Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor, The Australian, Australia, March 26, 2009-
KEVIN Rudd’s semi-secret meeting on Saturday with Li Changchun, the Chinese politburo member in charge of propaganda, media and ideology, is one of the most bizarre episodes of his prime ministership. It is almost certainly more stupid than sinister, but it does raise legitimate questions about Chinese influence in Australia. Li is ranked No.5 in China’s nine-member ruling politburo standing committee. Rudd welcomed Li and the accompanying Chinese media to the Lodge in Canberra but didn’t tell the Australian people about it.
Li’s visit was reported on Chinese television, but there is no guarantee that Australia’s small and very busy group of correspondents in China would have picked up the story, and its bizarre lack of visibility in Australia, if this paper’s Cameron Stewart had not reported it.
The day after Li’s visit Rudd went out of his way on TV to call for reform of the global financial system so that China gets more influence. I don’t believe that in any sinister way Rudd is doing the bidding of the Chinese Government, but nothing is more likely to reinforce such an interpretation than the weird behaviour regarding Li’s meeting.
Li’s visit should occasion a serious examination of the exercise of Chinese soft power in Australia. It can benefit from as much transparency and public scrutiny as possible.
Members of Li’s delegation, and presumably Li himself, as well as other Chinese officials, have been involved in an intensive round of lobbying and briefing in recent days. They seem to have three central messages for Australians. We must not support Tibet’s Dalai Lama. We must support the Chinalco bid for a large stake in Australian miner Rio Tinto. And we should know that Chinalco, though wholly owned by the Chinese Government, is an independent commercial entity run at more than arm’s length from the Chinese Government.
If you notice some tension between the second and third propositions, perhaps you are not alone. However, the chutzpah of the Chinese official position is remarkable.
Just as they are telling us Chinalco is not directly related to the Chinese Government, the former president of Chinalco, Xiao Yaqing, has been appointed to the Chinese cabinet. China’s belief that it can simply assert its position, no matter how obviously ridiculous, and Australians will ultimately accept it is disconcerting, to say the least.
The absolute and deafening silence of the Opposition, Barnaby Joyce excepted, on this or on any issue that demands a sense of values or of geo-strategic direction means the debate is not joined in our political process. This whole dynamic should be the subject of vigorous, freewheeling debate and searching media scrutiny.
In the end, the decision on Chinalco, though notionally Wayne Swan’s, will be Rudd’s alone. And it will be a key test of whether our somewhat Sinocentric Prime Minister is capable of saying no to the Chinese on something they really want.
The broader exercise of Chinese power in Australia should be a preoccupation of the media.
Chinalco is just one example, though it is instructive. Chinalco gave $250,000 to the Australia China Business Council to produce reports on the benefits of Chinese investment in Australia. It has signed up as a corporate sponsor of the Lowy Institute for International Policy.
More generally, the Chinese Government has sponsored the creation of four Confucius Institutes at Australian universities. Former Australian consul general in Hong Kong and University of Sydney visiting professor Jocelyn Chey has labelled the institutes as propaganda vehicles for the Chinese Communist Party. She certainly does not regard them as the equivalent of broad-ranging cultural organisations such as Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the Alliance Francaise. She argues that their presence at Australian universities is problematic.
Sponsoring think tanks and university organisations is, of course, perfectly normal. There do seem to be much more ruthless examples of Chinese power in Australia, however.
Last year there were quite serious assaults by pro-Beijing demonstrators against pro-Tibetan demonstrators in several Australian cities when the Olympic torch relay was held. The Chinese embassy helped organise the demonstrations. Would we accept that behaviour from any other embassy inAustralia?
When I asked the office of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith about this, a spokesperson said: “The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade does not agree that the actions of the Chinese embassy in facilitating the attendance of Chinese students at the Olympic torch relay was a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Prior to the relay taking place, senior officials from DFAT called in the Chinese ambassador to discuss aspects of the relay. The ambassador was told that under no circumstances were the students or Chinese community to have a security role.”
Even that perplexing statement seems to accept that the Chinese ambassador has a legitimate political role in controlling the actions of the Chinese community and Chinese students. No foreign embassy in Australia should have any role agitating among any group within Australia at all.
These incidents have to be seen, too, in the light of the testimony of Chinese defector Chen Yonglin, formerly a Chinese consul in Sydney. When he defected in 2005, Chen alleged that Beijing had 1000 agents in Australia, mostly working on monitoring and controlling Chinese students here. The Chinese Government told us Chen was talking nonsense, but it was the Chinese Government that, by appointing Chen, had previously told us to take him seriously.
Certainly China has greatly increased conventional espionage directed at Australian military, political, commercial and industrial targets in recent years.
Because the Chinese Government runs such an integrated and ruthless global operation in pursuit of power, it is legitimate to consider all these things together, especially when the key doubt about Chinalco is whether it will act in an authentically commercial fashion. Rudd’s strange meeting with Li can only exacerbate those doubts.
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