China row: Culture shock as ASIO move risks collateral damage

Cancellation of the Australian visa of Li Jianjun has sent shockwaves through the cultural world that connects Australia with China.

Chinese academic Li Jianjun.

Cancellation of the Australian visa of Li Jianjun has sent shockwaves through the cultural world that connects Australia with China. The move by ASIO against Chen Hong, director of Australian Studies at the East China Normal University at Shanghai, is more predictable.

Professor Chen, while building his earlier reputation as a scholar of Australian Nobel-prize winner Patrick White, has in recent years transformed into something of a wolf-warrior academic, attacking Australian policy frequently via Global Times commentaries.

Locking out Professor Li is a more momentous and controversial step, which appears to indicate that Canberra has chosen, hopefully only temporarily, to close one of Australia’s most consistently supportive doors into China.

Quietly spoken and widely liked, Professor Li is director of the Australian Studies Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University, secretary-general of the Chinese Association for Australian Studies, managing editor of the Chinese Journal of Australian Studies, executive editor-in-chief of the annual Blue Book of Aus­tralia, and convener of annual symposiums on China-Australia Relations and Trans­cultural ­Studies.

He is an ever-present guest at formal events at the Australian embassy in Beijing, and a frequent visitor to Australia, including in recent years as a researcher for a University of Western Sydney PhD on Australian writers in China in the 1950s and 1960s.

Professor Li, who declined to comment publicly on Thursday, has written to Michael Burgess, the director-general of ASIO, to request him to review the visa cancellation. In his letter, he says he thinks ASIO’s assessment of him must have been caused by “some misunderstanding”.

“I’m a scholar of Australian literature and essentially non-­political,” he says. “I have never done and will never do anything detrimental to the bilateral relationship between our countries.

“I have never been and will never be a direct or indirect risk to Australia’s security, or indeed any country’s security.”

He says cancellation of his visa “is a shock to me, disheartens the Australian studies community in China, and risks damaging many decades of important Australian studies work in China. Currently the bilateral relationship is strained but it is not in Australia’s national interest to punish its friends in China.”

He may have become collateral damage as a member of an online social group on the WeChat platform that includes Professor Chen and two subjects of a special ASIO investigation under the 2018 foreign interference legislation, NSW Labor backbencher Shaoquett Moselmane and his former staffer John Zhang.

Professor Chen has said that the group, self-titled FD for Fair Dinkum, is innocuous.

Canberra had to date avoided the tit-for-tat measures enveloping Washington and Beijing, including the expulsion of journalists. This ASIO move on Professor Li may have resulted from his being caught up in the organisation’s determination to achieve results from the new interference legislation.

Of course, there is no equivalence between the state security arms of China and Australia.

The former, all-powerful and unaccountable, has detained Australian CGTN business anchor Cheng Lei for a month now, for interrogation at an unknown location for an unknown duration for unknown reasons.

Rowan Callick is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.