese-Australian representatives, declaring
that ‘they will firmly uphold the “anti-secession law”, earnestly longing
for the early unification of the Ancestral Country’.®®
In 2016, at another event for patriotic overseas Chinese titled ‘Tell
China’s story well, spread China’s voice well’. Tommy Jiang said that
to tell China’s story well one must ‘base oneself on China’s perspective.
Chinas attitude and China’s position’.®' He said that Chinese-language
media like his in Australia ‘had the resources to compete with
42
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
international media on the same platform, and should fully display
their overseas dominance’.
Some say China is just doing what other countries do in projecting
a national image abroad. Yet as John Fitzgerald notes, this is a false
equivalence: ‘The BBC doesn’t seek monopoly control of information,
it doesn’t intimidate, extort, and silence critics, and it doesn’t operate
clandestinely through deception and subterfuge.’®^ As in China, patri¬
otic media groups in Australia take their cues on what is acceptable
and what is prohibited from the official Xinhua News Agency. Some
Chinese language radio stations allow China Radio International to
vet its guests for their political acceptability. ‘In Melbourne,’ Fitzgerald
writes, ‘a CRI staff member from Beijing sits in the background on
radio talkback programs and intervenes if callers start veering in a way¬
ward political direction.’®^
Chinese-language radio in Australia and almost all Chinese-language
newspapers have their news and editorial comment written, sometimes
literally, in Beijing. An editor at one of the pro-Beijing publications
admitted that ‘almost all the Australian Chinese newspapers only
publish what the Chinese government wants them to’.®** Loyalty is
rewarded by granting patriotic media owners preferential access to
business opportunities.
Those media outlets in Australia that do not toe the party line come
under intense pressure. The consulate leans on Chinese-owned businesses
to withdraw advertising. Businesses and community organisations are
threatened if they stock noncompliant publications, including threats
to their families in China.®^ And this is true nor only of Chinese-owned
businesses. The Sofitel hotel in Sydney was pressured by the Sydney
consulate to stop supplying its guests with The Epoch Times^^
It should be said that while the supply of pro-Beijing news media
in Australia has grown, so has the demand for it among Chinese-
Australians, for whom reading newspapers often plays a larger role in
daily life than for other Australians. While some find the proliferation
propaganda in Australia galling, others welcome it as a counter¬
point to Western reporting on Chinese politics. They like to read about
Chinas rising power and its increasingly nationalistic presence around
43
SILENT INVASION
the world. Western criticism of the PRC's abuse of human right., and
aggressive stance on Taiwan annoys them.
In Australia as elsewhere, CCP propaganda spread by Chinese
language media keeps patriotic expatriates informed about Beijing’s
positions on various issues and guides their thinking and activities
University of Technology Sydney media expert Wanning Sun argues
that there is ‘little clear evidence that such “localised” propaganda has
a direct impact on Chinese-speaking audiences’,®^ yet the effect on
Australian society is to consolidate and expand the perception of a large
group of citizens whose understanding of the world is shaped in Beijing
and whose first loyalty lies with the PRC. The authorities in China
see a politically mobilised diaspora as vital to the nation’s assertion of
influence around the world.
Wanning Sun and John Fitzgerald consider what might be done to
limit Beijing’s ‘authority over Australian conversations’ on Australian
soil, which Fitzgerald calls ‘a potentially grievous challenge to Australian
sovereignty by a foreign power’.®® A legal challenge to social media
platforms that restrict free speech is possible. Sun argues that the main¬
stream media should try harder at reflecting Chinese (and other) points
ofview, but this only turns the blame away from Beijing. After all, Beijing
is in a position to pressure the mainstream media too. Fairfax Media has
derived a chunk of badly needed revenue from monthly inserts from
the China Daily. Media Watch reported that the ABC has been censor¬
ing its news in order to gain access to Chinese consumers.®^ Fitzgerald
put it bluntly; ‘the ABC has offered tacit support for China’s repressive
media strategy at home and abroad. The national broadcaster’s dealings
with China signal to the world that our commitment to values and core
interests is negotiable.
