Here’s your kid future if current trajectories hold for Australia, via The Guardian:
Two Hong Kong independence activists who were stripped of their status as lawmakers in 2016 were sentenced to four weeks in prison on Monday for their role in a fracas that disrupted proceedings in the city’s legislative council.
Baggio Leung and Yau Wai-ching belong to Hong Kong’s embattled independence movement, which is calling for a complete split from China for the semi-autonomous city as its freedoms come under threat from Beijing.
The pair were told they had “directly hurt the dignity of the legislative council” by judge Wong Sze-lai, who went on to grant them bail pending appeal.
They were held in custody after the sentencing while the court awaited their bail money.
Calls for Hong Kong to split from China have incensed Beijing and the past two years have seen a crackdown on any expression of pro-independence views.
Yau, 27, and Leung, 31, are the latest activists to be given jail terms on protest-related charges.
Let’s consider what Australia will be like under the Chinese dictator if we proceed down our current kowtowing course of mass immigration and mushrooming Chinese economic dependence.
A Chinese accession of Australia
We give in and welcome Chinese hegemony as Hugh White suggests. There are two working models we can look at to see how things would change. The New York Times recently ran a profile of the first, the Uighurs of Western China:
Imagine that this is your daily life: While on your way to work or on an errand, every 100 meters you pass a police blockhouse. Video cameras on street corners and lamp posts recognize your face and track your movements. At multiple checkpoints, police officers scan your ID card, your irises and the contents of your phone. At the supermarket or the bank, you are scanned again, your bags are X-rayed and an officer runs a wand over your body — at least if you are from the wrong ethnic group. Members of the main group are usually waved through.
You have had to complete a survey about your ethnicity, your religious practices and your “cultural level”; about whether you have a passport, relatives or acquaintances abroad, and whether you know anyone who has ever been arrested or is a member of what the state calls a “special population.”
This personal information, along with your biometric data, resides in a database tied to your ID number. The system crunches all of this into a composite score that ranks you as “safe,” “normal” or “unsafe.”Based on those categories, you may or may not be allowed to visit a museum, pass through certain neighborhoods, go to the mall, check into a hotel, rent an apartment, apply for a job or buy a train ticket. Or you may be detained to undergo re-education, like many thousands of other people.
A science-fiction dystopia? No. This is life in northwestern China today if you are Uighur.
The Uighur live within today’s Chinese borders so they represent a different level of threat to the Chinese Communist Party. But the difference between internal and external Chinese repression is only a matter of priority. China is not some benevolent, peace-loving nation. It is a bald-faced autocracy that imprisons or corrupts anyone deemed hazardous to the national interests crafted by the autocrat.
This plays out differently in our second model, that of Hong Kong, via Reuters:
As China tightens its grip on Hong Kong, pro-democracy parties have been hit by the sidelining of key leaders and have been losing ground to a well-organized pro-Beijing camp.
Those troubles hit home last month, when the democrats suffered an electoral setback in a key legislative by-election, winning only two of three seats they were expected to take easily.
Critically, many supporters stayed home – and some switched sides to protest what they said were the confrontational tactics of pro-democracy groups.
“The opposition always argues for the sake of argument,” said one democracy supporter who gave her name as Feng. In frustration, she cast her ballot for a pro-Beijing candidate in the March 11 elections.
“Confronting Beijing directly is not a good strategy,” the 44-year-old government contractor said. “You have to go about it in softer ways.” She said she did not want her full name published because she works for the government.
That sort of shift by voters like Feng is worrying leaders of pro-democracy parties in Hong Kong who fear an eroding public mandate, which they see as their sole weapon to counter Beijing’s influence in the city.
“We have to make sure that our own people here in Hong Kong do not give up on us,” said Alvin Yeung, a barrister and head of the pro-democracy Civic Party.
Over the past decade, resentment has deepened toward China’s perceived growing encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy.
In 2014, protests by pro-democrats calling for a greater say in how Hong Kong’s leader was chosen engulfed large areas of the city for months. The collapse of those protests led to growing calls among young activists for independence.
The Chinese government has responded with an increasingly tougher line.
In 2016, it intervened in a Hong Kong court decision that removed pro-independence lawmakers from office for taking their oaths improperly – the action that led to the March by-elections. It has also deemed a Hong Kong train station to be under mainland authority.
