Chinese tyranny ever more pissed at Australian democracy

Business Insider kowtowed to China yesterday:

Recent media articles and comments by Australian politicians are starting to rub the Chinese the wrong way.

Just ask David Thomas, founder and President of the Australia China SME Association.

On a recent business trip to China, Thomas was acutely aware of a change in the way his Chinese counterparts spoke about Australia.

“China is becoming seriously concerned by Australia’s negative attitude towards it, he said.

“I have just completed a one week business visit to China and have never before heard such negative comments about Australia’s politicians, media and government.”

…“The (Chinese) view was that it’s not too late for Australia to turn this around. But there needs to be a change of attitude in Australia (government and media) to avoid it getting any worse,” he said.

“Chinese media is controlled by Government so there is often a perception that, when stories gets written in the Australian media it reflects the views of the Government, which of course isn’t true. But that can be the perception.”

Thomas suggests more appreciation should be put towards Chinese trading partners, or Australia could risk economic disaster.

“Whether people understand it or not, China is our biggest export partner,” he says, and as “China’s middle class [grows]… they are spending money on quality goods and services and they like Australian products because we have a good reputation for producing clean, ethical high quality goods and services.

“Everywhere across China, our goods are being sold in shops and online.

“So many Australian businesses are exporting to China. Food, beverages, health and wellness, beauty products, the list goes on.

“Our export market to China is creating jobs, economic growth and prosperity for our country. Every household across Australia benefits from our exports to China. Quite frankly, without our investment and trading relationship with China, Australia would be in serious trouble.

“Many people don’t realise that our education is our third largest export (after iron ore and coal) and our universities depend on foreign students to survive.

“Chinese students currently make up the largest group of international students in Australia and are currently standing at a record level of 160,000 this year. But all I hear are complaints, ranging from spying to clogging up our transport system.

“It’s getting out of control.”

In a word: bollocks. A riotous democratic debate is long overdue. We’ve spent fifteen years kissing arse on the prospect of China liberalising yet it has gone the other way. If it wants to become a straight-up dictatorship then bully for it. We don’t need to follow it.

It wasn’t Australia that kicked off the recent round of ructions, it was China’s soft power push into our politics. To wit, BI is not entirely filled with Chinese brain-scanner apologists. Another story told the truth of it:

While some of China’s covert actions have been difficult to pinpoint publicly, Maree Ma, the general manager of Australia’s Vision Times Media, recently described how the Chinese government is successfully interfering with the operations of Australian media companies.

Speaking at an event at the Lowy Institute attended by Business Insider, Ma said Chinese-language media in Australia faces unique pressures that other ethnic media don’t. She then described one incident which illustrated how China is trying to silence independent Chinese-language news in Australia.

“We have a migration agent who has an office both here in Australia and also in Beijing. He is actually very close to us, he’s been doing ads with us for quite a few years,” Ma said.

“But since he’s had his Beijing office – a couple of weeks before he pulled his ad contract from our newspaper – the Chinese State [Security] bureau was actually camping in his office for about two weeks, constantly harassing him to the point where he couldn’t really do much work.”

After describing the “pressures” he was facing from China’s intelligence and security agency, the advertiser then pulled his ads “in our paper in Australia, all the way in Australia,” Ma said.

Ma, who recently made a closed submission to the federal government with more examples of foreign interference, also described how advertisers based in Australia have been targeted.

“Some of our advertisers have been pulled into the Chinese consulate, I won’t say which one, but [one advertiser] was grilled for three hours for a ‘tea chat.’ She was told not to tell anyone,” Ma said.

Such actions by China’s government appear to be a means of intimidating and cutting financial support for independent journalism, in the hope enough advertisers boycott a publication, forcing it to either close or accept state funding and editorial input.

Tensions between Australia and China are long overdue. For years we’ve been sailing blindly into its sphere of influence and now, suddenly, we’re waking up. It’s a magnificent debate that should rise in volume and breadth until we settle, as a nation, on a much more considered course than hitherto’s grasping for trade riches.

My own contribution is straight forward. China is not what we hoped it would become when we took the trade handshake a dozen years ago. It is not liberalising. It is going to other way, into dictatorship. Yet it is still growing in eminence and power projection, so we are forced to construct a new way to deal with it.

China sees its role in the world as manifest destiny with a total claim over the ethnic Chinese imagination without borders. It must therefore be dealt with equally comprehensively. Our response should have three dimensions to it. The astute among you will see that these three steps actually work hand-in-glove with one another.

First, our economy must seek balance. To achieve that we will need a raft of new policies that aim to improve Australian competitiveness and get us out from under the commodity dependence. This is necessary anyway as China slows and changes and wants less dirt. We must reform energy, banking, and real estate to lower the currency, boost productivity and move from urbanisation growth drivers to tradables.

Second, we must engage strategically and diplomatically across our entire region. ASEAN is a natural partner to hedge Chinese influence. The Quadrilateral is also useful in bringing together allies. The US alliance must be constantly tended and revitalised. The Pacific must be treated as the good friend and partner that it is with significant aid and bilateral economic exchange, not the usual afterthought.

Third, Australian politics and society must be prepared and shielded to contain excessive Chinese Communist Party influence. This can easily be achieved via bans on foreign (or all) donations to political parties and the introduction of a federal ICAC. Society, too, is easy enough to protect if we have the will. There is no need, nor desire, for discrimination. We simply cut the permanent migration intake in half. It needs to be done anyway to take pressure off the east coast crush-loading. We should eschew both the cultural chauvinists of the Coalition and the “Asianising” influences within Labor. We are a multicultural democracy with liberal Anglophone roots. Let’s accept and protect it.

Thus, the state of affairs between Australia and China as they are is naturally one of tension. That doesn’t mean we can’t be pragmatic and friendly trading partners. Of course we can. But the period of calm we’ve enjoyed for a decade was a paid-for illusion during which we took the bribe and pretended it wouldn’t come with costs. It does. It jeopardises our democracy. It is finished. Let’s not bring it back.

Instead, let’s deal with things as they are so we don’t wake in fright one day to find the myriad children of the Lucky Country are born into something altogether less young and free.