SBS is supposed to provide ‘balanced and impartial’ news to
Australias various ethnic communities. I have spoken with a number
of Chinese-Australians who say that several SBS Mandarin radio
presenters admit to being members of the Chinese Communist Party.
They complain that the station’s political position is pro-PRC, some¬
times carrying news items taken unedited from Chinese state media.
Li Weiguo, for ten years a reporter and presenter at SBS Mandarin
dio, is chairman of the Youth Committee of the leading United
44
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
Front body ACPPRC.’^' He now works as a producer at the ABCs
Radio Australia.’^
Chinese voices
Chinese-Australians opposed to Communist Party rule of China have
watclied the expanding influence of qiaowu work in this country with
dismay. I met three of them in the heart of the Sydney Chinese com¬
munity in Ashfield, at a restaurant that looked grungy from the outside
but served delicious food once we were through the door and up the
stairs. John Hu had booked a private room and we were joined by two
of his friends.
Jingping Cheng is a quietly spoken public servant who decided
to ‘come out’ by joining the protest against the Red Detachment of
Women performance. He had been the president of the Chinese
Professionals Club of Australia until a few years ago when a new group
of pro-Beijing members suddenly joined up, then proceeded to vote out
the old committee and install a new one with links to the consulate. The
consulate, he said, is always set on controlling any Chinese organisa¬
tion, and this kind of political ambush has befallen many long-standing
Chinese community groups. Few independent ones are lelt. As Jingping
put it, ‘They are using democracy to destroy democracy.’
John Zhang Xiaogang told me that he was now taking a public stand
because the Communists are ‘coming to my home’, Australia. After he
began speaking out, he was refused a visa to visit his sick mother in
China. He too confirmed what 1 had seen and heard across the com¬
munity: ‘People are afraid of the consulate.’
For a clear-eyed view of Beijing’s methods we can do no better than
listen to Anson Chan, who served as chief secretary of Hong Kong from
1993 to 2001, before and after the handover of the British territory
to China in 1997. The first ethnic Chinese to head its civil service,
she became known as the ‘Iron Lady’. She stayed on in her position
after the handover because she was confident that Beijing would respect
the independence of Hong Kong guaranteed by the ‘One China, Two
Systems’ agreement.
Over breakfast in the exclusive surroundings of the Hong Kong
Club, Anson Chan told me she had been naive to expect the CCP to
45
SILENT INVASION
allow the citizens of Hong Kong their autonomy. She described in detail
the strategies used by Beijing to infiltrate, pressure and coerce Hong
Kongs Institutions, from using money to control NGOs to suppress¬
ing dissident voices, placing sympathisers on university boards, setting
up clan associations, controlling the media and pressuring businesses,
Beijing looks upon Hong Kongers as renegades who refuse to accept
Chinas rule. And it is becoming impatient. Chan has become a thorn
in their side. She will not travel to the mainland because of the risk
of being abducted and made to disappear. The 2015 abduction and
psychological torture of five Hong Kong booksellers (one a Swedish
citizen) by Chinese state security sent shockwaves through pro¬
democracy activist circles.^^ She knows she is not safe in Hong Kong
from a regime that has no regard for human rights or the law.
But what would Anson Chan know? In 2017 John Brumby, former
Victorian premier and chairman of the Australia China Business
Council and a frequent advocate for closer ties, told Xinhuanet that
Hong Kong’s return to China has been a resounding success and there
is ‘much to celebrate’.^'*
In October 2016 Chan, with Hong Kong lawyer and fellow
pro-democracy leader Martin Lee, travelled to Australia to send us a
warning. The Chinese embassy in Canberra did not succeed in its efforts
to pressure ministers and MPs to refuse to meet them. Interviewed by
journalist Peter Hartcher, Anson Chan warned that China is infiltrating
Australia, and that Australians do not understand ‘the designs of the
one-party state’.^^ She could see how the CCP was subverting social
organisations, NGOs, the media and the government itself. It was
establishing Confucius Institutes, controlling Chinese-language media
and buying off political candidates. We should have no illusions:
China under the CCP has a ‘well-thought-through, long-term strategy
to dominate’.