On Tuesday, dozens of pro-Beijing groups took out advertisements in Hong Kong newspapers calling for the dismissal of a University of Hong Kong academic, Benny Tai, after he allegedly made comments advocating independence for China.
The growing reach of China’s security apparatus is also worrying many in Hong Kong after instances like the 2015 disappearance of several Hong Kong booksellers who later showed up in Chinese custody, as well as the mysterious disappearance of a mainland Chinese tycoon from a luxury hotel in 2017.
Hong Kong authorities, meanwhile, have proposed jail terms of up to three years for those mocking China’s national anthem, and there have been calls from pro-Beijing politicians for national security laws outlawing subversive acts against China.
The authorities have also started jailing protest leaders like Joshua Wong, a 21-year-old student.
So, neither option looks altogether appealing. Still, if we went the way of HK and steered ourselves directly under Xi Jinping’s skirts I expect that we’d see the following:
- Chinese soft power would dominate Canberra. There’s be no official takeover because there is no need. China bribes and trade coercion would be enough to control the parties. Elections would continue but Beijing would determine the outcome in advance to ensure no resuscitation of Anglophone allegiances.
- Slowly but surely the media would be corralled as a Chinese Communist Party propaganda unit. At first by takeovers and joint ventures. Eventually a new licencing regime would be introduced to limit views. The ABC would play a major role promoting the CCP. New media would be shut down. Some agitators for freedom may even quietly disappear for re-education. A show trial or two may be needed to make the point.
- ANZUS would die and US marines shifted out of Darwin. Pine Gap would be converted to a Chinese operation and Australia withdraw from the “five eyes” intelligence network. Chinese military bases would open in WA (to police the commodities trade) and in NSW (as a kind of permanent gun to Canberra’s head) to rapturous local applause. Or, perhaps, Chinese aircraft carriers would simply frequent both coast lines.
- There might be a national service obligation in the Australian Liberation Army to brainwash youth and inculcate obedience. All armed services will be retooled for integration with Chinese tech. It’s that or they would effectively be disbanded.
- Mass immigration of ethnic Chinese would be dramatically expanded to Sinofy the identity over time. Chinese joint ventures would mushroom across the economy. Universities especially would become promotional units of Chinese hegemony.
- There’d be no obvious presence of Chinese policing but advanced surveillance techniques would be deployed across all cities to ensure trouble-makers were spotted early for re-education by Vichy-styled Australian officials. There’s probably no need for gulags Downunder. That may upset the locals. But if a few get restive you never know. There’s always a bit of forced work in the Pilbara mines as an option.
- Above all else, the Chinese Communist Party would infiltrate and dominate and divide everything until there were two classes of people. Those in it and those not.
We’d remain rich and fat as Chinese dollars flowed Downunder, eventually becoming a kind of distant marsupial theme park for Chinese seeking a little more freedom than that available on the mainland. Perhaps an outlying haven for gay Chinese who want to escape conversion therapy. A kind of socially liberal ‘Hong Kong on the beach’.
On the whole life would not too bad so long as long as you kowtow to the Beijing line, are happy for the Chinese Embassy to approve or disapprove your overseas travel, and don’t mind as your culture and history are air-brushed into oblivion.
Declare neutrality
This is kind of what we have been doing in-formerly until recently. Quietly pretending we care about the US alliance while taking the big payoff from China. To formalise it would be an interesting experiment. We’d need to quit ANZUS and build our own freestanding military, including going nuclear. Otherwise it would all be a bit of a joke.
From that position of mutually assured destruction we might be able to address issues based upon the relative merit as they pertain to either of our great and powerful friends.
However, I think it unlikely we could sustain this for long. A country needs a strong sense of moral vision to be neutral. We’re an easily corrupted people with a culture that skips between comedic self-hatred and psychopathy, best captured in the lovable “larrikin” motif.
We’d likely get bought off inside a week, leading to Chinese dominance anyway. Although the US might consider as invasion it probably wouldn’t bother, simply drawing a red-line across the central Pacific at Hawaii.
Fight for the Australia we have
There are three points to this fight.
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.
The defence will cost us some China trade. But over time we can deal with that.
Petition the US to become its 51st state (or fifteenth territory)
That doesn’t seem to be a terrible idea given the array of choices but they may not want us. Not least because we’ll add to their national debt burden. We’d slowly absorb many of their problems too. But at least the culture would be congruent and we’d be free with certain military protection.
That is until one day POTUS declares war on China and our youth is drafted into the Marines to fight it!
