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When and Where was the 20^th Party Congress Held?

The 20^th Party Congress took place on 16–22 October 2022 in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

One to Twenty

1^st Party Congress: 23 July to 2 August 1921, Shanghai and Jiaxing.

2^nd Party Congress: 16–23 July 1922, Shanghai.

3^rd Party Congress: 12–20 June 1923, Guangzhou.

4^th Party Congress: 11–22 January 1925, Shanghai.

5^th Party Congress: 27 April to 9 May 1927, Wuhan.

6^th Party Congress: 18 June to 11 July 1928, Moscow.

7^th Party Congress: 23 April to 11 June 1945, Yan’an.

8^th Party Congress: 15–27 September 1956, Beijing.

9^th Party Congress: 1–24 April 1969, Beijing.

10^th Party Congress: 24–28 August 1973, Beijing.

11^th Party Congress: 12–18 August 1977, Beijing.

12^th Party Congress: 1–11 September 1982, Beijing.

13^th Party Congress: 25 October to 1 November 1987, Beijing.

14^th Party Congress: 12–18 October 1992, Beijing.

15^th Party Congress: 12–18 September 1997, Beijing.

16^th Party Congress: 8–14 November 2002, Beijing.

17^th Party Congress: 15–21 October 2007, Beijing.

18^th Party Congress: 8–14 November 2012, Beijing.

19^th Party Congress: 18–24 October 2017, Beijing.

20^th Party Congress: 16–22 October 2022, Beijing.

Who Goes, How Are They Chosen, and What Do They Do?

A total of 2,379 people were expected to attend the 20^th Party Congress: 2,296 delegates representing the 96.7 million members of the CPC plus eighty-three special invitees, including retired former leaders. Forty-one people sent apologies, leaving a total of 2,338 attendees.

Thirty-eight ‘electoral units’ 选举单位 choose the delegates in multiple rounds of referrals and reviews overseen by and subject to the approval of party discipline and inspection organs, who screen for such things as loyalty to Xi Jinping and appropriate representation of ethnic minorities. Provinces, municipalities, and regions choose nearly 70 percent of the delegates, or 1,585 delegates in 2022. The People’s Liberation Army and People’s Armed Police chose another 13 percent of the total, and central party organs and state organs about 12 percent. Of the 2,296 delegates, 619 were women, or 27 percent of the total, a slight rise (2.8 percent) from the 19th congress in 2017.

The delegates’ function is largely ceremonial: approving the selection of the new Central Committee and acclaiming official reports and resolutions.

Who Holds the Power?

The delegates formally approve the selection of the CPC Central Committee 中国共产党中央委员会. The 20th Central Committee has 205 members and 171 alternate members, with an average age of 57.2 years. Among those retiring in 2022 were premier Li Keqiang 李克强 and Chinese Political Consultative Conference chairman Wang Yang 汪洋, though neither had reached the official retirement age of sixty-eight. Of the 205 members of the 20^th Central Committee, 135 (66 percent) were new. Only eleven of the full members, or 4.9 percent, are women; another nineteen women are alternate members.

The Central Committee approves the appointments to the Politburo 政治局. The 20^th Politburo has twenty-four members, only four of whom are under the age of sixty (three are fifty-eight and one is fifty-seven). The oldest member is seventy-two-year-old Zhang Youxia 张又侠, who is vice-chairman of the Military Commission.

For the first time in twenty-five years, no woman sits on the Politburo. Historically, there have only ever been six female full members and two alternates. Of those six, three were the wives or widows of top leaders. Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing 江青, lost her position after her arrest as part of the ‘Gang of Four’ after Mao’s death in 1976; she died in jail in 1991. Lin Biao’s wife, Ye Qun 叶群, lost her position in 1971 when she and her husband — Mao’s erstwhile ‘closest comrade-in-arms’ and chosen successor — died in a plane crash while fleeing China after allegedly trying to assassinate Mao. Deng Yingchao 邓颖超, the widow of popular premier Zhou Enlai 周恩来, joined the Politburo in 1977 as part of the group around Deng Xiaoping that ushered in the Reform Era; she retired in 1985. (See XX, pp. xx)

The Politburo selects the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC)政治局常务委员会. Its members are the most powerful people in China. No woman has ever sat on the PSC. The current PSC has seven ranked members of whom Xi Jinping, as the third-term General Secretary and Chair of the Central Military Commission 中央军事委员会, is the most powerful of all; unlike previous committees, which comprised diverse ‘factions’ or groups — prominently including that which had its origins in the Communist Youth League — the new one is believed to consist entirely of men loyal to Xi personally and to his vision for the country.

No. 1: Xi Jinping 习近平, aged sixty-nine, holds the titles of CPC General Secretary and Chair of the Central Military Commission, among other non-party titles, including that of State Chairman or President.

No. 2: Li Qiang 李强, aged sixty-three, was Xi’s subordinate when Xi was party secretary of Zhejiang province. Promoted to the Politburo in 2017, he was also party secretary of Shanghai, responsible for the strict COVID lockdowns there in 2022. He is new to the PSC.