After meeting Australian MPs and the foreign minister, Anson
Chan and Martin Lee travelled to New Zealand for their pre-arranged
meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Bill English,However, the night
before the meeting English cancelled it, saying it was ‘diplomatically
sensitive, code for caving in to pressure from the Chinese embassy.
New Zealand has shown itself to be more responsive to Beijing’s
46
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
demands than Australia. As far back as 2002, Auckland International
Airport gave in to pressure to remove a billboard ad paid for by Falun
Gong practitioners. And the University of Auckland cancelled a visit
by Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, only reversing the decision after a
public outcry.According to China scholar Anne-Marie Brady, China
no longer has ‘to pressure New Zealand to accept its soft power activi¬
ties and political influence. The New Zealand government has actively
courted it’.^®
The long arm of China’s law
Chinas Ministry of State Security has been caught sending agents to
Australia to intimidate suspects.^^ This violates Australian law. The
ministry also kidnaps foreigners and renders them to secret prisons
in China, as it did in 1993 with the Australian James Peng Jiandong,
who was abducted in Macau then taken to the mainland and jailed on
trumped-up charges.He had run afoul of a company linked to a niece
of Deng Xiaoping. A Hong Kong court later ruled that he was innocent
and had been robbed of $800 million.'®'
The ministry is also known to pay, or otherwise reward, triad gangs to
do its dirty work. In 2014 and again in 2017 pro-democracy protesters
in Taiwan were attacked by thugs led by the criminal ‘White Wolf’,
variously described as a ‘notorious gangster’ and ‘a tool of China’s united
front policy’.'®^ The CCP has a long history of links with criminal gangs.
Deng Xiaoping once said that some triad gangs are patriotic, while
another senior official called for the CCP to join forces with them.'®^
The South China Morning Post used to carry reports of the CCP’s use
of criminals for political purposes in Hong Kong. James To notes that
PRC diplomats are said to cultivate links with criminals to spy on and
infiltrate community groups.'®^ Triads are well established in Australia
but there is no evidence they have links to the Chinese consulates.
The CCP adopts a cynical attitude towards international law—use
it when convenient, ignore it or denounce it otherwise. Adopting the
former approach, in 2017 Beijing asked Interpol to issue a red notice
against the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who, after taking refuge in
the United States, made sensational claims of corruption reaching high
into the Politburo. The Interpol notice, which allows law enforcement
47
SILENT INVASION
bodies to cooperate, was issued three days after r • ,
reported in The New York Timer. But Intlpol’s in«
diately raised suspicions because in November 2016Thr °"'
Interpol president had been filled for the first time by a Ch
officid Meng Hongwei. formerly vice-minister
one observer put it, Interpol ‘is in danger of becoming an exteZJ
die increasingly long reach of the Chinese state ... [a means to] extend
Its inHuence over unruly citizens abroad’.
Despite the reassurances of those pushing for it. the ratification of
Australia’s extradition treaty with China would extend that long reach
into this country. In 2017 the government’s mishandling of the plan to
ratify the extradition treaty revealed some of the fault lines in the larger
Australian debate. The treaty was signed by the Howard government in
2007 and lay on the table until the Turnbull cabinet decided in March
2017 to put it to parliament for ratification (or, technically, for possible
disallowal). It was intended as a sign of good faith to the visiting PRC
premier, Li Keqiang. Two weeks earlier, I had asked a senior official
why the government was pushing for ratification and he replied that he
didnt know why Australia had agreed to such a treaty in the first place
but we should ratify it ‘because it’s there’. It was a piece of housekeep¬
ing. Besides, an Australian attorney-general would not be obliged to
agree to any extradition request, so plenty of safeguards would remain.
The foreign minister, Julie Bishop, assumed it would cruise through
parliament, and was annoyed when right-wing senator Cory Bernardi,
whod recently left the Liberal Party to form his own conservative party,
moved a disallowance motion. After testing views in caucus, the Labor
leadership decided it would back the Bernardi resolution. The Greens
and other independents agreed. Their stance drew on advice from
the Law Council of Australia, which noted that China’s legal system,
always subject to political interference and corruption, was becoming
worse.More alarming for the government, some of its own members
had indicated they would cross the floor to oppose ratification. Tony
Abbott, who as prime minister had decided not to pursue ratification,
was one of them.
