China’s Xi Jinping lets a thousand free spirits wither

Badiucao, at Brescia’s Museo di Santa Giulia, has painted Carrie Lam with the characteristics of Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

Xi Jinping has claimed grandly that “we” – meaning his Chinese Communist Party – “have created a new form of human civilisation”, indeed “a new world”.

We are learning, step by step, what kind of a civilisation, what kind of world.

In the last few days, we have been reminded that it has become one of scrupulous uniformity, of intolerance of autonomous thought or expression.

In past CCP eras, first all party members, then after seizing power in 1949 all people of China, were expected to accept the discipline of conceding party primacy over mass media, over the arts, over most forms of articulation.

As China prospered and the party’s prefects relaxed a little, confident in their overall success, independently spirited people found ways to be creative, even to a degree in public.

But in this area of expression, in a few short years Xi has walked party and nation back many ­decades. And his “new era” is not stopping at how his own citizens create and communicate. It wishes foreigners to follow suit, ceasing and desisting from questioning the party line.

Some of the Australians who have involved themselves most wholeheartedly and even empathetically in the Chinese world have suffered most from this ­extension of control.

The latest journalist to suffer in this way is Sue-Lin Wong, who was born in Sydney, graduated from the Australian National University, and has proved to be an extraordinarily capable ­reporter covering China from Beijing, then Shenzhen and Hong Kong for Reuters, for the Financial Times, and for The Economist. But now the Hong Kong authorities have refused, without explanation, to renew Wong’s work visa – a move usually ­ordered by Beijing.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chef of The Economist, said that “to maintain access for the foreign press is vital to (Hong Kong’s) standing as an international city”.

Sadly, such standing is of little to zero account for those busily creating “a new world” in Beijing – one in which journalists must understand that, as Xi has said earlier, “their name is party”.

The list of highly credentialed, excellent Australian journalists no longer able to report from China keeps lengthening. It includes The New York Times’ Chris Buckley, The Wall Street Journal’s Phil Wen, the ABC’s Bill Birtles, The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith.

Most distressingly, one must add the outstanding and popular business anchor for China’s own CGTN network, Australian Cheng Lei – who remains jailed, inexplicably, 15 months after being seized and then interrogated over bizarre and vague claims about divulging unspecified state secrets.

Meanwhile, over in the Italian city of Brescia, the city museum, the Museo di Santa Giulia, is having to face down angry complaints from the Chinese embassy in Rome which has tried to put pressure – including hints at commercial coercion – on the local authorities to abandon an exhibition by an Australian artist.

This is a ground-breaking show, the first comprehensive solo exhibition by artist and cartoonist Badiucao, who grew up in Shanghai but has for a decade or so lived in Melbourne. He originally adopted this pen name to conceal his identity and thus shield his family, but has chosen to persist with it after revealing himself publicly in 2019.

The artworks, both audacious and meticulously realised, include a likeness of Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam merged with that of Xi, and a torture device used in Chinese jails re-conceived as a rocking chair.

The Chinese embassy complained that Badiucao’s works are “full of anti-Chinese lies”, although the artist remains proud of his Chinese heritage – though not, of course, of the party that rules there. He told Agence France-Presse that he sought to “celebrate the Chinese people, how brave Chinese people are”.

The city authorities of Brescia, defending all art that mocks the powerful, are continuing to back the show – thus contributing to the essential debate about which form of human civilisation will ultimately prevail.

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