Liberals talked of banning Chinese super app – now MPs flock to it

Liberal MPs are flocking back to Chinese social media service WeChat, reversing a Morrison-era boycott over national security concerns to win back diaspora voters who turned against the party and cost it seats at the last election.

The party’s full court press to woo the constituency includes recruiting candidates and staffers of Chinese heritage, along with a plan to push more MPs to open accounts on the ubiquitous platform despite accusations it is a Communist Party tool.

The Coalition under Peter Dutton is back on WeChat to court Chinese Australians alienated by Scott Morrison.Credit: Jamie Brown

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been working with local Chinese media on the app that spans everything from messaging to payments. Melbourne MPs Michael Sukkar and Keith Wolahan are gaining hundreds of thousands of views on videos posted to their own accounts.

The Liberals are considering setting up an official party account alongside individual MPs who are establishing accounts. Senior party sources familiar with the matter said they viewed winning back Chinese-Australians as equally important to retaking the six seats it lost to teal independents.

“We pissed off a lot of the Chinese community in 2022 [under Scott Morrison] and Dutton instinctively knows we can and must improve on last time,” a top Liberal source said.

Dutton has notably softened his rhetoric on China since the past election, describing himself as “pro-China” in the lead-up to a June visit by Chinese Premier Li Qiang, stressing his desire for peace in the Indo-Pacific and effusively praising the Chinese diaspora. However, the Liberals responded with harsh criticism when Chinese officials clumsily inserted themselves between reporter Cheng Lei and cameras during Li’s visit, highlighting the difficulty in maintaining a more dovish stance.

A Lowy Institute survey released in 2023 found that 47 per cent of Chinese-Australians use WeChat, only slightly below Facebook usage. Tencent, the company that owns WeChat, told a parliamentary committee last year that it had under 500,000 users, down from 790,000 three years earlier.

The Morrison government, in which Dutton was home affairs minister, muscled up to China during COVID over the origins of the virus and foreign interference. But the party’s tough rhetoric contributed to the voter group swinging sharply away from the Coalition, contributing to losses in four seats, and forcing Wolahan and Sukkar into ultra-marginal fights.

The Liberals now believe they can win back about half the Chinese-Australians they lost, aided by running candidates including Scott Yung in the Sydney seat of Bennelong and Howard Ong in Perth’s Tangney.

Wolahan has racked up more than 130,000 views on videos discussing topics such as vaping and school standards. He told this masthead his party needed to show “sincerity and humility” to regain the trust of Chinese-Australians, whom he said would be attracted to the Coalition’s policies on the economy and crime.

Then-prime minister Scott Morrison’s WeChat account, which had about 76,000 followers, was taken over and rebranded “Australian Chinese new life” in January 2022, following a dispute between the government and WeChat. This led to a boycott of the app among some Coalition MPs.

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson, who led a Senate inquiry examining foreign interference through social media, said last year WeChat was “an essential tool for communication”.

But he said the committee heard “compelling evidence” that WeChat functions as a “narrative machine” for the Chinese Communist Party and that the app had been used to intimidate and harass Chinese Australians. The government banned WeChat on official devices shortly after Paterson’s probe, acting on intelligence agencies’ advice.

A Liberal source speaking on background to discuss the matter freely said boycotting the app in principle was pointless and added that MP did not have the app on government phones.

Haiqing Yu, a professor of media and communications at RMIT, said it made sense for politicians to use WeChat as a way to reach Chinese-Australian voters, adding it would be seen as a “symbolic gesture” of engagement.

However, she added: “There is a sense of cynicism in the community about politicians who portray WeChat as a propaganda tool of the Chinese Communist Party then rush onto the platform to engage with Chinese-Australian voters.”

Yu said that WeChat was increasingly used by older Chinese-Australian voters, with younger voters turning to apps like Xiaohongshu (also known as RED or The Little Red Book), which is regarded as China’s version of Instagram.

Fan Yang, an expert on digital technologies at the University of Melbourne, said that independent MP Monique Ryan and NSW Premier Chris Minns stood out for their use of WeChat to engage with Chinese-Australian voters.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.