Why Values Matter in Australia’s Relations with China

Returning to Australia last year after five or six years away I had a Rip Van Winkle moment. Back in 2007, Wall Street was awash with cash, Europe was booming, and China was humming along. Today China is still humming and Australia’s economy is ticking along in harmony. That much could be predicted. What I had not appreciated was that China’s growing momentum was being felt in Australia well beyond its economic impact. China’s soft power push for the hearts and minds of Australians, especially Chinese-Australians, was also having an impact.

A democracy refugee from Shanghai brought the message home. One of 30,000 or so Chinese students who were granted asylum in Australia after the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on citizens in Beijing, in June 1989, he and his family had prospered in Australia over the past 25 years. Now in his fifties, however, he was no longer a fan of democracy. “It’s not right,” he told me, “democracy. America talks about universal human values and criticizes China and then goes to war whenever it likes. Now look at America. China may not be democratic but it gets results. And now that China is rich and strong it won’t be pushed around by America or anyone else. China has different values.” Since my return to Australia, I have often heard such sentiments expressed in Chinese community circles. To be sure, America’s reputation has taken a hit, in recent years, for well-known reasons. But I was not expecting a Chinese Australian of the 1989 democracy generation to be echoing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) line on China’s national values in Australia. What happened while I was not looking?

John Howard was still in office in 2007. As prime minister, Howard was fond of saying that Australia valued freedom and equality, and that China did not, but that we could each respect our distinctive national values as long as the two countries focused on shared interests in expanding trade and investment. One thing that has changed is that growing trade, investment, and migration have punctured the national boundaries separating the two contrasting value systems. Beijing is taking advantage of more porous national boundaries to monitor, organize and mobilize its far-flung diaspora in order to project China’s national values in Australia.

When Canberra first established relations in 1972 with Peking, as it was known at the time, China’s economy was roughly the same size as the Australian economy. By 2013 it was five times as large. The PRC now accounts for more international students in Australia than any other country—140,000 or 20 percent in 2010/2011—, and the aggregate spending of the 685,000 Chinese tourists who visited in 2012 exceeded that from every other source country.¹ Most significantly, Australia is home to close to one million people of Chinese descent, of whom around 320,000 were born in China. China has emerged as the third most common foreign country of birth among all Australian citizens, behind Britain and New Zealand.²

Earlier generations of Chinese-heritage immigrants from Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan shared Australia’s liberal democratic values. So initially did the ‘89 generation of democracy activists from the People’s Republic who organized freely as they never could in China, who published widely in Australia’s mainstream Chinese language press, and regularly argued their case on Chinese-language community radio. Although they could not vote in China, Chinese Australians achieved one of the highest rates of electoral representation at local, state and national levels outside the dominant Anglo-Celtic community.³ They openly aired their views on China, some supportive and some critical, and generally felt free to comment over the Chinese-Australian airwaves and in the mainstream press.

That has changed. In recent years, the political sentiments of the ‘89 democratic generation and succeeding generations of immigrants from China have been massaged daily in Australia through Chinese-language news and commentary produced in Beijing and rebroadcast through commercial radio stations and other media that have been bought up by businesses acting on behalf of the CCP Propaganda Bureau. Chinese Australians are being lectured, monitored, organized, and policed in Australia on instruction from Beijing as never before.

The Howard values formula under which each side respected the other’s values kept Beijing happy during his term in office. The Chinese government has long proclaimed there are no universal human values, merely national ones. With Howard’s pitch on national values, Canberra appeared to endorse China’s position. Howard supported freedom and equality because these were Australian values, not because people universally aspired to be free and equal. Under Howard, Australia acknowledged and respected the authoritarian values of the communist government as China’s national values. It worked for Australia for a time as well. By emphasizing Australia’s value differences over cultural or historical ones, Howard could refer to the universal values that underlay its historical commitment to the US alliance while arguing that a trade surplus could balance the value deficit with China. Australia could preserve its values and alliance partnerships while landing big trade and investment deals with China.

Win-win it seemed at the time. The formula worked well when China’s leadership priorities and policy settings favored domestic economic and social reforms over direct challenges to the sovereignty of its neighbors, indirect challenges to alliance networks, or the projection of Chinese values through soft power abroad. In bilateral dialogue with Australia, China did not mix trade with politics. Mutual respect was the name of the game, and separating trade from values and alliance politics was a basic rule of play.

This began to change in 2008. With the collapse of Wall Street and the international reputation of the United States going into free-fall across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Beijing began to show less reticence in proclaiming authoritarian Leninist values as Chinese values and projecting its voice abroad. Today, China is promoting its national values as a serious rival to the values of liberal democracies in Australia and throughout the region through media purchases, by linking trade with alliance politics, and by projecting hard power abroad. Universal values such as freedom, equality, and solidarity are readily grasped around the world. So are national cultures. National values are more difficult to get a handle on.

