Rita Panahi: Now, more than ever, we must stand up to China

China’s assault against Australia has moved from underhanded trade tactics to attacks against our national character.

No matter how much more insane 2020 becomes, it’ll never be batshit crazy enough to justify China berating Australia about our human rights record.

Copping a lecture on human rights violations from China is akin to copping one about humility from Kanye West or logic and self-awareness from Kevin Rudd. China’s assault against Australia has moved from underhanded trade tactics to blatant economic coercion to attacks against our national character.

The latest strike was almost too absurd to fathom. Chinese propagandists produced an image of an Australian soldier holding a blood-soaked knife to the neck of an Afghan child inexplicably cuddling a lamb. The picture was posted by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian. A hostile move Zhao would only make with the backing of his superiors.

It is somewhat disturbing this is Beijing’s response to the Treasurer and Prime Minister seeking to repair bilateral relations with the economic superpower.

Expect the Chinese communist regime to be further emboldened as they wait for their preferred candidate, Joe Biden aka “the big guy”, to begin his reign at the White House. For a few hours on election night, when Donald Trump’s odds shortened dramatically as he led the count in key states, China’s Yuan plummeted recording its biggest single-day fall in more than 2½ years. A few days later it had reached its strongest position in more than two years.

Now is not the time to take a backward step against a regime that is determined to use its economic might to bully smaller nations into submission. For too long, the West has ignored China’s tyranny and the threat the dictatorship poses not only to its own citizens but to residents of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. Picture: Carlos Garcia Rawlins

It takes obscene levels of chutzpah for China, with its deplorable record of gross human rights violations, to criticise a country like Australia. There’d be zero chance of China launching a thorough investigation into the behaviour of its armed forces.

Indeed, those who gave orders for soldiers to slaughter students in Tiananmen Square weren’t punished but promoted.

China is right now engaged in ethnic cleansing of its Uighur population, more than a million of whom are locked in concentration and forced labour camps for the crime of being an ethnic and religious minority. How can a country that allows forced organ harvesting, forced abortion and the killing of political dissidents take the high ground on issues of morality and ethics?

It’s interesting Zhao chose Twitter to launch this latest attack against Australia. Twitter is banned in China but somehow the tech giant allows Chinese propagandists to use its platform to spread disinformation.

Zhao has form. He has previously used Twitter to spread deliberate lies about the origins of COVID-19 (or Wuhan flu as we should’ve called it). He has tweeted that coronavirus originated in the US and has blamed the US army for bringing the virus to Wuhan.

Sadly, Beijing’s chief propagandist blocked me on Twitter on Monday after I encouraged folks to respond to his lies with Taiwan’s flag. However, that hasn’t stopped China’s bot army from sending me an avalanche of abuse with messages calling me a “white pig”, disparaging my mother and noting my “convict” ancestry.

On a serious note, it’s been promising to see Australia present a united front with both the Coalition and federal Labor slamming China’s lies and aggression. It hasn’t always been that way. China’s ugly antics are too often excused by quislings in Australia including members of the Victorian government who went against the national interest and signed the Belt and Road Initiative, a program designed to advance China’s political and economic influence across the globe.

We mustn’t forget that earlier this year, as China was punishing our farmers by putting tariffs on Australian products, Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas claimed it was China that was the victim of “vilification”, which he warned was “dangerous, damaging and probably irresponsible” before blaming the federal government for “inelegant interventions”.

China arguably poses the greatest threat to the free world and with an obedient Biden administration, it is likely to become even more ambitious and aggressive. We have only scratched the surface on the Biden family’s dealings with China given the story was suppressed by Big Tech, including Twitter and Facebook, and the bulk of the media in the lead-up to the presidential election.

With the exception of the New York Post and a handful of others, most media outlets did their utmost to bury or misrepresent the story as a foreign disinformation campaign despite it being nothing of the sort. There will be all sorts of implications for Australia if the next US president is in a weakened position with China.

The pandemic saw a coalition form against Beijing with more than 100 countries co-sponsoring a motion for an independent investigation into the origins of the COVID-19. That momentum cannot be lost as China lashes out against countries with the courage to stand up to the Red Dragon.

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist

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