No. 3: Zhao Leji 赵乐际, aged sixty-five, is considered a member of Xi’s ‘Shaanxi Gang’ 陕西帮. It is said Zhao’s father had a personal relationship with Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun 习仲勋.

No. 4: Wang Huning 王沪宁, aged sixty-seven, has been the Party’s leading political theorist since the 1990s, including during the administrations of Xi’s predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and has been a member of the Politburo since 2012. He is one of Xi’s closest advisors. Unlike the others, Wang came to prominence not as a party bureaucrat but because of his work in the Central Policy Research Office 中共中央政策研究室, a major CPC think tank.

No. 5: Cai Qi 蔡奇, aged sixty-seven, is the Party Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and First Secretary of the CPC Secretariat. A former subordinate of Xi’s in both Fujian and Zhejiang, he has been known to call Xi ‘Xi Dada’ or ‘Daddy Xi’. He is also said to be a fan of the television series House of Cards and was behind the forced eviction of rural migrants from Beijing beginning in 2017. He is new to the PSC.

No. 6: Ding Xuexiang 丁薛祥, aged sixty, is the youngest member of the PSC and the director of the General Office of the Central Committee. Dubbed Xi’s ‘chief of staff’, he has worked under him for many years, and frequently accompanies Xi on both domestic and foreign trips. He is new to the PSC.

No. 7: Li Xi 李希, aged sixty-six, until recently the party secretary of Guangdong Province, chairs the powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which prosecutes the anticorruption campaign that is one of Xi’s signature policies. He is said to be a close friend of Xi’s and is new to the PSC.

Reports, Speeches, and Constitutional Amendments

Xi Jinping’s keynote speech was titled ‘Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive in Unity to Build a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects’ 高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜，为全面建设社会主义现代化国家而团结奋斗—在中国共产党第二十次全国代表大会上的报告. It took about one hour and forty-five minutes for him to read the abridged version of the report, which in full is 31,600 characters and, printed, runs to 72 pages.

The overall message of the report was that China is advancing by leaps and bounds under the leadership of the Communist Party, with Xi at the helm. It reaffirmed that the central task of the CPC is to build a powerful modern socialist country and promote the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

Compared with previous reports, there were many more mentions of security 安全 (in particular, ‘national security’ 国家安全) and references to ‘risks’ and ‘challenges’, and none of the previously popular expression ‘period of strategic opportunity’ 战略机遇期.[1] There were also fewer mentions of the economy (in particular, the market and reforms) — although there were numerous references to the importance of technology.

Among the changes to the party constitution adopted by the congress was the enshrinement of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era as well as the Two Establishes 两个确立 and Two Safeguards 两个维护. The first establishes Xi as the Party’s ‘core’ and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era as the Party’s guiding ideology — in essence, putting Xi on par with Mao and above Deng Xiaoping and his other post-Mao predecessors. The ‘safeguards’, meanwhile, maintain that ‘core’ status in the Party and the Party’s authority over the nation.

The line from Xi’s official report that the Party must ‘resolutely oppose and contain Taiwan independence’ was also written into the party constitution.

An Unscripted Moment

After the press had been let into the congress, Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, appeared visibly agitated by something in the red folders on the table before him. When Xi motioned for attendants to lead him away, Hu appeared unwilling to go, and an attendant lifted him from his seat by the armpit. As he left, he said something to Xi and patted the shoulder of Li Keqiang; both men nodded without turning to face him. Hu’s first reappearance in public was at the 6 December memorial service for his own predecessor, Jiang Zemin.

The author wishes to thank M. Su for her contribution to this article

References

[1] See ‘Brief #126: 20^th Party Congress Report: Keywords Analysis’, Neican, 18 October 2022, online at https://www.neican.org/brief-126-20th-party-congress-report-keywords-analysis/?ref=translations-newsletter

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Decade of Deterioration

Marking the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic relations in 2012, the Australian Embassy in Beijing declared the relationship with China to be one of its most important. According to the official statement by the Australian government, the bilateral relationship was ‘based on shared interests and mutual respect, an approach which offers the best prospects to maximise shared economic interests, advance Australia’s political and strategic interests, and manage differences in a sensible and practical way.’ Two years later, in 2014, the relationship was looking stronger than ever. Then-prime minister Tony Abbott even invited China’s new leader Xi Jinping to address the Australian parliament. Together, they witnessed the signing of a declaration of intent for a Free Trade Agreement between the two countries; other bilateral agreements signed at the same time enhanced Australian-Chinese cooperation in Antarctica, agreed to establish a renminbi clearing bank in Sydney and boosted cooperation in investment and education. The leaders upgraded the relationship to a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’.

Within four years, the bilateral relationship had turned tense. Canberra, still under Coalition government, had come to perceive China’s rise as a threat. Acting on ASIO advice, in 2018, it passed nine laws intended to prevent of foreign interference; though China was not explicitly named, it was no secret that concerns about the PRC prompted the bills’ hurried drafting. That same year, Canberra banned Huawei from Australia’s 5G networks.

