Characteristically, his case is light on evidence. In fact, he hasn’t cited a single thing that I have written.

I will happily set my record as a critic of Beijing’s policies alongside Hamilton’s. As a historian of Xinjiang, I write and talk on the crisis there regularly, and my forthcoming book engages much more seriously with the repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong than either of his two works.

Hamilton might not be a racist bigot, but I have always held that his exaggerated “silent invasion” narrative was likely to generate suspicion and racist hostility towards Chinese Australians. His paranoia, let us remember, extends as far as ethnically Chinese janitors at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

A rise in anti-Chinese racism has now come to pass, and Hamilton wants to duck any accountability for his role. As he sees it, this has been “triggered largely by COVID-19”.

That will be news to Asian Australians who face relentless accusations of spying for Beijing when they enter public life. But even to say that racism has been “triggered” by COVID-19 is evasive. Can this “triggering” really be so easily divorced from the hunt for CCP “links” that Hamilton has long engaged in, or dubious theories like the Wuhan “lab-leak” that he has indulged on Sky News?

When a man stood outside the People’s Republic of China consulate in Sydney, cracking a whip and yelling “You fucking knew about it, it’s your plan” at those lining up, was this to do with COVID-19, or a view of Chinese people as all in some way tied to the CCP? Clearly, it was a toxic mix of both.

Maintaining his denials, Hamilton makes a predictable move to absolve himself of any taint of racism: there are Chinese Australians who share his views.

He is right about this. He is quite wrong, though, when he claims that I “obliterate the wide political, economic, cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences within the diasporic community in Australia”.

Among critics of the CCP in the Chinese diaspora, there are a diversity of views: there are leftists, there are liberals and then there are those who have taken a sharp rightward turn in the age of Donald Trump.

It is Hamilton who is obliterating difference here, by presenting one particular circle of dissidents — those who support him — as the sole authentic voice of opposition to the CCP.

Hamilton claims I am “silent” on these particular Chinese Australians. On the contrary, I discussed them in my review of Silent Invasion. There, I said that Hamilton’s allies in the Australian Values Alliance (AVA) espouse “a love-it-or-leave-it brand of Australian patriotism, which, predictably enough, leads in the direction of apologies for Australian racism”. I stand by that.

A staunch supporter of Trump, AVA President Feng Chongyi recently held a conference in Canberra where he hailed Trump’s sabre-rattling secretary of state Mike Pompeo as pointing the way forward on China.

Hamilton spoke alongside Liberal Senator Eric Abetz, notorious for his McCarthyist grilling of Chinese Australians (which the AVA praised), as well as Liberal National Party MP George Christensen, possibly the most bigoted parliamentarian in the country.

Railing against “ideological purity,” Hamilton feigns ignorance of any choices for the left here, urging us to simply join him on his hawkish bandwagon.

But while support for United States militarism from a section of the Chinese diaspora might be understandable, it is not something that progressives can invoke as an alibi for their own rightward lurch.

From the very beginning, Hamilton’s stance on China has led him to make common cause with the hard right. Witness, for example, his chummy 2018 conversation on the “loyalties” of Chinese Australians with right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt, a man who counts the number of Chinese-born people in Australia to warn that “immigration is becoming colonisation”.

Hamilton’s own rhetoric, sad to say, has not been much different. When a business association in Fujian Province held an information session on study and migration opportunities in the Northern Territory, he rang the alarm bell: “Beijing is encouraging migration to northern Australia to populate it with people who’ll promote [the] CCP’s strategic power program of One Belt, One Road.”

Was this flight of old-school yellow peril “triggered” by COVID-19?

In responding to China, Hamilton exhibits a familiar modus operandi: identify a problem; push for punitive solutions that empower the Australian state; and throw principles to the wind in seeking allies.

Think back to his campaign against pornography, in which he advocated internet censorship and collaborated with the Australian Christian Lobby and anti-abortion activists. His proposal to filter the web reflected the same authoritarian mindset that we see today in his call, for example, to deny residency to any Chinese student who is identified as actively pro-Beijing.

It’s not Roche and I, but Hamilton who is abandoning “basic principles that progressives have always defended”. The course he is advocating will not do anything to defend democratic rights in Australia, nor will it help anyone in China. We are hardly going to be in a position to oppose Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minorities as a subversive fifth column if we are doing the same thing to Chinese Australians.