Acutely embarrassed with Premier Li in the country, the govern-
nt faced defeat and withdrew the treaty. It was duly castigated by the
48
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
Chinese ambassador. Julie Bishop promised to keep trying. But Chinas
case was seriously dented when, as Lis visit began, security officials
in China refused to allow a visiting academic from the University of
Technology Sydney, Feng Chongyi, to leave China. Associate Professor
Feng, an Australian permanent resident with a wife and daughter hold¬
ing Australian citizenship, had written articles critical of the growing
influence of China in Australia. When he was allowed to return home,
after two weeks of interrogation, he declared that ratifying the treaty
would be a ‘fatal mistake’.It would encourage the Chinese state to
invent charges to get their hands on dissidents in Australia.
Left and right of the political spectrum agree that China’s legal system is
not independent but a tool of the state. Justice cannot be assured, torture
is not uncommon and judges are often bribed or instructed on their
verdicts. In China’s court system the conviction rate is ninety-nine per
cent. (It’s around eighty-seven per cent in Australian criminal courts.'®**)
China’s Supreme Court has rejected the principle of independence of
the courts from the political system as ‘erroneous western thought’.'®®
The courts have imprisoned tens of thousands of Chinese people for the
meditation practice of Falun Gong. In prison many have been drugged
and had their vital organs surgically removed for sale to Chinese hospi¬
tals with wealthy patients needing transplants."® After hearing evidence
from some campaigners and victims in 2013, the Australian Senate
passed a resolution condemning human organ harvesting. In 2016 it
was reported that Queensland’s rwo major organ transplant hospitals
were refusing to train Chinese surgeons because of organ harvesting in
their homeland.'''
Most China apologists and appeasers sit in the soft centre of
Australian politics. ^Although prone to be dazzled by the economic
promise, the right is more consistent in its scepticism towards China.
The right has alwa)^ held a knee-jerk hostility to anything that has the
word ‘communist’ attached to it. .Although it’s hard to identify anything
collectivist in post-Deng China, the right’s belief that communism
is inherently chctatorial and oppressive receives plenty' of vindication
49
SILENT INVASION
from modern-day China, which has refined the Leninist party-state
beyond anydiing achieved in the Soviet Union, and even more so under
Xi Jinping.
Some on the left retain a romantic attachment to the idea of the
Chinese Revolution, despite the horrors of Maoist excess, not to
mention the fierce repression of 1989 that continues to this day. This
attachment spills over into an unexamined sympathy for the post-Mao
regimes. One of the more unrepentant is journalist and film-maker
John Pilger in his 2016 film The Coming War on China, which paints
China as an innocent victim of American aggression. That may have
been an accurate characterisation thirty or forty years ago, but in the last
twenty years the United States has worked hard at facilitating Chinas
rise through integration into the global economic system, including its
membership of the World Trade Organization. Pilger even repeats the
CCP line that economic progress trumps abuses of human rights.”^
The kind of strident anti-Americanism that many shared in the 1970s
and 1980s now does nothing more than provide cover for the PRC’s
bullying of its neighbours and extending its new form of imperialism in
places like Africa.
The ratification fiasco revealed the hypersensitivity of Australia’s elites
to the Mao-style hysterics that issue from the Chinese government and
media whenever it does not get its way. As journalist Fleur Anderson
observed, although they adopted different views on ratification, both
the current Coalition government and Labor ‘were at pains to avoid
explicitly referencing concerns about China’s legal system in order to
avoid any possible breakdown in diplomatic relations’."^ Curiously,
a 2014 briefing paper from the prime minister’s department advised
against ratification partly on the grounds that raising the issue would
prompt critical commentary from Australians concerned about China’s
legal system, reproaches that would upset Beijing."*^
This dont talk about the war’ attitude has underpinned the relation¬
ship, keeping it on the safe terrain of mutual economic interests. Our
politicians claim that they have ‘robust’ exchanges with the Chinese, but
50
QIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
in truth the manufactured tantrums and appeals to ‘the hurt feelings of
the Chinese people’ have mostly cowed them into silence on all issues
involving human rights abuses and the outrageous incursions of the
Chinese party-state into our society. When dissident writer Liu Xiaobo
died in a Chinese prison hospital, the censors launched a blitz against
any expression of grief or anger, even using image recognition software
to block drawings of empty chairs like the one at Lius Nobel Prize
award ceremony in 2010. There was no need to censor the Australian
government’s tepid reaction because it had censored itself, speaking
out only after his death and then merely to express regret. Of course,
this restraint and respect for national feelings is not reciprocated, with
party-controlled media frequently loosing volleys of harsh criticism and
abuse directed at our government and the moral faults of Australian
people in general.