Beijing was openly displeased, and relations grew sour. After the Morrison government made its unilateral demand for an independent investigation of COVID-19’s origins in early 2020, which Beijing characterised as Australia playing ‘political games’, the relationship began a rapid downward slide. Beijing applied de facto trade sanctions against selected Australian exports. It also suspended high-level official contacts. Towards the end of the year, Beijing presented a list of fourteen ‘grievances’ it had with Australia to a journalist from Channel 9. Predictably, these included unhappiness with the Huawei ban, the call for an inquiry into COVID-19’s origins, the foreign interference laws, limits on foreign investment and Canberra’s criticism of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The list also cited ‘unfriendly or antagonistic’ media reports about China that it claimed were poisoning relations.

Its own officials, meanwhile, threw fuel on the fire by responding to the official inquiry into possible Australian war crimes in Afghanistan by tweeting out a mocked-up picture of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child. Attitudes towards the PRC hardened among politicians and the public at large. The following year, Canberra signed up to the AUKUS security pact with the US and UK.

The AUKUS pact, under which the Australian navy will acquire nuclear submarines, went far beyond the ANZUS treaty of 1951. That had served as a general assurance against the possibility of a militaristically resurgent Japan as well as any Communist threat from the North. The AUKUS pact was created specifically (if never explicitly) against the perceived threat from a rising and assertive China. In joining AUKUS, Australia not only compromised its long-held stance against nuclear proliferation, but also tied itself more firmly to the US war chariot. By integrating Australian troops with British and US forces to ‘move beyond interoperability to interchangeability’, the arrangement potentially subjects Australian forces, the navy at least, to the command of US-led military operations in the future.

What’s more, by ditching its original deal with France to build conventional submarines in favour of nuclear ones, Canberra not only incurred French fury, but provoked anxieties amongst regional neighbours, including its closest partner New Zealand, which pursues a nuclear-free policy. The lengths Canberra has gone to secure the AUKUS pact point to Canberra’s assessment of the threat posed to Australian national security by China’s growing power.

Antecedents and Precedents

Laws and regulations to prevent foreign influence have plenty of historical precedents on both sides. These include Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 — the “White Australia Policy”. Imperial China also imposed closed-door and self-seclusion policies including ones aimed at shutting ports 海禁 or closing passes in the Great Wall 闭关自守to ward off ‘barbarian’ infiltration.

Both Australia and the PRC had previously suspended bilateral political contacts. Canberra cancelled official exchanges in response to the June 4^th crackdown of 1989 and Beijing called off high-level visits to protest what it regarded as ‘unfriendly acts’ by the Howard administration in 1996 — including increasingly close alignment with the US, which it suspected of wanting to ‘contain’ China’s rise.[1] Howard’s assurances towards the end of 1996 that Australia’s China policy had not changed as a result of the alliance defused those tensions, and soon the rhetoric cooled down. Beijing again suspended high-level visits over irritation with various actions of the Rudd government. Yet towards the end of 2009, then vice-premier Li Keqiang 李克强 visited Australia and the two sides signed a joint statement affirming their desire for an increasingly comprehensive and cooperative relationship based on mutual benefit and respect. Those mutual benefits were obvious. Two years earlier, 2007, China had become Australia’s single largest trading partner (relegating Japan to third place).

Beijing’s trade punishments of 2020 were the first major sanctions since 1971, when the PRC suspended wheat imports from Australia to register its displeasure with the McMahon government’s refusal to normalise relations.

Ingrained in History

Fear of their surroundings was a central part of the experience of European settlers of Australia in the 18^th century. This was true for the alien land they found themselves in, with its unfamiliar flora and fauna, harsh environment, and the First Nations people whose languages, laws and customs they didn’t understand (or respect).

It was also true of the broader region. The 19^th century Gold Rush saw the China-born population of Australia swell to over 38,000 by 1861, or 3.3 percent of the total population, sparking fears of being overrun by ‘Mongol hordes’. Yet it was not an uninflected story, with such figures as the Guangzhou-born tea trader Quong Tart becoming a leading businessman and society figure in Sydney in the late 19^th century.

Australia stationed a trade commissioner in China from 1921 to 1922, and in 1934, Deputy Prime Minister JG Latham led a trade mission there. Two years earlier, Chinese residents of Australia founded a lecture series named for the Australian China correspondent George E. Morrison that aimed to further cultural understanding of China in Australia (a series, based in the Australian National University, is still going ninety years later).

Australia first came into focus for especially southern Chinese of the late Qing dynasty as ‘New Gold Mountain’ 新金山 (San Francisco being ‘Old Gold Mountain’ 旧金山). Despite the racist exclusionary laws of the 20^th century, Melbourne hosted a Chinese Consul-General in 1909, and in 1930, China’s soon-to-be president Lin Sen 林森, visited Australia.

