Saving face at China’s latest piece of Australia
It was a strange house warming where the invited guests weren’t even allowed to enter the house.
It was a strange house warming where the invited guests weren’t allowed to enter the house.
Just after 9am Tuesday, about 100 hand-picked guests and dignitaries arrived for the official opening of the new Chinese consulate in Adelaide by Premier Steven Marshall and representatives of the Chinese government.
Upon entering the vast 5600 sq m compound in the once-peaceful eastern suburb of Joslin, guests were directed away from the consular buildings towards a white marquee erected for the occasion.
“It did seem quite strange,” one of the guests told The Weekend Australian. “I have attended many launches and you generally get to see what’s being launched.”
Seated on plastic patio chairs in the marquee, guests received a goodie bag containing a souvenir mug adorned with Chinese state logos, a pamphlet commemorating the opening of the consulate, a small box of moon cakes decorated with Mandarin characters and a bottle of spring water.
As the guests waited for the formal speeches, a ruckus began outside where about 300 protesters screamed anti-Beijing slogans through the consulate fence.
“No one mentioned the racket but one of the ladies from the consulate started to look quite panic-stricken and rushed over to the sound guy and told him to turn up the PA system to drown out the noise,” the guest said. “The power also went out briefly. It was all a bit surreal.”
Amid the din a small band — comprised of members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra — played on and a group of Chinese students from local schools performed traditional songs.
Denying the guests access to the inner sanctum in the consulate suggested that while you can accuse China of many things self-awareness is not one of them.
These are the same consular staff who asked The Australian last month whether the newspaper had sought permission from either the consulate or SA Police to interview residents on a public street in Australia about their grievances with the project.
It was a question that underscored the different approaches of our countries, which was further highlighted on Tuesday by the guests being barred from entering the consulate as protesters outside gave Beijing’s Adelaide-based operatives a first-hand look at democracy in action.
The protest was a pleasantly unusual assortment of humanity — it looked like a world music festival crossed with a Country Road catalogue.
There were scores of Uighur people wearing embroidered hats, the Uighur men sporting shaved underbeards and some of the women in veils. Next to them, a bunch of well-heeled, middle-aged, white folks, who, in some cases, were just annoyed that the consulate had damaged a fence during construction or was aiming security cameras into their yard.
The meat in the sandwich in all this is Premier Marshall. The creation of the new consulate was approved by the previous Weatherill Labor government in 2016 and the project was taken out of the hands of the usual authorities and green-lighted by the Co-ordinator General as being of state importance.
Mr Marshall was in the doubly awkward position of being the member for the eastern suburbs seat of Dunstan — home to many angry Joslin residents — and also being presented with a diplomatic dilemma to open the consulate.
Decline and risk a diplomatic row, or go and risk being labelled an appeaser who is indifferent to the impact of China’s trade war on South Australia’s winemakers, farmers and seafood industry.
“He should have just said he was double booked,” one Liberal MP told The Australian, recommending the same tactic used by Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas, who ducked the invite with the flimsy excuse that he couldn’t get out of attending a routine Caucus meeting.
Other SA political figures in attendance were Lord Mayor Sandy Verschoor, Trade Minister Stephen Patterson and, representing Labor, MP Zoe Bettison.
South Australia’s media were not invited, with the consulate taking aim on its website at The Australian’s coverage of the Joslin residents’ concerns.
“Certain Australian media maliciously slander the office construction project of our Consulate-General, made groundless accusations against our office, and drove a wedge between our Chinese consular mission and local people,” the statement read. “We firmly oppose it.”
The consulate instead invited pro-Beijing local Chinese media and used its own photographer to document the occasion, with the photos accompanying this article now up on its website.
Mr Marshall’s predicament in attending was made worse by the fact that, since accepting the launch invitation several weeks ago, the relationship with China has gone from bad to worse.
Just days after saying yes to the invite, China toughened its rhetoric against the West with Chinese President Xi Jinping telling the annual conference of the Chinese Communist Party that “the entire military must co-ordinate the relationship between capacity building and combat readiness”.
Then days before the consulate launch, China announced that the tariffs that are decimating some of SA’s biggest and proudest winemakers would be extended from 12 months to five years.
Mr Marshall has declined several requests from The Australian for comment on the consulate issue, but was pressed about it on Adelaide radio last month when he said that he met with many national groups and that Australia had an important trade and cultural relationship with China. He has not released the speech he gave launching the consulate.
“What he said was utterly predictable,” the insider at the launch told The Weekend Australian. “He made a bland comment similar to what the PM has said about how sometimes in any relationship we are tested. There was nothing contentious. He certainly didn’t say anything about the trade war though.”
Speaking to The Australian after addressing the protesters, independent senator Rex Patrick said the consulate stood as a symbol of how unmanageable the China relationship had become.
“We have got all these people standing here today with real grievances on everything from human rights and democracy, national security, trade and the shocking behaviour of the consulate itself towards the locals,” he said. “The whole thing is absurd. It should never have been put here.”
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