Patrick Carlyon: China may call us 'scumbags’ but our kids will be proud

Australia has been warned against resisting China’s campaign of fear against the Western world, but the Chinese must remember Aussies are people who care for the truth.

At the risk of being a “scumbag”, and shaming my children, let’s address the latest Chinese dressing down of Australian values of freedom and democracy.

Deputy Head of Mission, Wang Xining, has laid out the risks of Australia’s resistance to China’s campaign of fear and loathing against the Western world.

A senior diplomat, his Canberra speech at a Lunar New Year dinner was dipped in the petulance of an unworldly child who rages against a world it does not understand or like.

Wang selected “facts” to entrench the case that Australia, as the Chinese State-run press has asserted, is indeed gum on China’s shoe.

Lost in translation, literally, was the removal of the word “scumbag” in the English transcript of the speech. Scumbags, apparently, are Australians who criticise China.

Wang Xining came in off the long run (for Chinese authorities, that’s a cricket term). Australians were being “brainwashed”.

The knockers (critics) “choose to make enemies to sustain a living”.

Was it a threat, or just a friendly warning, when he said: “Those (scumbags) who deliberately vilify China and sabotage the friendship between our two countries and do damage to our long-term friendship and benefits out of their sectoral or selfish interest will be (cast) aside in history. Their children will be ashamed of mentioning their names in the history.”

Call me a scumbag. Cover my children’s ears.

China’s ad hoc boycotting of Australia’s exports, its recalcitrance against the overwhelming evidence for the origins of COVID, and its genocidal treatment of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, lend weight to unpalatable conclusions.

Deputy Head of Mission, Wang Xining, has laid out the risks of Australia’s resistance to China’s campaign of fear against the Western world. Picture: Gary Ramage

Such as China being a closed society, driven by fear and coercion by a single party political regime that seeks to bully submission from any who question its dynastic ambitions.

Throw in its threats to assimilate Taiwan. And the generational suppression of Tibetans.

What about the routine “disappearing” of so-called dissidents who, if they’re lucky, rematerialise after months in captivity?

It appears that only “scumbags” would think to question such practices. Only scumbags would applaud attempts by Canada and the United States to label China’s human rights record as “genocidal”.

A BBC report from several weeks ago depicted life inside the Uyghur “re-education” centres (concentration camps).

The harrowing tales, from multiple sources, are required reading for any freedom-loving person (scumbag) who seeks to understand China’s intolerance for freedom of thought or expression.

According to one woman, Tursunay Ziyawudun, who is now safely overseas, female camp prisoners are routinely gang-raped by masked men.

They are bitten all over and brutalised into submission by four kinds of electric shock: the chair, the glove, the helmet and rape by an electric stick.

Afterwards, as part of the systemic torture, they are compelled to “confess” their crimes.

Prisoners are punished by being starved or beaten when they fail to accurately recite passages of text about President Xi Jinping, whose images and slogans emblazon the camps.

Ziawudun herself lost her womb because she was trampled on by guards. Evidence mounts of forced sterilisations programs.

“You can’t tell anyone what happened, you can only lie down quietly,” said Ziawudun, who was gang-raped three times in nine months of incarceration.

“It is designed to destroy everyone’s spirit.”

China’s treatment of minorities in 2021 is a modern equivalent of Germany in 1943 or Rwanda in 1994. Picture: AFP

It seems, then, that only scumbags would find parallels between the China of today and Germany of the 1930s.

Only scumbags would wonder at the Australian apologists for China, from mining to media interests, and liken them to the hapless British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who declared in 1938 that Germany may not be so bad after all.

China recently railed against the Five Eyes alliance between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK for its “white supremacy”.

Naughty Canada condemned China for “genocide” in Xinjiang. China accused Australia, among others, of genocide against Indigenous people.

“They have formed a US-centred, racist, and mafia-styled community, wilfully and arrogantly provoking China and trying to consolidate their hegemony as all gangsters do,” China’s Global Times said.

In alluding to reports of China’s concentration camps in his recent speech, Wang spoke of respect.

“Maybe you don’t fully agree with our model of governance and administration, but at least you respect and understand the reason behind our development path and model of governance,” he said.

Actually, we don’t. The Uyghur situation is an affront to humanity. To not describe it as an atrocity is to bow to an evil conspiracy.

China’s treatment of minorities in 2021 is a modern equivalent of Germany in 1943 or Rwanda in 1994. History is doomed to condemn China in the same terms.

Scumbags are behind the worldwide protest against China’s systemic debasement of human rights. Besides wearing labels, such as “racist” and “gangster”, scumbags are people who care for the truth.

May it long last. Along with mateship and resilience, being a scumbag, as it has been redefined, promises to be a defining characteristic of a nation that will make our children proud.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist

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