An extradition treaty would be for China just another means of
exerting pressure on Australia. Each time the attorney-general con¬
sidered refusing a request, he or she would be assailed with Chinese
histrionics and economic threats. Beijing sympathisers in the Australian
business community would be mobilised to pressure the government
to hand over whoever Beijing wanted, including political critics facing
trumped-up charges and automatic jail sentences.
In fact, China already has its own means of repatriating those
it wants. It has methods of encouraging people to return to China
‘voluntarily’. The Chinese police speak of their ‘persuasion work’, with
one saying: ‘A fugitive is like a kite, the body is overseas but the thread is
inside China. Through family and friends, we can always find them.’"^
In 2015, Chinese police blindsided Australian authorities by arriving
unannounced and unlawfully to persuade Dong Feng, a bus driver
and Falun Gong practitioner, to return to China to face embezzlement
charges. It was reported that his elderly parents in China were being
pressured by the authorities."^
In 2016, Australian permanent resident and grandmother Zhou
Shiqin was charged with corruption by a Dalian court. She strongly
disputed the charges, claiming they were a tactic in a political quarrel;
in Chinese business disputes it’s not uncommon for a rival to bribe
a judge to issue an arrest warrant. But after Zhou’s sister’s assets
51
SILENT INVASION
in China were frozen and her own face was splashed across Chinet^
media as a criminal, the psychological pressure on her became ‘cxtraf>r
dinary’, according to her lawyer, and she went back to China.
Philip Wen observed, the ‘case underlines the pervasive pressure tactics
employed by Chinese authorities outside the bounds of bilateral lav/
enforcement cooperation’."*
‘They can do anything. They don’t care.’
Is it any wonder that Australian politicians of conscience, on the left
and the right, had grave misgivings about signing an extradition treaty
with the PRC? These misgivings can only deepen with the passage in
July 2017 of China’s new National Intelligence Law. Although typi-
cally vague in its wording, wrote Beijing correspondent Rowan Callick,
it indicates that Chinese intelligence operations in Australia will be
legally authorised."^ While it’s well known that state-owned enterprises
operating abroad have party committees, the new law imposes an
obligation on those companies to provide cover posts for spies. ^ The
legislation calls on all Chinese people to work with the nations intel¬
ligence services. Since the PRC regards all people of Chinese heritage to
be ‘Chinese’, no matter what their passports say, it raises the possibility
that Chinese-Australians will be expected to assist Beijings spying here.
In modern times no group in China has been more severely and
tirelessly persecuted than Falun Gong. For outsiders it is strange that a
loose organisation promoting a spiritual practice, one based firmly on
traditional Chinese qi gong (the slow-flowing moving meditation) and
with no political aims, should have provoked such a ruthless crackdown.
But CCP leaders felt threatened by a movement with more members
than the party and attracting greater devotion, and so in 1999 declared
it illegal. To pursue practitioners who have fled the country, the Central
Committee of the CCP established the 610 Office to coordinate the
persecution. This includes monitoring their activities, confiscating their
passports, destroying their families’ businesses in China, pressuring
news outlets not to report on them, and phoning local, state and federal
politicians to strong-arm them into withdrawing any kind of support
for Falun Gong.'^' Chinese students abroad are pressed to stage rowdy
protests against the ‘evil cult’.
