CHARLES WOOLEY
With again China ignoring once the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, some are wondering whether we need to find some new trading friends who share Australia’s values
You certainly won’t read all about it in China, where this month the 29th anniversary of the 1989 slaughter of student protesters went unmarked.
It was as if that dark event simply didn’t happen. It has been erased from history and from the memories of the Chinese population. The Tiananmen Square massacre, infamous around the world, is a blank page in the country where it took place. Last year, the BBC reported that Foreign Office documents now assert at least 10,000 people died in those pro-democracy protests. Previous estimates ranged from several hundred to more than a thousand. Still, the ruling Chinese Communist Party dictates that it never happened and if that’s what the CCP says, then in China at least, you better believe it. Never has George Orwell’s dictum in his frightening novel Nineteen Eighty
Four been so prophetic: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
Twenty-nine years ago, Prime Minister Bob Hawke wept during an emotional speech to the Australian Parliament. He described the actions of the pro-democracy students as “acts of indescribable bravery.” Certainly there were none braver than “Tank Man”, the global nickname for an unknown Chinese youth who on June 5, 1989, stood in front of an encroaching column of Red Army tanks. Whatever happened to him? The video and photographs were seen worldwide and never forgotten, perhaps not completely even in China where to remember is forbidden.
After the event a shaken Australian PM declared: “To crush the spirit and body of youth is to crush the very future of China itself.”
That was a less accurate prophecy than Orwell’s thoughts on the relativity of history. Despite what Hawke said all those years ago, China continues to go from strength to strength economically, militarily and diplomatically. In fact, revisiting those awful events years later, Hawke had to prudently recognise the dragon in the room was our heavy economic reliance on the relationship with China. Just like the rest of Australia, the former PM hedged his bets. “That doesn’t mean you shut your mind to the moral issues, but we would be in God’s most awful mess if we didn’t have the relationship,” he told the National Press Club.
The Chinese aren’t fools. They know that we are a nation which morally, at least until now, wants to have its cake and eat it too. We might demonstrate a degree of ethical posturing concerning human rights but in the end we have always taken the money.
How apposite last week then that our flagship airline Qantas acceded to Chinese demands to recognise that “Taiwan, China” isn’t really an independent democratic nation but is in fact a part of the People’s Republic of China. Landing rights now assured, Qantas hopes the Taiwanese will understand that it’s just business and nothing personal.
Of course, the communist Chinese well know that our yen for the yuan will always overrule our more highfalutin impulses. Marxists have no illusions about the real priorities of capitalists. As Karl Marx so presciently put it: “The capitalist will sell us the rope with which we shall hang him.”
Bob Hawke’s recognition of the “awful mess” without China has been bipartisan in Australian politics, at least until it isn’t. So the past week has been a salutary one for Australian China watchers and maybe, too, for Chinese Australia watchers.
There is now Coalition-Labor bipartisanship, which has already upset Beijing, to prevent “foreign interference” in Australia’s democratic processes. Neither the Espionage and Foreign Interference Bill nor the Foreign Influence Transparency Bill specifically single out China, but we all know whose “influence” the legislation is aimed at curtailing. The Chinese took it very personally when Attorney-General Christian Porter said: “We now live in a time of unprecedented foreign intelligence activity against Australia.”
Australians are becoming uneasy about this. The obliteration of all memory of Tiananmen Square reminds that although we love their money, China is not like us. To coin a phrase, communism is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Whether it’s financial donations to political parties from billionaire Chinese agents of influence, attempts to control the activities of the one million Chinese living in Australia, or maybe just the sale of a patch of Tasmanian coast near Swansea, Australians are becoming worried. Caught in a fierce tug of war between the US and China, some are wondering whether we need to find some new trading friends in democracies with burgeoning markets, like India, perhaps, or Indonesia.
Meanwhile, on the 29th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Australian politicians refrained from proclamations about human rights abroad, and instead have framed bipartisan legislation to defend democracy at home. While the Chinese are impervious to political criticism, they will not be so indifferent to attempts to block their growing influence in Australia. In poking the dragon, our Parliament will put us in a hard place. The Chinese will be inclined to punish us by turning off the money tap but where in the world will they find a more stable, secure and reliable source of raw materials?
They mightn’t like our political system but it has made us a trading partner with protocols they can trust. Perhaps they will simply overlook our curious obsession with freedom and democracy, just as for so long we have conveniently overlooked the absence of those qualities in China.