Crackdown leaves us in the dark on China
The loss of Australia’s entire corps of journalists covering China reduces the relationship immeasurably. Surprisingly few people in Australian public life in any institutions have spent time living or working in China — or in Asia generally.
Thus we have become all the more dependent on Australian correspondents acting as our ears and eyes in finding out what’s happening in the People’s Republic, and explaining why.
China’s own media can’t act as proxies to do that job. President, and more importantly Chinese Communist Party general secretary, Xi Jinping has told Chinese journalists: “Your name is Party.” He has said: “Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles.” Since the days of Mao Zedong, after whom the PRC “opened its doors” to reform and to the wider world, Australian media organisations have deployed a distinguished cohort to cover events there. They have included Robert Thomson, the worldwide chief executive of News Corporation; Richard McGregor, who is now a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute; and Stephen McDonell, who made his name with the ABC and is now a prominent BBC journalist still based in Beijing.
But earlier this year, two other prominent Australian journalists working for international media — The Wall Street Journal’s Phil Wen, and The New York Times’s Chris Buckley, the doyen of Aussies covering China — were forced to leave as their visas were cut short or not renewed.
The more dramatic, forced departure this week of the ABC’s Bill Birtles and The Australian Financial Review’s Mike Smith has come as a terrible shock to their readers, viewers and listeners, as well as to former correspondents including myself.
The Australian’s China correspondent Will Glasgow has been working for a short time in Sydney, having returned for family reasons. And Eryk Bagshaw, appointed as China correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has been unable to take up his post due to the COVID-19 restraints. Thus now there is no correspondent left in situ.
Covering China has always been a challenging gig. Press conferences, parliamentary sittings and other set-piece events are exceedingly rare, and access to courts is even rarer.
It is almost unknown for senior officials to speak on the phone or to be available in general. And increasingly, academics and others formerly prepared to be quoted or to provide background information have become too anxious to talk publicly, or have been silenced. China’s diplomats, often formerly helpful, have been transformed. Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged them to adopt a “fighting spirit” and be wolf-warriors.
Chinese people have usually been willing to talk to correspondents. But they also now face risks as China becomes a controlled land of algorithmic governance and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology, with 800,000 street cameras in Beijing alone.
Correspondents have always come under surveillance — in part, because the PRC still finds it difficult to comprehend that Western media can be truly independent of their governments.
The Chinese assistants of correspondents are required to report regularly to security services. Offices and apartments are believed to be capable of observation, if not watched all the time.
While working in Beijing as The Australian’s China correspondent, I was drafting a feature on how Xi was restructuring the party.
The dramatic Crown Casino arrests distracted me for a fortnight, but when I returned to the draft on my laptop I discovered written above my notes, in a strange script but in English, the words: “The glorious Communist Party of China, always with you.” It had either been hacked in, or physically written in by someone gaining access. It was a message.
But that and other encounters I experienced with China’s surveillance state were of a different order from the nightmare from which Birtles and Smith have just emerged, and worse still, from the fate still facing our friend Cheng Lei, the Australian TV presenter.
If the midnight knocks by the authorities on their apartment doors were meant to send a message, we don’t know what it is.
If the message is that merely doing one’s job diligently in China is not enough to prevent being targeted to send a message to Canberra to “show more respect”, then almost every Australian working there may rightly be feeling more anxious today — which is a terrible result for this crucial relationship.
Rowan Callick, an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute, was twice a China correspondent for The Australian, and before that for The Australian Financial Review