Why we can’t afford to dismiss China fears as racism
China is at war with Australia, hitting us with cyber attacks and trade boycotts while recruiting dozens of academics to steal Australian-funded science. How many of our 1.2 million ethnic Chinese would help its dictatorship, asks Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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It’s the question multicultural Australia is too scared to ask: how many of our 1.2 million ethnic Chinese would help China’s dictatorship?
In fact, how many already help China as its leader instructs its military to “prepare for war”?
This is not an idle question.
China is already at war with Australia, launching cyber attacks and punishing us with trade boycotts.
Meanwhile, it is recruiting dozens of Australian academics — many ethnic Chinese — to steal their Australian-funded science under its secretive “Thousand Talents Plan”.
China is also openly appealing to the patriotism of Chinese Australians — to their love of China, not Australia.
As former prime minister John Howard observed in a panel discussion in London on national security: “One million (Australians) are of ethnic Chinese background, terrific citizens making an enormous contribution to our nation, but it remains the case that China is very interested in the capacity to use those people to further her power and her interests.”
This danger is now too real to ignore.
A paper in the Australian Journal of Defence and Strategic Studies this week warns China’s military build-up will help create “a much higher threat environment” for us over the next two decades.
Another journal paper, by Ross Babbage, former head of strategic analysis in the Office of National Assessments, warns of “sabotage operations conducted by ‘fifth column’” if war does break out over, say, Taiwan.
It shouldn’t need saying that the vast majority of ethnic Chinese Australians are loyal to Australia. Many are hostile to China’s dictatorship, knowing its menace better than most.
But many Australians have been trained or terrified into dismissing any questions about dual loyalties as “racist”.
We saw that only too shamefully last year when Prime Minister Scott Morrison played the race card to silence those of us asking why Liberal MP Gladys Liu was a member of organisations tied to China’s main propaganda arm, the United Front Work Department.
“They seek to smear an Australian of Chinese heritage,” Morrison raged.
“This has a very grubby undertone in terms of the smear that is being placed on Gladys Liu … and the broader smear that I think is implied in that over more than one million other Australians”.
His words — not surprisingly — were echoed by China itself, which would love to stifle debate about its influence here.
As Eric Chan, a China-Korea strategist for the US air force, has pointed out, shouting “racist” also helps the dictatorship in another crucial way: “By raising the spectre of racism and xenophobia, it promotes the (Chinese Communist Party’s) blood and soil argument — that only China and the CCP can protect ethnic Chinese.”
Ironically, what critics call racist — noting the potential of dual loyalties of some ethnic Chinese — is actually China’s policy.
In 2017, President Xi Jinping said he wanted to use the Chinese overseas: “We will maintain extensive contacts with Overseas Chinese nationals, returned Chinese and their relatives and unite them so that they can join our endeavours to revitalise the Chinese nation.”
What China means by maintaining “contacts” can be as brutal as threatening relatives still in China.
Student Tony Chang was granted a protection visa by Australia after Chinese state security warned his parents back in Shenyang to make their son quit the Chinese democracy movement in Australia.
China has also tried money. Huang Xiangmo, a billionaire close to the regime and since banned from Australia as a security risk, handed Labor big donations, and bought the loyalty of then senator Sam Dastyari.
If money worked with Dastyari, why wouldn’t it work even better with some Chinese, more likely to also feel some loyalty to China?
And now China has recruited 7000 scientists around the world under its Thousand Talents Plan, hoping to bring their intellectual property to China.
It is no coincidence that many of the Australian scientists who have signed up have Chinese ethnicity.
ASIO is briefing universities about the danger, which is made clear by people like Song Guo Zheng.
Zheng worked in medical research in the United States for over 20 years, but has now been arrested.
He secretly pocketed more than $250,000 a year under the Thousand Talents Plan, and is charged with the illegal transfer of intellectual property from the US to China.
The tragedy is that one Zheng makes 1000 other expatriate Chinese look suspect, and, that, too suits China.
“Racism!” it will cry. Come to Mother China. We love you!
What a dilemma. Ignore the threat, we lose. Call it out, we lose again.