In 1941, Australia appointed its first official envoy to the Nationalist government in its wartime capital of Chongqing, three years after the Japanese invaded China. The Department of External Affairs argued that establishing a legation ‘at a most unfavourable time and when few reciprocal material benefits can result, will probably create a profound impression on Chinese minds, and have incalculable consequences in our future relations.’ Frederic Eggleston, the first envoy, maintained that China ‘held the key’ to peace in the Pacific.[2]

The Communist victory in the Cold War changed everything. The historical fear of the ‘Yellow Peril’ that had inspired the White Australia Policy evolved into terror of the ‘Red Menace’ of Communism. Australian soldiers followed the Americans into the Korean War. Canberra maintained formal relations with the Nationalists, who had relocated the Republic of China to Taiwan after 1949.

Then, while still in opposition, Gough Whitlam led a delegation to China, where he met with Mao; in 1972, as Prime Minister, normalised relations with the PRC.

During the first two decades following normalisation of diplomatic relations, and especially following Deng Xiaoping’s determination to modernise, reform and open China’s doors to the world, business, academic and cultural communities of both nations responded with enthusiasm to the opportunities for exchange and engagement, including in the economic sphere. Trade and investment grew. Deng Xiaoping’s reform and open-door policies gave some in Australia and elsewhere in the West (misplaced) hope that the CPC was also heading down the path to liberal democracy. The violent crushing of the pro-democracy protests of 1989 dashed this hope.

Several years later, after Deng made it clear that China would not reverse the course of reforms and expanded the role of the market within it, China’s economy boomed. Its need for massive amounts of iron ore gave the Australian economy a huge boost as well.

The old anxieties never entirely went away. When asked in 2015 by Angela Merkel to sum up Australia-China relations, then prime minister Tony Abbott famously responded: ‘fear and greed’. Yet there was still great cooperation and perceived opportunity on both sides: in 2016, Australia became a founding member of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, though the US and Japan declined to join.

Soon, fear would trump greed. By the middle of the 2010s, it was more than clear that China’s economic take-off would not be accompanied by political liberalisation. Unease grew with Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the region, including the Pacific, which Australia had grown used to thinking of, paternalistically, as its ‘backyard’ and natural sphere of influence. The unease was fed too by the rapid modernisation and empowerment of the People’s Liberation Army, and the fact that Australia’s economic health had grown increasingly dependent on trade and investment with China.

Recent Baggage

Not long after Donald Trump was elected US President in 2016, Washington launched a virtual trade war with China. As Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull banned Huawei and introduced the foreign interference laws. After Beijing once more suspended high-level contacts with Canberra in protest, Turnbull tried to mend fences without much success. His successor Scott Morrison, who took office in 2018, had several opportunities to restore direct dialogue with Beijing. He met with Premier Li Keqiang in Singapore during the ASEAN summit in November 2018 and again in Bangkok on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in November 2019. He also met with Vice-President Wang Qishan in Jakarta at President Joko Widodo’s inauguration in October 2019. But the distrust between the two sides was so deep that no progress was made. Former Penny Wong staffer Allan Behm wrote in No Enemies, No Friends that Australia’s leaders had long been given to so much ‘hysteria and hyperventilation’ that they’d ‘squandered our diplomatic capital’ — and not just with China, but the region more generally.

After the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, the bilateral relationship worsened when Beijing took offence at Canberra’s call for an international inquiry into the origins of the pandemic and imposed its de-facto trade sanctions. Canberra hardened its stance and the AUKUS pact was born.

Present reality: glimmer of hope?

In January 2022, a new Chinese ambassador, Xiao Qian 肖千, arrived in Canberra and made clear that Beijing was ready to ‘actively develop friendship and cooperation with Australia’ and ‘willing to work with Australia to meet each other halfway.’ Morrison refused Xiao’s offer of a meeting — a stance supported by then Opposition leader Anthony Albanese.

With a federal election looming, the Coalition government stressed the issue of national security, including the threat posed by China. Defence Minister Peter Dutton fronted the press a week before the election in May 2022 to make an issue of a sighting of PLA Navy vessel Haiwangxing 250 nautical miles off the coast of Western Australia.

By the time the prime ministerial baton was passed to Anthony Albanese in May 2022, Australia’s political relationship with the PRC had reached its lowest point in fifty years of diplomatic relations. Premier Li Keqiang sent Albanese a congratulatory message along with a wish for ‘sound and steady’ relations with Australia. The Albanese government, with Penny Wong as Foreign Minister, had a similar goal of stabilising relations. It set a different tone in its rhetoric towards China: firm on principle but minus the aggressive edge.

At the same time, Albanese insisted there would be no reset of relations without Beijing ending its trade punishments. Before long, significant meetings were taking place. In June, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles met with his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe at the Shangrila Dialogue in Singapore. In July, Foreign Minister Penny Wong met her counterpart Wang Yi 王毅 at the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Bali. Penny Wong described the meeting as ‘an important first step’.

In August, Ambassador Xiao Qian addressed the National Press Club in Canberra, calling for a reset in the relationship based on a return to mutually beneficial economic relations and less argument over values — or as Katharine Murphy summed it up in the Guardian: ‘more trade and less trash talk’. He warned Australia not to pick sides between the US and the PRC, and to stay out of the Taiwan issue.