On the Chinese side, national values generally mirror the Asian values proclaimed by successive Malaysian and Singaporean governments since the 1990s: deference to authority ahead of freedom, preference for hierarchy over equality, submission of individual interests to the solidary group, and positive commitments to study, to work, and to responsibility for one’s fate. In the abstract a number of these values have merit. Yet Chinese national values are not abstract. In this case the collective authority that must be obeyed is a specific regime, the CCP government, which today is the supreme authority demanding deference from neighbors and extending Chinese national values in competition with the universal values championed by countries working in the liberal tradition, including Australia.

What of Australian national values? Whereas Beijing is trying to extend its national values, Canberra is inclined to reduce the universal values embedded in the UN Declaration of Human Rights by nationalizing them as Australian values. In point of fact, there is little to distinguish Australian values from universal ones. The preferred local terms freedom, egalitarianism, and mateship are simply native idiom for liberte, egalite, and fraternite, or in UN charter terms, freedom, equality, and solidarity, on the modern ethical principle that all people are born free and equal. This principle was well established in early 19th-century Europe and America. By the late 19th century it had come to hold considerable appeal in China and Japan as well. But it was quashed by fascism in pre-war Japan and by communism in postwar China. In Australia, freedom, egalitarianism, and mateship were quashed as universal values by the White Australia policy.

Historian Charles Price has framed the Australian values problem well. Australian conservatives, radicals, and liberals a century ago held that all men had certain inalienable social and political rights, “but they were not inclined to include men from China in the category of ‘all men.’” What made universal values particularly Australian was their selective application to whites. Chinese were to be excluded because they were held incapable of appreciating the universal values that made white people—and only white people—Australian.

This is, of course, no longer the case. Successive commonwealth governments began dismantling White Australia more than 50 years ago, and today Australia is home to more than a million people of Asian descent. Nevertheless, a lingering insistence on nationalizing universal values is a legacy of that earlier period. Howard’s tacit acknowledgement as prime minister that Canberra respected the fundamental value differences separating Australia from China implied that the universal values encoded in the UN declaration did not apply to China. In the People’s Republic, Chinese still don’t qualify for the category “all men.”

Since taking office in October 2013, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has picked up where John Howard left off in highlighting the value differences that separate Australia from China. In the meantime, Kevin Rudd (2007-2010, 2013) and Julia Gillard (2010-2013) set aside questions of values and focused instead on the distinctive cultures separating the two countries. Values were rarely mentioned. But when the Abbott government was rebuked by Beijing for having the temerity to comment on its declaration of an air-defence zone over islands administered by Japan, just a month into office, Abbott struck back. “Where we think Australia’s values and interests have been compromised, I think it is important to speak our mind.”

Abbott returned to the theme in announcing an FTA with Japan in April 2014, highlighting the universal values that underlay relations between Canberra and Tokyo. “The relationship between Australia and Japan is about much more than economics and trade and growing wealthy together. It’s about respect, it’s about values,” he declared. “We have a deep, shared commitment to the universal aspirations of democracy, freedom and the rule of law.”

Significantly, China is now aligning trade deals with values and alliances as well. In Howard’s time, Australia could profess its values and uphold its traditional alliances while landing big trade deals with China. This will no longer do for Beijing. The shift over the past six years was exposed at the third annual Australia-China Forum in Canberra in December 2013 when the official Chinese delegation insisted that trade and security were inextricably linked in bilateral relations. It was time for Australia to let go of the outmoded Cold War alliance with the United States. As the year drew to a close, a researcher affiliated with the Ministry of Commerce is reported to have said that the main obstacle to a bilateral FTA with China was Australia’s alliance with the United States.

Within Australia, public figures have begun to echo Beijing’s line. The most outspoken critic of the US alliance in elite circles is former die-hard alliance advocate and Cold War warrior Malcolm Fraser, prime minister from 1975 to 1983. Paradoxically, he came to office through the governor-general’s unprecedented dismissal of progressive Labor Prime Minister (1972-1975) Gough Whitlam, who famously alienated Nixon and Kissinger with his casual and at times dismissive attitude toward Australia’s alliance partner.⁴ In replacing Whitlam, Fraser set out to strengthen the US alliance.