What we need is an internationalist alternative that combines solidarity with victims of repression in China with opposition to racism and warmongering at home.

I am sure Hamilton will scoff at that. The rest of us should just get on with it.

The article was originally published on Green Left on 9 March 2021.

The post For anti-racism and international solidarity appeared first on The China Story.

The Australia-China convergence on national security

When Bill Birtles and Mike Smith made their dramatic exit from China last week, the news cycle had 24 hours to tell a familiar story, of Beijing’s paranoia and intolerance of foreign scrutiny. When news broke of the June 26 raids on four Chinese journalists, and the August termination of two Chinese academics’ visas, some pundits were visibly uncomfortable at having to complicate this narrative of Australian victimhood. The protestations that there was no comparison between China’s actions and our own only betrayed an anxiety that there was.

In the sensitive field of Xinjiang studies in which I work, I’ve seen colleagues who are critical of China lose their visas to the country. It’s a practice we all abhor. It’s worth noting, though, that when China applies its bans, it’s usually not solely on the basis of what someone has written or said, but on suspicions that they’re linked in some way to nefarious foreign state efforts to interfere in Chinese politics. This is precisely the treatment that has just been meted out to PRC scholars Chen Hong and Li Jianjun.

Much of the commentary so far has held back from directly criticising Australia’s security agencies, instead calling on them to explain their actions. This strikes me as overly optimistic. Since 2017, ASIO has been reciting the mantra that Australia faces “unprecedented levels of foreign interference,” without ever having satisfactorily justified this claim.

In this case, furthermore, there may well be no more information to give. There is no defined standard of evidence for the Home Affairs Minister to cancel someone’s visa on character grounds. All that is required is for Peter Dutton to believe that an individual poses a risk. 

We know this thanks to the case of Huang Xiangmo, who was kicked out of Australia in 2019, not on the basis of any infringement of Australia’s laws, but on the grounds that he might commit such violations in future. He was punished, that is to say, on pre-emptive grounds.

Huang Xiangmo may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But as Noam Chomsky has written recently regarding Julian Assange, “[w]hen setting a gravely dangerous precedent, governments don’t typically persecute the most beloved individuals in the world.” An ability to distinguish questions of procedural fairness from whether we like someone or not is an important principle in a democratic society. In dispatching Huang, we threw it out the window.

That scalp has emboldened the security agencies to go after more reputable figures like Chen Hong. A scholar of Australian literature, he has spent much of his life promoting Australian studies in China, and has assisted many of my colleagues in their work. 

He has also been publicly critical of Australia’s post-2017 hawkish turn against China, and it’s hard to avoid the perception that this commentary is what put him on ASIO’s radar. 

Lest anyone doubt that someone’s take on Australia-China relations might be a factor here, witness Peter Dutton’s comments on ABC Insiders on Sunday, responding to a question on the raided Chinese journalists: “If people are here as journalists, and they’re reporting fairly on the news, then that’s fine. But if they’re here providing a slanted view to a particular community, then we have concern with that.”

The foreign interference laws and civil liberties

Of course, the security agencies have a mandate for their actions. As in the case of the Australian Federal Police’s raid on the offices of the ABC last year, there are laws on the books to permit their dawn home invasion of Chinese journalists in Sydney, as well as the scrapping of Chen and Li’s visas. 

The fact that the ABC case involved Australian citizens, while these involve foreigners, should not prevent us from asking the same basic question of them: are we comfortable with the powers that these agencies have acquired?

When the 2018 Foreign Interference laws were introduced, critics, including myself, said that they were a threat to civil liberties. They rely on vague terms like “collaboration” with a foreign principal, and define national security so broadly as to include Australia’s “political, military or economic relations with another country.” A lot of very ordinary forms of political discussion and exchange between Australian citizens and foreigners—in this case, it would seem, membership of a private WeChat group—could serve as grounds for intrusive enforcement actions.

The risk is, having introduced these laws, such actions become necessary to justify them. Defenders of the legislation have been calling for more raids for some time. Meanwhile, a bill currently before parliament will extend ASIO’s compulsory questioning powers from terrorism investigations to cases of “foreign interference.” Left unchecked, today’s China panic will drive an expansion of the Australian security state in just the same way that 9/11 and the War on Terror did in the 2000s.