In November, Xi Jinping met Anthony Albanese met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, the first such high-level meeting in six years. No great announcements followed, but that wasn’t the point. Albanese himself said: ‘There are many steps yet to take. We will co-operate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in our national interest.’ As Laura Tingle wrote in the Australian Financial Review, ‘the most important thing to be said about the meeting was that it took place at all’.

In December, Penny Wong travelled to Beijing for the 50^th anniversary of relations, where she and her counterpart Wang Yi met for 90 minutes and agreed to reopen structured, regular dialogue on issues ranging from trade to consular affairs, climate change, defence and regional affairs, and maintain ‘high-level engagement’. Wong remarked: ‘the ice thaws, but slowly’.

While politicians took first steps, business made strides. In September, Australia’s mining giant Rio Tinto and China’s largest steel-maker Baowu 宝武 Steel announced a A$2 billion joint venture to develop the Western Range iron ore project in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. With Rio owning 54 percent and Baowu 46 percent, the joint venture would begin construction in 2023 and produce around 275 million tonnes of iron ore over thirteen years, generating 1,600 jobs in Australia. Once both governments approved, the project would cement long-term cooperation in this key sector.

From the time of the imposition of the trade punishments in 2020, Australian businesses worked hard to diversity their customer base to reduce dependency on the Chinese market. Chinese enterprises similarly strove to reduce their own dependency on Australian goods and inputs and increase their bargaining power regarding key commodities. Two months before its joint venture with Rio Tinto was announced, Baowu had joined with other major Chinese steel producers, including Ansteel, Minmetals and Shougang, to form the China Mineral Resources Group 中国矿产资源集团. Headquartered in the Xiong’an New Area 雄安新区 about 100 kms southwest of Beijing, this supersized new entity, with 20 billion yuan in registered capital, is being closely watched by Australian mining companies, which regard it as an attempt to centralise China’s iron ore purchasing. The impact of this will soon be apparent.

Looking Ahead

At the time of writing, diplomats of both countries are working towards the resumption of regular high-level dialogue between Canberra and Beijing and stabilised relations. How future relations pan out will depend on several key factors.

One is the international environment, and in particular Sino-American relations. Australia’s historical alliance with the US, plus the Quad and the AUKUS pact, will continue to complicate Canberra’s interactions with Beijing. A recent case in point was the fallout from US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August. When Beijing responded angrily to Pelosi’s visit by conducting military exercises around Taiwan, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong criticised Beijing’s response as ‘disproportionate and destabilising’. Not surprisingly, such criticism received a strong rebuttal from the Chinese side, which warned that such ‘unfair judgement’ risked causing new trouble for the bilateral relationship. As with the Morrison government’s call for an international inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, Beijing viewed Wong’s criticism as part of an orchestrated Western campaign to contain China. In the absence of a fundamental shift of US policy towards China, Australia-China relations is unlikely to recover the warmth with which they began fifty years ago.

A more independent foreign policy, one that didn’t involve automatically following the US into each of its quarrels, including with China, but rather arose out of an assessment of Australia’s own interests, would afford Australian leaders more freedom to manoeuvre between Washington and Beijing. In fact, from Bob Hawke to John Howard, a succession of Australian prime ministers have been able to play a useful mediatory role between the two great powers.

A second factor involves public perception. Chinese officials like Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian and media including the Global Times, have not done Beijing many favours with the ‘wolf warrior’ rhetoric of recent years, including comparing Australia to ‘gum stuck on China’s shoes’ and a ‘paper kitten’ (vs the US as ‘paper tiger’). Beijing’s imprisonment of the Australians Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei on vague and disputed charges, the threats towards and expulsion of Australian and other journalists, widely reported human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere, and incidents such as the one in June in which a Chinese military aircraft directly endangered an Australian maritime patrol plane by suddenly cutting across its path and releasing metal chaff into the Australian plane’s engines, have further influenced public opinion against the PRC.

Lowy Institute polling in 2022 revealed that only 12 percent of those surveyed said they trusted China ‘somewhat’ or a great deal, a forty-point decrease since 2018. The same surveys, interestingly, revealed that a decreasing percentage of Australians aged eighteen to forty-four believe Australia should support the US in a conflict between the US and China, and an increasing percentage of that same cohort believed Australia should remain neutral.

There has been argument among China watchers about the extent to which the language used by media, particularly translations of Chinese official statements, has affected Australian attitudes towards China. The list of fourteen grievances presented in 2020, for example, was typically characterised by the media as fourteen ‘demands’. Media reports also typically used the word ‘demands’ in translating the four ‘points for consideration’, or ‘suggestions’ 四点建议 of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Penny Wong in July 2022.[3]  Another, widely discussed example related to Xiao Qian’s address to the National Press Club. Some observers, including former ambassador and China scholar Stephen Fitzgerald, criticised reporters for focusing not on what Fitzgerald characterised as ‘a friendly, conciliatory and constructive’ speech, but on the ambassador’s answers to journalists’ questions on Taiwan: Xiao had said that the Chinese would need to ‘educate’ the Taiwanese once the island was reunified with the mainland. Others argued that those answers were the most newsworthy aspect of the otherwise platitudinous speech.

