China row: Journalists just pawns in the Great Game

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. Picture: AFP

It was frank advice from one of the Morrison government’s shrewdest China advisers.

“You’re a pawn in the Great Game,” he said, in an unnervingly cheerful tone, when asked his thoughts on my returning to Beijing.

After this week, who would argue?

Being an Australian reporter working for Australian media in China has suddenly become an endangered — although I still hope not an extinct — profession.

It seems Chinese state media journalists haven’t had a great few months in Australia either. So there was a bit to work over as I debated whether to catch a Xiamen Airlines flight back to China last Sunday.

As China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian pointed out at a regular media briefing in Beijing, I was actually scheduled to return a week earlier, after a few months in Australia attending to some family affairs.

“Will Glasgow … handed his visa applications for his return in August and the Chinese side made special arrangements and smoothed things out for his and his family member’s return. He was planning to fly back to China this weekend,” Zhao explained to reporters on Thursday. “It was the Australian side that asked him to delay his travel.”

All true.

Zhao’s colleagues at China’s foreign ministry have been extremely helpful over the past few months. Less so, the crew at China’s Ministry of State Security.

Almost a month ago, the MSS began its ongoing detention of Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen and Beijing-based business anchor at the state television channel CGTN.

That spooked Australian authorities into urging the ABC’s Bill Birtles and The Australian Financial Review’s Mike Smith to flee the country, and tell me to hold off on last weekend’s flight.

It turned out a bit more was going on in the background.

Back on June 26, four Chinese journalists working for state media in Sydney were the subject of an unprecedented raid by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

According to a still-to-be confirmed report by China’s Xinhua news agency, the dawn encounter with 10 ASIO officers was not a pleasant experience.

The agents reportedly inspected wardrobes, confiscated computers, and even a child’s tablet computer, during “four to six hours” of interrogation.

“The Chinese journalists were treated very unfairly,” a Chinese diplomatic source told me.

ASIO has not commented on the raid, which was reportedly linked to whether or not Chinese citizens helped Shaoquett Moselmane — an upper house member of the NSW state opposition and not exactly a leading light of Australia’s foreign policy community — write an absurdly pro-China speech and opinion piece.

China responds tit-for-tat to impositions on its state media, as the Xi administration has made abundantly clear to the US government this year.

Two months after ASIO’s speech-and-opinion-piece raids, there is now not a single journalist working for Australian media in China.

Not that the Chinese have banned us. It was the Australian government who told us to leave or, in my case, not return. That advice appears to be unprecedented for journalists from any other country, however tense their bilateral relationship with China.

It has Australian journalists working in China for other international organisations — be it the BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg or Al Jazeera — understandably worried about what else ASIO might have in store.

Based on recent precedent, those Australian journalists should not expect to figure highly in the decision-making matrix in Canberra.

As for me, I won’t be adding to the number of Australian pawns in China for at least another week.

While I might push back on advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, my wife is another matter. The wise woman cancelled our Sunday tickets without telling me.