Tgk1946's Blog

From Silent Invasion (Clive Hamilton, 2018)p20

The CCP leadership is aware that announcing its longer-term ambition would provoke resistance and so it conceals its deep strategy behind a story of peaceful economic development and engagement with the world. Every now and then, however, the secret leaks out. In 2015 the deputy director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO), He Yafei, gave a speech to senior cadres.“ As we’ll see, the OCAO is a leading organ of the State Council, the PRC’s chief administrative authority, with the primary task of mobilising the Chinese diaspora to serve Beijing’s goals. A report of the speech (in Chinese) somehow made its way onto the website of the State Council Information Office. He Yafei’s theme was the need to propagate ‘China’s voice’ through- out the world. The first of six areas he covered was the domination of international public opinion by Western media groups and the need ‘to carve out a bloody path and smash the West’s monopoly and public opinion hegemony’. He then set out the need to replace with ‘China’s value system’ important ideas invented by America and the West like ‘soft power’ and the ‘clash of civilisations’ as well as ideas like ‘freedom, democracy [and] equal human rights’.

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It would be a mistake for Australians to believe that spurious historical claims to justify territorial ambitions are confined to China’s traditional sphere of influence. China is using fake history to position itself to make a future claim over Australia. When in 2003 President Hu Jintao addressed the Australian parliament, he began with a piece of outrageous historical revisionism.

The Chinese people have all along cherished amicable feelings about the Australian people. Back in the 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming Dynasty reached Australian shores. For centuries, the Chinese sailed across vast seas and settled down in what they called Southern Land, or today’s Australia. They brought Chinese culture to this land and lived harmoniously with the local people, contributing their proud share to Australia’s economy, society and its thriving pluralistic culture.

Hu’s claims may have been based on the junk history penned by Englishman Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The year China discovered the world, which claimed a fleet led by Admiral Zhou Man sailed the world, stopping off at all major continents where the Chinese sailors mixed with the natives, including in Eden, New South Wales. The evidentiary holes in Menzies’ claims began to be pointed out even before his book was published,51 and in 2006 an ABC Four Corners program eviscerated Menzies and his history.52 Maps that Menzies has produced to prove his propositions have been shown to be fakes. Chinese scholars have been as assiduous in their testing and debunking of Menzies’ historical claims as Western ones.53 In short, there is no evidence that a Ming Chinese fleet came anywhere near Australia. (Having wrung all he could out of the 1421 story, Menzies moved on, discovering the lost city of Atlantis.)

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Along with Chinese-language media, Chinese-Australian social and professional organisations are the primary means of guiding people of Chinese origin and promoting China’s ‘soft power’. The China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification (CCPPNR) is a central organ of the United Front Work Department.21 The Australian arm of the council is the Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China (ACPPRC), the peak body of dozens of overseas Chinese organisations in Australia.22 The council’s executive positions are filled by people the embassy trusts to advance the interests of the PRC. When the ACPPRC was founded in 2000 as part of the CCP’s renewed United Front effort, its aim was to eclipse the older Chinese social organisations run by ethnic Chinese whose loyalty to Beijing was questionable. The old groups had been created by what qiaowu analysts disparagingly called the (Three Knives’, poorly educated Chinese migrants who worked in restaurants, market gardens and the garment industry.23 The ‘Three Knives’ would be pushed out by the ‘Six Masters’— lawyers, engineers, doctors, accountants, professors and scientists — who, united by the new organisations, would spread China’s new vitality.

The billionaire political donors Chau Chak Wing and Huang Xiangmo have held senior positions in the ACPPRC, but its inaugural president in 2000 was William Chiu. Chiu was a radical Maoist as a student, persecuted in his Malaysian homeland, who would become an eminent citizen of New South Wales and an important Liberal Party political donor who hobnobbed with the state’s great and good. He was also a loyal Chinese Communist Party cadre. When he died in 2015, Liberal Party grandee Philip Ruddock spoke at his funeral and delivered a eulogy in federal parliament. New South Wales premier Barry O’Farrell laid a wreath. Chin’s ashes were laid to rest at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, reserved for revolutionary heroes and top officials, including Xi Jinping’s father. His corpse was draped with the flag of the ACPPRC, brought from Australia. Comrade Yu Zhengsheng, one of the seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification and chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, sent flowers to the ceremony. Senior cadres from the United Front Work Department and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office also paid their respects. The People} Daily hailed William Chiu as a ‘great China patriot’.“

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Chinese law forbids dual citizenship, demanding the undivided loyalty of its citizens. The law, however, is inconsistent with the CCP’s aim of keeping and strengthening the ties of overseas Chinese to the motherland. So in practice large numbers of Chinese who carry Australian, American and other passports retain their PRC passports, allowing unimpeded travel between the ancestral homeland and the new country of citizenship. The CCP’s aim is to persuade or induce overseas Chinese to owe allegiance to Beijing. As more Chinese-Australians enter politics (which in itself is to be welcomed), section 44 of the Australian Constitution (the cause of so much parliamentary angst in 2017) will become increasingly germane. It renders ineligible for federal parliament anyone who owes ‘allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or citizen of a foreign power’.

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No one is more alarmed by these developments than those Chinese-Australians who are loyal first and foremost to Australia. When I met with dissident writer Qi Jiazhen in Melbourne, her friend told me that wherever you go the party wants to control you. ‘They can do anything. They don’t care . .. You never have peace.’ His blunt message to his fellow Chinese-Australians is this: ‘You chose this place as your home. If you go out and protest and support the Communist Party then Australia should send you back to China.’