The Way Ahead: Back to Basics

Some thirty-six universities across China have Australian Studies Centres. By contrast only twenty-odd tertiary institutions in Australia offer Chinese studies of one kind or another, and this number includes universities where the only courses on China or the Chinese language are taught by Confucius Institutes (organs of Chinese ‘soft power’, answerable to the Chinese government).[4] In 2019, then Opposition frontbencher Chris Bowen claimed that there are only around 130 people in Australia of non-Chinese background who spoke Mandarin well enough to do business in China. The ABC fact-checked his claim and concluded that it was a reasonable guess. The point is that whatever the exact number, there is a very small pool of non-Chinese Australians who can read, write and speak Mandarin proficiently.  In China, hundreds of millions of people study English, and it’s estimated that at least ten million are conversant in it. If knowledge is power, there is here a power imbalance. Unlike those that arise out of geopolitical or economic circumstances, however, it should not be that hard for Australia to remedy. Cultivating greater China expertise in Australia isn’t a magic pill that will solve the substantial and ongoing issues in the relationship. But it can help in the search for solutions.

[1] See Yi Wang, ‘Australia-China Relations: The Larrikin and the Rising Giant’, in Europa Publications ed., The Far East and Australasia 2022, London: Routledge, 2021.

[2] William Sima, China & ANU: Diplomats, Adventurers, Scholars, Australian Centre on China in the World, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015, p. 32.

[3]  The 4 points: ‘First, stick to regarding China as a partner rather than a rival. Second, stick to the way we get along with each other, which features seeking common ground while reserving differences. Third, stick to not targeting any third party or being controlled by any third party. Fourth, stick to building positive and pragmatic social foundations and public support.’ For a detailed analysis of Australian media distortion of Wang’s four points, see Wanning Sun, ‘Misconstruing China’s ‘demands’, Australian media beat the drums of war’, Crikey, 13 July 2022, online at: https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/07/13/australian-media-china-demands/.

[4] See ‘Australian Studies Centres in China’, Australian Embassy, China, online at https://china.embassy.gov.au/bjng/studycenter.html and  ‘Chinese Studies in Australia’, Chinese Studies Association of Australia, online at https://www.csaa.org.au/chinese-studies-in-australia/

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China Story editor Linda Jaivin interviews Louisa about her latest book — Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, New York: Riverhead Books, 2022 — which looks at the durability and characteristics of Hong Kong identity from ancient times to the present and restores ‘Hong Kong voices’, in all their power and powerlessness, to the centre of the Hong Kong story.

Q1. The ‘King of Kowloon’ is a man who, convinced that his family owned Kowloon before the British stole it from them, devoted his life to graffiti-ing his genealogical claims to the territory on walls, electricity boxes and numerous other places across Hong Kong. He is a central figure in Indelible City. You even use his calligraphy in your chapter titles. What is it about this marginal yet iconic figure — poor, not well-educated, possibly mad — that makes him the perfect symbol for Hong Kong (so often seen as wealthy, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan)?  

I’ve been really interested in the ‘King of Kowloon’ because he is so fungible and flexible as a symbolic figure, and I think that’s why he’s also so attractive. He’s an almost prismatic figure. How you interpret his symbolism depends on the angle from which you’re looking at him. Very early on, people mainly talked about the fact that he was working-class, marginalised, an outsider, and there was very little discussion at all of his claim over the land, the idea of sovereignty. That was something that came up later as the situation changed in Hong Kong. People began to label him the first localist, but at the same time he was also becoming a brand that represented Hong Kong, a shorthand for Hong Kong. He was commoditised by actual brands, big and small, from the high-end fashion designer William Tang, all the way down to Goods of Desire, who reproduced his calligraphy on underwear and bags – you can buy cushion covers and everything. So he became a commodity as well. Later he was seen as an artist even though he never saw or called himself that. I think it was that potential for him to be viewed in different ways across time that attracted me. When I was doing the ABC podcast, the ‘King of Kowloon’, I talked to people like the legislator Ted Hui, now in exile in Australia and he described the King of Kowloon as ‘a prophet’. Other people called him a shaman. That whole change in the way people viewed him attracted me as a writer, as well as the idea of a mystery, a story that you could really unpack and explore – I’ve always been interested in stories that are hard to tell. I like the challenge and this to me was this sort of ultimate journalistic challenge.

Q2. Discussing Hong Kong’s multiple historical identities and frequently redrawn borders, you liken Hong Kong to a ‘shimmering chimera that was constantly changing shape depending on the angle of viewing.’ You grew up there, worked there as a journalist, have been a visitor and even protester. How has its shape changed in your view?

