From Silent Invasion (Clive Hamilton, 2018) pp235-7
Sally Zou’s gold
Sally Zou has come to public attention for her extraordinary generosity. The owner of the gold mining company Aus Gold Mining Group, she donated $460,000 to the Liberal Party in 2015-16, making her easily the dominant donor in South Australia.
When she is in Australia Ms Zou is a fiercely patriotic Australian. To prove it she took out a full-page newspaper advertisement to celebrate Australia Day. She even had her Rolls Royce painted over with the Australian flag. If this says something about the vulgarity of China’s nouveaux riches, Sally Zen is not alone. In August 2017 some rich Chinese-Australians in Sydney drove through the city in a convoy of luxury cars emblazoned with Chinese flags and patriotic slogans. The excuse for this crude display of wealth was to protest against Indian incursions in Chinese territory (in fact, the PLA had occupied part of Bhutan). Next to a Bentley painted CCP red, a Porsche displayed a decal of the disputed Himalayan border region with the slogan ‘China, Not An Inch Will Be Given Up’, a slogan popularised by ANU student Lei Xiying.‘
Aus Gold established an engineering scholarship at the University of Adelaide and Zou became the largest benefactor of Port Adelaide Football Club. She says she wants to help the club take Australian football to the world. In May 2017, with her financial backing, the club played the AFL’s first overseas league match in Shanghai watched by 10,000 fans, most of whom had flown from Australia.” The idea of exporting a love of Aussie Rules to China is mere whimsy, so there must be another objective to Zou’s investment.
When she is talking to the Chinese press Zou’s patriotism changes hue. A 2011 story in People’s Daily entitled ‘Sally Zou: Devoting my wisdom to the Ancestral Nation from a foreign land’ reported Zou saying that ‘despite being a stranger in a strange land, she will continue to devote her wisdom and strength to the prosperous development of the Ancestral Nation’.” She had certainly done well in the Ancestral Nation, after being born into a wealthy steel-making family and setting up a Hong Kong company at age twenty-nine with a registered capital of HK$200 million.”
Sally Zou declared that she was ‘willing to make her own company become a platform for Chinese enterprises to enter Australia,’ while she also wanted to ‘sell iron ore to Chinese enterprises at a lower price than Australian mining tycoons, to support the construction of the Ancestral Nation’. She ran into criticism when she struck a multibillion-dollar deal giving the huge state-owned China Gold Group exclusive rights to buy all gold produced by Aus Gold Mining. Aus Gold later denied that any preferential deal had been made, stating that they ‘would prefer ‘ to sell our gold to Australian buyers’. ‘We are very loyal to the Australian community and Australian government’, said a spokesperson. ‘We are committed to Australia’s future. We would like to make contributions back.’ In a March 2017 ceremony overseen by New South Wales energy and resources minister Don Harwin, China Gold Group signed an agreement underwriting Zou’s Aus Gold.
Perhaps Sally Zou’s passion for both China and Australia only proves her commitment to bringing the two nations into a closer harmony. As evidence we might point to Sally’s daughter, Gloria, whose eighth birthday Sally celebrated by spending around $50,000 on a full-page advertisement in The Australian. Gloria is known to the People’s Daily as the ‘Little angel of Australia-China friendship’. Gloria may have been speaking for her mother when at a precious metals symposium she predicted that ‘there will be a golden “Maritime Silk Road” between China and Australia and the coming “golden age of China-Australia relations” will have shining luster and long-term stability like gold and last for thousands of years maintaining beauty and firmness without changes’.
Julie Bishop, whose West Australian branch of the Liberal Party has enjoyed a tsunami of Chinese cash, was so moved by these remarkably mature sentiments that she met with Gloria at a garden party where she heard another speech from the eight-year-old expressing her dream of ‘China and Australia as one family’. Sally had spread the love by setting up the Julie Bishop Glorious Foundation. Addressing an incredulous Opposition in parliament, the foreign minister said she had never heard of it.
Tgk1946's Blog 