Reinstate the visas

In the midst of this tit-for-tat deterioration of Australia-China relations, it can become hard to see the wood for the trees. The roots of this crisis, I believe, lie in Australia’s determination to support America in upholding its flagging position in Asia. That objective has only become more explicit in 2020: in the fanfare surrounding Morrison’s multi-billion-dollar arms purchases, for example, or in July’s AUSMIN meeting, which is said to have resulted in a “secret defence plan with [the] US to counter China.”

The tip-off that gave The Sydney Morning Herald a front-row seat to the raid on Shaoquett Moselmane shows the politicking at play in these actions. The outcome of such raids is secondary to the effect they have in advancing a politics of fear. This is directed domestically, to heighten public animosity towards China, but also internationally, to show America that we’re willing to keep pace with its own draconian measures. Last week, Homeland Security revoked the visas of more than a thousand Chinese students studying in the US. 

Worryingly, it is not only the security agencies who now practise the politics of fear. DFAT Secretary Frances Adamson was quoted in The Australian on Friday in terms indistinguishable from ASIO’s hyperbole: “The institutions we take for granted—our parliament, our democracy, our legal system, our freedom of speech and association—they really are at stake now.”

If this is an example of the “nuanced” diplomacy towards China that some hope will balance the brinkmanship of the security agencies, we are in serious trouble. Pace Adamson, Scott Morrison’s evident willingness to let Australia’s security agencies run amok constitutes a far greater threat to our democracy and rule of law than anything China is doing.

Meanwhile, Chen and Li will carry the stigma of this decision for the rest of their lives. If, as seems likely, this was an act of ministerial fiat, the law affords them no right to examine, let alone test, the advice on which their visas were torn up. There is no route of appeal. Their ability to ever again set foot in Australia will depend on our ability to recognise the threat this move poses to civil liberties as well as academic freedom, and to apply pressure for their ban to be overturned. 

If they’re to mean anything, Australia’s “liberal values” must be more than just an anti-China slogan. Anyone with the slightest commitment to such values should be calling for Chen and Li’s visas to be reinstated immediately.

The post No one wins in a race to the bottom on national security: Let the Chinese academics back in appeared first on The China Story.

An outbreak of COVID nationalism

COVID-19 has triggered a wave of nationalism and finger-pointing towards China. As the virus hit, the Foreign Investment Review Board set its screening threshold to $0, with much anxious talk of Chinese companies swooping in to buy up the country. Chinese Australians have been depicted as predators for exporting masks and Personal Protective Equipment to Wuhan at the height of its crisis, and as subversive influence-peddlers when they imported the same items back from China to Australia. In Andrew Hastie’s view, ties to China make us vulnerable to “supply-chain warfare.”

Shock jocks and the tabloid press have had a field day, with Sky News hosts endorsing wild conspiracy theories of COVID-19 as a deliberate Chinese Communist Party plot. “Making China pay for breaking the world” was how 60 Minutes billed one of its recent episodes on the virus. The Daily Telegraph, predictably enough, has gone into overdrive: Tim Blair’s cracks at bat-eating Chinese; a sympathetic profile of a man who brandished a whip while ranting at Chinese bystanders for knowingly spreading the virus; this week’s “BATMAN” front page featuring the mugshot of a respected Chinese virologist. The list could go on. 

White Australia might imagine it can binge on bat jokes and endless media images associating Chinese people with a dangerous virus, all without any consequences. Australians of Asian appearance know otherwise, of course, with an upsurge of racist attacks in the last two months. Asian Australians have had to take note of the alarming rise in anti-Chinese sentiment. Do we think that people in China won’t?

Chinese international students are now among the most vulnerable in this climate, with racism rubbing salt into the wounds of lost part-time jobs and disruption to studies. The Prime Minister, though, delivered a blunt message to these visitors. “It’s time to go home,” he told them, cutting them off from Jobkeeper benefits that might keep them in work. 