No place is static, but I think Hong Kong has really changed, and in so many different ways. Its shape has changed physically over the years since I grew up there. The harbour has grown smaller and smaller, and whole areas of the sea have been reclaimed, to make the airport of Chek Lap Kok, for example. So the actual physical shape of Hong Kong has changed, but also its height, as skyscrapers have become ever higher. There have been these physical changes, but there have been other changes as well: it’s a place in motion. But what we see now is an attempt by the Hong Kong government and China to pin down Hong Kong, to cement one version of it and one version of its history — the official narrative. How Hong Kongers have seen themselves and Hong Kong has also changed over the years. Early on it was much more of a sojourners’ place, where people went on the way to somewhere else. It was only in the sixties and seventies that that began to shift. These new cities were being built in the New Territories. You were getting more than one generation of families born in Hong Kong, and it became not just a social destination but a home. Now with these political changes, how the people view Hong Kong is changing yet again and for many Hong Kongers those changes are turning the city that has been home into something quite unrecognisable.

Q3. You write that the history of Eurasians in Hong Kong — a community you have been part of — is one of ‘disappearance’. On the one hand, they were often, as you say, ‘excluded from the clan lineage records that anchored Chinese identity’. On the other, they ‘erased themselves from sight.’ How did this happen, and what does the future look like for Eurasian and other non-Chinese Hong Kong people under the increasingly nationalist regime?

It’s a feature of the history of Eurasians that they have not just been excluded from versions of history, even family history, but that they have excluded and erased themselves. We see that from historical records in the nineteenth century when the very category of Eurasians disappeared, as noone was willing to identify as Eurasian, even though the actual number of Eurasians was increasing at the time. To me, that idea of self-erasure is really tragic.

Back then it was so difficult, almost impossible, to  function as someone who was both Chinese and Western. They would have to choose either to be Chinese, or to be Western, and very few Eurasians managed to navigate that successfully. The nationalism nowadays in Xi Jinping’s China and the Communist Party’s conflation of state and Party, its capture of the very notion of Chineseness is, I think, really alarming for Eurasians and non-Chinese Hong Kong people as well. It’s deliberately exclusionary, and that bodes ill not just for Eurasian people but for Hong Kong’s future as an international city.

Q4. One of the interesting aspects of your book is how, in contrast to so many histories of Hong Kong that begin with the Opium Wars, you examine its ancient histories and myths. One of your interviewees remarks that the King of Kowloon struck such a ‘deep chord’ in Hong Kong because ‘the Cantonese mindset is characterised by a subversive and revolutionary yearning for lost dynasties.’ What does this mean, and why have we not got that memo sooner?

According to Chinese history, Hong Kong was the place to which the last heirs to the Song dynasty fled, and that act of imperial flight left a profound mark on Hong Kong culture. The site of enthronement still exists — there’s even an MTR station named after it — and there’s also a popular feast dish of various delicacies layered in a large bowl — pun choi — that supposedly dates back to that time. My interviewee was also referring to Hong Kong’s physical and political distance from the imperial centre of power, and how that helped shape a rebellious, subversive mindset, which was then amplified by the use of a different language, Cantonese, from the imperial centre. I think that memo — as you put it — hasn’t been passed on because it has not been in the interests of Hong Kong’s successive colonial rulers to frame Hong Kong identity in those terms. Instead, both the British and the Chinese rulers of Hong Kong have hewn closely to the same message: that Hong Kongers have always been purely economic actors without much interest in politics. This has never been true, but it seems they hoped that if they repeated this fiction enough, even Hong Kongers would come to believe it. We can see from the events of the last ten years how wrong that turned out to be.

Q5. What is it about Cantonese, as spoken in Hong Kong, that is so central to Hong Kong identity — and what role has it played in the various protests?

Cantonese is central to Hong Kong identity, because it is the language of Hong Kong, and I use the word ‘language’ advisedly. Many scholars would argue that Cantonese is closer to Classical Chinese than Putonghua, or the standard Mandarin that is spoken on the mainland. In its written form, Cantonese uses ancient participles and fantizi, the traditional characters that are no longer used on the mainland. Cantonese is integral to the Hong Kong identity in many ways. One, because it is not the language of the mainland — until recently, even the Cantonese spoken across the border in Guangzhou was different from the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. Just learning it and speaking Cantonese can be an act of assertion of a separate identity. The nature of Cantonese is profane, it’s sweary, it’s a little bit subversive. The role it has played in the protests has been really interesting. It’s much more flexible than Mandarin. There is this linguistic inventiveness of a level not allowed on the mainland. Protesters were even creating new characters. The most famous example was the creation of a character for ‘freedom c**t’ — using a combination of the three characters that make up freedom 自由 and c**t 閪 (see illustration below) — a phrase that a policeman used against some protesters early on. The protest movement appropriated it and made all these posters and t-shirts using this new Chinese character ‘freedom c**t’, written in Roman letters as ‘freedom-hi’ after the Cantonese pronunciation. These new Chinese characters were unintelligible to mainlanders.

Q6. During the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement of 2014, one of the protest’s leaders, Benny Tai, told you that ‘Hong Kong laws provide the protection for us to have this kind of movement’. Were he and others like him naïve, or were they betrayed, and if so, by whom exactly? Was it possible to foresee the crackdown to come?

