Australia: Pushing back on Chinese interference
Australia is finally getting serious about Beijing’s meddling in our democracy, said Peter Hartcher in The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Police and intelligence agents last week raided the home and office of Shaoquett Moselmane, a New South Wales state lawmaker, over an alleged Chinese plot to influence a serving politician. Moselmane has repeatedly expressed “admiration for the Chinese authoritarians and disdain for his own country”; the Labour lawmaker once wrote about “the obsolete scum of white Australia” in an essay for a Chinese university. He has also taken numerous trips to China—he denies media reports that the Chinese Communist Party footed the bill—where he met with top officials. Moselmane isn’t the only legislator with suspect ties to Beijing, but he is the first to be publicly investigated under “the foreign interference law passed by the Australian Parliament two years ago.” The belated enforcement of that law, which stiffens penalties for espionage and the sharing of state secrets, is sure to result in blowback from China. When our government dared to call for a probe into the origin of the coronavirus, Beijing slapped tariffs on our farm products, launched cyberattacks on businesses and government agencies, and referred to this nation as “chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoe.”
The scale of Beijing’s ambitions in Australia is terrifying, said Shannon Molloy in News.com.au. Chinese operatives are on a mission to infiltrate and influence “almost every aspect of Australian life, from politics and business to the media.” This onslaught is exposed in a new report from the independent Australian
Strategic Policy Institute that examines the operations of China’s United Front agency. Run by one of President Xi Jinping’s closest allies, United Front funds and directs scores of benign-seeming community, business, and student organizations around the world. In Australia, its tentacles have “already spread through our universities, corporations, and parliaments.” The agency has penetrated Chinese-Australian groups so thoroughly, the report said, that “genuine and independent political participation by ethnic Chinese” in Australia is all but impossible. One of Moselmane’s staffers, John Zhang, actually attended a United Front propaganda training course.
What racist paranoia, said Wang Wenwen in the Global Times (China). Australians now view all Chinese-Australians and visiting Chinese students as spies. Obviously, Canberra thinks it can “curry favor from Washington” by smearing China. With this libelous report, Australia shows that it is a den of “xenophobia, discrimination, and McCarthyism.” Threats from Beijing are going to “become regular fixtures in Australia’s future,” said Natasha Kassam and Darren Lim in The Guardian (U.K.). To survive, we will have to begin the slow process of trade diversification—China is our largest trading partner, buying vast amounts of coal and natural gas—and also shield our institutions and our ChineseAustralian communities from undue influence. We must also learn to accept that we may be punished “for staying true to our values.” Beijing may be immune to our condemnations, but the fate of our liberal democracy remains “in our hands.”