What did the Chinese ambassador make of all this? He said, reasonably enough, that the climate in Australia could eventually cause the parents of Chinese students to ask “whether [Australia], which they found is not so friendly, even hostile, is the best place to send their kids to.” Was this a veiled threat, or simply a statement of the obvious?

Probing Morrison’s strategy

To be sure, much of Cheng’s Friday interview with Andrew Tillett dwelt on Scott Morrison’s call for an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19. But China doesn’t have to “coerce” Australia to scotch those plans. All that requires is a simple “no,” which was always going to be Beijing’s response to this proposal. 

Even at the best of times, it’s hard to see China allowing outsiders to snoop around its labs. Morrison only made things worse by invoking the example of “UN weapons inspectors.” Apart from the provocative analogy here between COVID-19 and WMDs, let’s think about what else this reference implies. UN resolutions required that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for example, give inspectors “immediate and unconditional access to any weapons sites and facilities.”

Can anyone imagine the United States, in the wake of the 2007-8 global financial crisis, allowing foreign forensic accountants “immediate and unconditional access” to its financial institutions and their balance books?

As many have already said, political grandstanding will only get in the way of the scientific collaboration that’s needed to trace the origins and transmission paths of the COVID-19 virus. So far, the chief value for Morrison in floating his proposal for an international investigation has been to have China shoot it down. That then permits the next rhetorical move in the game of tit-for-tat, which Peter Hartcher provided on Tuesday. In his view, China’s opposition to Morrison’s scheme “suggests the Beijing regime has a lot to hide.” The mystery deepens.

Today’s COVID-19 conspiracy theories are too outlandish for most Australian politicians and commentators to embrace openly, the way Republican right-wingers like Tom Cotton have in the United States. But at the same time, in focusing people’s COVID-induced frustrations and anxieties on China, they’re far too politically valuable to completely hose down. A nice climate of uncertainty serves just as well, in which they can continue to fester and influence public opinion on China. That where we’ve now ended up.

Newscorp’s BATMAN “exclusive” on Tuesday is a good example of the propagandistic logic at work here. We’re told that the Five Eyes intelligence agencies are on the trail of two scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who once did stints at CSIRO. Of course, “[t]he Daily Telegraph does not suggest the two scientists are responsible for the outbreak or spread of COVID-19.” But still, the spooks must be onto something, right?

No cure in sight

For Australia’s foreign policy establishment, the best of all possible worlds is one in which Australia supports the United States to retain its dominant position in East Asia, while losing as little skin off its nose as possible in trade with China. 

In the first weeks of 2020, voices from the defence and intelligence world greeted the arrival of COVID-19 with an unmistakable sense of opportunity. That’s since been tempered, though, by the spectacle of American dysfunction and failure. In this situation, the instinctive response of Australian politicians and pundits has been to step up and ensure that the spotlight of global recriminations for COVID-19 remains on Beijing. The accompanying rise in anti-Chinese racism will be deplored by all, but it’s an unavoidable by-product of the course we’re on. 

This dynamic explains the desire to fan the dying embers of Morrison’s inquiry plan into a diplomatic conflagration. But the injured response to Cheng Jingye’s mild interview tells us something else as well. For all the tough talk about sucking up the economic consequences of confronting China, Australia’s China hawks have yet to really come to terms with the implications of the policies they’re advocating. 

For years now, commentators have been warning us of Australia’s dependency on China. “Australia is far too reliant on an unreliable nation,” as Chris Uhlmann put it recently. They’ve also told us that Australia will have to ride out the likely economic impact of standing up to Beijing: “If we value our freedom, Australians will need to remain resolute and take the pain,” Clive Hamilton wrote in Silent Invasion. A reduction in trade with China has been widely discussed as a predictable, indeed desirable, outcome of Australia’s policies. You’d think, then, that we’d be comfortable enough with what Cheng Jingye was saying. But no, we’re crying foul, and denouncing him as a bully and an extortionist.

Australia’s China policy is a mass of contradictions, but one thing remains constant: our ability to position ourselves as the victim. Anyone who was serious about diversifying Australia’s exports, or “decoupling” from China, would be buying Ambassador Cheng a beer. To kick up such a stink at the thought that Chinese mums and dads might take their business elsewhere really only shows how reliant Australia still is on China.

The post A turning point, or a storm in a wine glass? appeared first on The China Story.