I don’t think it’s naive to believe in the rule of law, or to believe in a government that upholds the rule of law. It might have been naive to believe that a government ultimately loyal to the Communist Party of China would uphold a common law system in its jurisdiction, but that’s exactly what ‘One Country Two Systems’ pledged. When he was sentenced for the Umbrella Movement, Umbrella movement co-founder Chan Kin-man said, ‘In the verdict, the judge commented we are naive, believing that by having an Occupy movement we can attain democracy. But what is more naive than believing in One Country Two Systems?’

Hong Kongers have been betrayed at various points in their history by successive rulers in different ways, but this particular betrayal was so painful because Hong Kongers had believed they would be protected by the systems both British and Chinese promised would remain in place for fifty years after the return of sovereignty. There are those who argue that a crackdown was always inevitable, but the speed and scope of that crackdown has been brutal and shocking. I don’t think anyone foresaw how quickly Hong Kong’s institutions would be dismantled, or the huge exodus of Hong Kongers from their home.

Q7. Staying with 2014 for a moment, you describe a poster of the Umbrella Movement that read ‘This is NOT a revolution’ as having ‘said it all’. What is this ‘all’ that it said?

The message was that this was not a movement to overthrow or forcibly replace the government. The Umbrella Movement came after a series of actions  working within the constraints of the system to widen the democratic mandate in choosing a chief executive. The Basic Law had always promised universal suffrage but provided no timetable.  Methods for widening the mandate included running polls, which more than 790,000 people took part in, to find how the population wanted to nominate candidates for chief executive. The aim was to carry out democratic deliberations on reform through popular consultations. The act of civil disobedience that was Occupy Central was originally intended to be a one-day event. The failure of the government to compromise or give any ground during the Umbrella Movement stoked the dissatisfaction that then exploded during 2019.

Q8. You write that watching the protest movement of 2019, you’d had a feeling that people in Hong Kong had been ‘living in a kind of simulacrum, a political make-believe where our imaginations had been colonised for so long that we were desperate to believe whatever our rulers told us, no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary.’ Is there a danger that in the future – even the near future – that the people of Hong Kong will simply move from one simulacrum to another, this one designed by Beijing?

There is a danger that the people of Hong Kong are moving from one reality to another, but the evidence shows that they are far less willing to buy into Beijing’s political make-believe. In this case, the challenge is epistemological. It confronts Hong Kongers on a daily basis, whether it be through high-ranking officials telling outright lies or legal charges against activists and politicians that are blatantly concocted for political ends. The reality that Hong Kong’s rulers are building is not so much a simulacrum but something more akin to a political re-education territory, where actions and words must be policed at all times to avoid violating ill-defined laws that can be applied retroactively. Hong Kongers’ reaction to this can be seen through the large numbers leaving the territory.

Q9. In 2020 you spoke to the playwright Wong Kwok-kui about a series of historical plays he had created several years earlier about Hong Kong. You write that ‘The very existence of the national security legislation restricted our conversation like a corset.’ If open conversation on Hong Kong identity is now impossible, what are the implications for that identity itself?

The implications for Hong Kong identity are far-reaching. We are seeing a campaign against expressions of Hong Kong identity which is playing out across politics, society, education, and all other arenas. One area that is most concerning is the campaign of intimidation to silence academics who study or research Hong Kong identity itself. We’re seeing the same pattern recurring, which begins with attacks by the pro-Beijing state-run newspapers, and often ends with those academics having to leave their jobs and sometimes to flee Hong Kong. This purge of education has targeted people like the eminent sociologist Ching-Kwan Lee, the political scientist Brian Fong, and cultural studies scholars Law Wing-sang and Hui Po-keung. These attacks muzzle these scholars and try to discredit their work, with the long-term aim of rewriting Hong Kong’s history so that it conforms to the Communist Party of China’s official narrative. I remember in 2019 one of my sources told me that they feared that the phrase  ‘heunggongyan’ 香港人 or ‘Hong Konger’ would itself one day be illegal. At the time, I thought they were overreacting. Today I fear that day is approaching.

Q10. You make a convincing case that by August 2021, Hong Kong was no longer what it used to be — culturally and intellectually vibrant and as a haven for political and other non-conformists in the Chinese world. What then is ‘indelible’ about the ‘Indelible City’?

Hong Kong is such a layered place, as literally shown by the city’s walls with their layers of political graffiti. Layers may be covered over, but they often also resurface in unexpected ways and at unexpected times. Even if the outward manifestations of protest are covered up, those expressions of discontent have been written onto the brains of Hong Kongers over the years in a way that cannot be reformatted. I like the contrast this title makes with my last book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, which refers to the way that the CCP managed to excise memories of the killings of 1989 and silence discussion, even by those who were witnesses. That same playbook will not work with Hong Kongers. Figures show that 140,000 people left the territory in the first three months of 2020 alone. I think that’s testament to the fact that Hong Kongers would rather leave their hometown forever than sacrifice their freedom of thought.

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