From Silent Invasion (Clive Hamilton, 2018) pp258-9
In response to the political donations scandal that broke out in Australia, in August 2016, University of Melbourne legal academic Joo-Cheong Tham wrote an article — the bottom line of which was that foreigners have legitimate interests in donating to Australian political parties and that those who question Chinese donations are confused about the concept of ‘Chinese’ and fall into xenophobia of the Yellow Peril kind.3 It is true that the scandal risked tarnishing all people of Chinese heritage with the same brush, but Professor Tham shows that he missed the essential point of the scandal when he poses the following rhetorical question: ‘Why is ancestry or country of birth presumed to be significant among “Chinese” political donors but not among others?’ I hope by now it will be obvious to the reader that the nature of the modern Chinese political regime is precisely that it makes ancestry significant. The CCP explicitly makes ethnicity an issue. This is the danger for Australia, and we will be able to breathe easy about the large number of ‘overseas Chinese’ in Australia only when their ancestry matters no more than it does for immigrants from Italy, Indonesia or Chile.
Joo-Cheong Tham is but one of the many academics I have come across working on China who believe that China is essentially the same as any other country and any suggestion that it is not must be motivated by xenophobia. Even critics of the PRC who are fluent in Mandarin and have deep Chinese experience and connections (often familial) are whispered to be xenophobic so that their arguments can be dismissed. The racism charge is harder to make against ethnic Chinese critics of the PRC, so they are typically ignored. In truth, it is not the alleged xenophobia of the critics but the innocence and naivety of the sympathisers that stand out.
It might seem odd to place Bob Hawke, known as a wily politician, among the innocents. The money seems to have smoothed his path to the status of ‘friend of China’. For well over a decade his main occupation has been facilitating business deals with Chinese firms and by the mid—2000s he had become ‘seriously wealthy’, with a fortune of some $50 million.‘ In 2012, National Party firebrand Barnaby Joyce denounced him for his (alleged) involvement ‘in selling large parts of regional Australia to the Chinese’.
The former prime minister has taken on the task of reassuring Australians concerned about China’s intentions. He was one of the most vocal supporters of the free trade deal with China, going against calls by some in the Labor Party he once led for greater protections for Australian jobs.6 In a 2012 opinion piece extolling the wonders of the return of the Middle Kingdom and its peaceful intentions, he assured his readers that he could see ‘absolutely no grounds for apprehension’ about China’s rise.7 He tells his nervous American friends that when China becomes the dominant economic power it ‘will simply be occupying a position it has held for most of the past 2500 years’. Even if this claim were not a piece of historical revisionism (an ambit claim that with repetition must have washed over Hawke at all of those banquets), the suggestion that we should not be wary of China’s dominance because that’s how it was for 2500 years is hardly comforting.
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