52
1 1 H i ,
OIAOWU AND THE CHINESE DIASPORA
The embassy in Canberra actively works to suppress free speech in
Australia when that speech makes for uncomfortable listening. Reacting
to pressure, in 2002 foreign minister Alexander Downer forced Falun
Gong practitioners to scale back their long-running peaceful protest
outside the Chinese embassy. Beijing’s campaign has been effective,
suppressing the voice of Falun Gong in Australia and marginalising it
from public discourse. In the meantime, the continued inflow of pro-
Beijing migrants from China swells the ranks of overseas Chinese that
the embassy can rely on to come out in support when called upon.
In summing up his meticulous study of qiaowu work, James To
warns that the growing populations of overseas Chinese in Australia,
New Zealand and elsewhere serve as a financial and skilled resource,
and increasingly, as a ready supply of soft power to advance or sup¬
port Beijing’s outreach throughout the world’.The overseas Chinese
‘have the potential to become politicized and mobilized as a highly
coordinated ethno-nationalist force with transnational loyalties to
influence political, economic, diplomatic, and military outcomes’.
The Bennelong by-election in December 2017 saw Beijing pulling
the various levers at its disposal in order to defeat the sitting Liberal
Party member John Alexander. It was a way of punishing the Turnbull
government for introducing new foreign interference laws. If Labor’s
high-profile candidate Kristina Keneally were to win, the govern¬
ment would lose its majority in the House of Representatives, so the
by-election became a focus for intense United Front activity. Bennelong,
on Sydney’s north shore, is especially well suited to CCP operations
because it is the electorate with the highest percentage of ethnically
Chinese residents, some twenty per cent. And they tend to be more
recent arrivals, and therefore more pro-Beijing.
The levers included mobilising Chinese-language media (traditional
and social) to launch a virulent attack on the government for its ‘racist’
and ‘anti-China’ stance.A 1700-word anonymous letter, widely
circulated on Mandarin social media, described the Liberal Party as
being against China, against Chinese, against ethnic-Chinese migrants
and against Chinese international students’, calling on ‘we Chinese to
take down this far-right Liberal Party ruling party’.'^5 (The letter was
circulated by a United Front operative and may have been composed by
53
SILENT INVASION
the Sydney consulate.) The ‘anti-China message gained traction, lead-
ing the Labor Party to sing the CCP s tune by accusing the government
of ‘China-phobia’. On election day, in the suburbs with the highest
ethnic Chinese vote the swing to Labor was over ten per cent, although
Alexander retained the seat.'^*’
No one is more alarmed by these developments than those Chinese-
Australians who are loyal first and foremost to Australia. When I met
with dissident writer Qi Jiazhen in Melbourne, her friend told me
that wherever you go the party wants to control you. ‘They can do
anything. They don’t care ... You never have peace.’ His blunt message
to his fellow Chinese-Australians is this: ‘You chose this place as your
home. If you go out and protest and support the Communist Party then
Australia should send you back to China.’
Professor John Fitzgerald, often named as the most authoritative
expert on China in Australia, writes that the Chinese party-state is
‘massive, capable, authoritarian, indifferent to the rights of individuals,
resentfiil of the liberal West, jealous of its own standing, and here to
stay’.'^^ For a quiet and thoughtful academic, Fitzgerald has lately been
ringing the alarm bells loudly. ‘Beijing seeks to penetrate and influ¬
ence Australia’s small, open and inclusive society,’ he writes. ‘It seeks to
restrict Australia’s freedoms of speech, religion and assembly. It threatens
social harmony. Where it succeeds, it breaches Australian sovereignty
and security’.'^®
When I met him one morning in a hot and crowded cafe in one of
Melbourne’s famous lanes, it was as if his life’s work now had to be put
to a much larger use than advancing China scholarship. He had warned
of the silencing effect of Beijing’s propaganda and security systems
which ‘have migrated and settled comfortably in Australia. When I
left the laneway I felt fearful, afraid for Australias future being stolen
from us by an overwhelmingly powerful force. And, if I m honest, I
felt nervous about my own future, given the reach and ruthlessness of
China’s security apparatus.
54
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