Beware of China’s insidious influence

WHY are our schools and universities so blindly taking Chinese money, asks Miranda Devine. Nothing is ever really free, and the price we’re paying is the whitewashing of China’s horrific human rights record.

AN anatomical exhibit of preserved corpses with various muscles, bones and organs exposed is touring Australia in the name of art, despite claims that the bodies could be those of executed political prisoners in China.

The Real Bodies exhibit is now showing in Sydney, with the tagline “get to know your body inside and out” at $35 a ticket. It displays 20 “real, perfectly preserved” human bodies and 200 anatomical specimens, with no mention of their provenance, though the organisers deny “foul play”.

Similar exhibits have been banned in Israel and France.

“These bodies are from China; it’s questionable where they are from,” says Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada and human rights activist, who is in Australia to testify to federal Parliament about forced human organ harvesting in China.

“They were human beings who once lived and breathed … they might have never consented.”

The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China also told the federal parliamentary committee into human organ trafficking last week of concerns “those bodies are actually coming from prisoners of conscience” and called for the exhibit to be closed.

Human rights Anastasia Lin with the Dalai Lama. She is in Australia to promote a documentary about Chinese influence in our affairs. (Pic: Supplied)

Lin says Real Bodies offers tangible evidence of a hidden industry of transplant abuse of Chinese prisoners. Organs, including livers and hearts, which require a donor to die, are available in China with suspicious speed, she says. Kidneys sell to overseas patients for $US130,000 ($175,000) and are available within two weeks.

“There is compelling and convincing evidence that vulnerable prisoners of conscience are being killed in large numbers in China to provide organs for transplantation,” says the parliamentary submission from Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. “It is … the largest potential market for Australian transplant tourists.”

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade first assistant secretary Graham Fletcher told the committee China has dismissed such claims as “complete nonsense …[but] I’d say there’s probably a few rough edges around that system — it’s a very big country”.

Lin also is here to promote an alarming documentary, In The Name Of Confucius, about Chinese interference in our affairs.

It raises concerns about the Beijing-sponsored Confucius Institute, which is embedded in 14 Australian universities, including Sydney and Melbourne, and 67 schools, ostensibly to teach Chinese language and culture, with teachers and funding from China.

The NSW government has just launched a review of the program, over concerns of undue foreign influence. The NSW schools involved include Chatswood Public School, Fort Street High, Mosman High, Chatswood High, Rooty Hill High, Bonnyrigg High and Homebush Boys High.

Lin says the institutes are Trojan horses, part of the “overseas propaganda unit of the Chinese government”, used to censor debate about its human rights record, actions in Tibet and the Tiananmen Square massacre. “They teach songs which are from my childhood which praised Mao as a great leader.”

Lin is not alone in her criticism of the Confucius Institute. Ross Babbage, former head of strategic analysis in the Office of National Assessments, has warned: “Accepting Chinese government-funded personnel within an Australian state government department is a very serious issue that deserves urgent review.”

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The Real Bodies exhibition is now in Sydney. (Pic: Supplied)

nd FBI director Christopher Wray told a US Senate intelligence committee inquiry in January: “It is something that we’re watching warily.”

Lin has testified to our parliament, the US Congress, the European Union and the UK parliament. She was promoting the documentary at screenings in Parliament House in Canberra last week, and in the NSW Parliament this week.

But she’s too hot to handle for our ABC, which seems to prefer to side with the Chinese regime.

Last week the ABC abruptly cancelled a scheduled interview with Lin after a producer expressed concerns about her “affiliations”.

“The producer was very honest on the phone,” says Lin. “She said [the order to cancel] came from higher up because of my affiliations … That’s a Chinese propaganda term”.

The ABC has denied her claim but Lin, who recorded her conversation with the producer, says the “affiliation” is Falun Gong, a yoga-style religion which is banned in China, whose adherents are persecuted and imprisoned.

Although not denying she has been a practitioner of Falun Gong, Lin says she is not affiliated with any group. “I speak for myself. It is very undignifying when Western media describe me as a follower of Falun Gong. It’s not doing justice to the very hard choices I have made.”

Since migrating to Canada with her mother at age 12, Lin has made the ideological journey from brainwashed Communist to using her Miss World platform to campaign against human rights abuses in her former homeland. Her family in China have been punished and her father’s business destroyed. Those are the hard choices she has made, and the least we should do is listen.