Australia must stand up for freedom in the face of China’s totalitarian regime

Most Australians may have been content to let the dragon go unchallenged until the global pandemic but the fallout shows we must stand up against China, Piers Akerman writes.

Living with Chinese President-for-life Xi Jinping is like being trapped in an unending nightmare.

Under President Eleven (he apparently hates the fact that the letters in his name equate to the Roman numerals for 11) the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has reverted to the Stalinist model of totalitarianism beloved by Xi’s most notorious predecessor, the monster Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the deaths of upwards of 50 million people.

To this legacy Xi has added a belligerence toward minority groups, imprisoning Uighurs in concentration camps, stamping out the vestiges of Tibetan culture, and manifestly ludicrous claims of sovereignty over vast tracts of the South China Sea and the Pacific in breach of international law.

Most Australians may have been content to let the dragon go unchallenged until the Wuhan flu and the global pandemic which ensued dramatically restricted their lifestyles and torpedoed the economy.

The world is indebted to my friend and former colleague Sharri Markson for her extraordinarily thorough and detailed expose of the cover-up by the CCP, the World Health Organisation’s head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the irritating US health supremo Dr Anthony Fauci, and scores of compromised scientists who attempted to hide the source of the infection.

China's President Xi Jinping at the virtual World Economic Forum in January. Picture: World Economic Forum AFP

Markson’s book What Really Happened in Wuhan (HarperCollins) is chilling but riveting reading as it outlines the case that the most probable source of the coronavirus is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it was engineered.

Australia has been severely punished by Xi merely for asking for a professional inquiry by international experts to determine how the virus, which has smashed the global economy and killed at least five million people (though mortality figures are notably shaky) originated.

It is only now, almost two years since the virus first appeared in China that Australian coal is being unloaded to meet China’s damaging energy crisis.

There is a faint hope that China’s internal economic problems highlighted by the collapse of the giant building developer Evergrande and the chronic energy shortage will weaken Xi’s position but so far his bellicosity has not diminished.

In May, the editor-in-chief of Beijing’s Global Times newspaper, long the mouthpiece for the CCP, threatened Australia with “retaliatory punishment” with missile strikes “on the military facilities and relevant key facilities on Australian soil” if we were to send troops to
co-ordinate with the US and wage war with China over Taiwan.

A fortnight ago, Victor Gao, formerly Deng Xiaoping’s translator, said the recent AUKUS alliance was a “gross violation of international law” that would have “profound consequences” for “brainless” Australians and warned that “armed with nuclear submarines, Australia itself will be a target for possible nuclear attacks in the future”.

Stan Grant, the host of the ABC’s China Tonight program, did not correct Gao and tell him that any nuclear-powered submarines Australia might acquire or build under AUKUS would not be nuclear-armed.

Now Taiwanese airspace is being subjected to intrusions by nuclear-capable fighter-bombers as Xi increases pressure on the independent state.

Former PM Tony Abbott delivered a speech in Taiwan on Friday in which he noted he had previously hesitated to attend the annual the Yushan Forum “lest that provoke China … but since then, Beijing has torn-up the ‘one country, two systems’ treaty on Hong Kong; put upwards of a million Uighurs into concentration camps; boosted cyber spying on its own citizens; cancelled popular personalities in favour of a cult of the new red emperor; brutalised Indian soldiers in the Himalayas; coerced other claimants in its eastern seas; and flown evermore intimidatory sorties against Taiwan”.

“It’s weaponised trade, especially against Australia, with our barley, wine and coal exports all stopped on spurious safety grounds, and its embassy has published 14 demands – essentially that we become a tributary state – that no self-respecting country could accept,” Abbott said.

His concluding remarks – “Nothing is more pressing right now, than solidarity with Taiwan, if we want a better world; hence my enthusiastic presence here today, to stand with
this island that’s brave and free” – should be embraced by freedom-loving people everywhere.