Foremost among Fraser’s many reasons for his recent about-face on the US alliance is his retrospective recognition that Washington shares its strategic analyses selectively with allies so as to drag them into wars without just cause. In a recent book Fraser argues that the gravest threats to Australian security today are an increasingly militaristic Japan and a narcissistic America obsessed with its own exceptionalism. He recommends that Australia break with the “dangerous” US alliance and acknowledge China as the truly benign power in the region.⁵ Malcolm Fraser has every reason to reassess his earlier support for US foreign and security policy, but a cursory glance at Beijing’s dealings with Chinese Australians and Chinese residents in Australia does little to support his vision of a benign China.

A win-win values perspective on Australia’s relations with China would require Beijing to recognize that Chinese Australians and Chinese residents in Australia enjoy full and equal entitlement to all of the rights and freedoms guaranteed in a liberal democracy. Beijing’s manipulation of Chinese-Australian media and its systematic surveillance of Chinese Australians and resident Chinese suggest otherwise.

Media

In her recent book historian Mei-fen Kuo argues that Chinese-language media have played a catalytic role in the “making” of Chinese Australia for over a century.⁶ Since the 1890s, local Chinese media have provided opportunities for free-ranging discussion over sensitive topics including the politics of race and exclusion in Australia, the politics of reform and republicanism in China, and questions surrounding China’s international standing. For over a century, Chinese Australians expressed their hopes and concerns without fear or favor in a society where freedom of expression, religion, and assembly were valued and protected.

Over this time exiled reformers visited Australia to press for equal treatment for Chinese Australians and for basic civic rights in China. In 1901, the political exile Liang Qichao presented a series of weekly lectures in the upstairs reading rooms of the Tung Wah News building in downtown Sydney. Liang was a constitutional reformer, not a radical nationalist. In his talks, he highlighted the dangers of rigid social hierarchy and blind obedience in China and called on the people of China to recast their system of government and patterns of person-to-person relations around the principle of equality: the government of China needed to be reformed on the foundations of constitutional government, and citizens needed to treat one another with the respect that came with recognition of equal citizenship. If Liang were to visit Australia today he would not be given airtime on Australia’s most popular Chinese language radio stations nor allowed column space in the majority of Chinese-language newspapers. Back then the Chinese-Australian press was not beholden to the court in Peking. Today, Australia’s major Chinese language media are largely controlled from Beijing, which outlaws open discussion of constitutional issues and civic equality in areas under its remit, even within Australia.

New Zealand Overseas Chinese specialist James To observes that Beijing has gained overwhelming dominance of Chinese language media in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands following a concerted effort at content placement and media industry networking by China’s embassies and consulates in the region. This effort is part of a larger proactive strategy of “group management, extra-territorial influence, counter-infiltration, and counter subversion” targeting Overseas Chinese communities generally—particularly Chinese students abroad—to ensure their loyalty to Beijing wherever they happen to be domiciled.⁷

Beijing’s investments in Australia’s Chinese language media have had negligible impact on the broader Australian public, but they are earning high dividends among the Chinese-Australian communities targeted through an active public-diplomacy program that is highly strategic, clearly focused, and generously supported. Through China International Radio, the World Chinese Media Forum, and other arms of the party-government, the Central Propaganda Bureau outlaws the slightest criticism of the CCP or PRC government on its Australian radio and press networks. It pre-packages its own content for placement in local media, including layout, editing, and typesetting, and has largely banished alternative news sources from co-placement on Australian networks.

Coincidental with growing Chinese government interest in Australian media is a growing concentration of local community media ownership and management. Although media outlets are proliferating, they remain in the hands of very few individuals and firms. The Chinese Newspaper Group, based in Sydney, owns nine regular newspapers, each targeting a particular urban or regional community, including the Chinese Melbourne Daily and the Queensland Chinese Times. Another consortium is the Austar International Media Group, based in Melbourne, which operates eight print publications and several city-based Chinese-language radio stations such as Radio 3CW (AM1341) in Melbourne.⁸ Further, with growing media concentration, media ownership and management are no longer local in the sense of being based within Australia, as individuals and agencies based in China call the shots. The Chinese Herald, for example, is run by editors who live in China.

Recent arrivals from China are said to feel comforted by the familiar voice of Beijing emanating through the Austar International Media network, but others, notably immigrants from Taiwan and earlier arrivals from China, find their programming “culturally and politically controversial.”⁹ Other Australians, if they understood Mandarin Chinese, might find CCP Propaganda Bureau broadcasts on Australian community radio networks equally uncomfortable. Behind the closed ramparts of the Great Firewall in China, domestic CCTV and government radio stations can broadcast anti-Philippine, anti-American, or anti-Japanese material as often as they please. Broadcasting identical material through Chinese community language media in Australia could be thought to abuse the hospitality of a host country that welcomes communities from many different countries in the region seeking to live in harmony together in multicultural Australia.

Many countries, particularly China, are sensitive to foreign government access to domestic media networks. To date, however, foreign government media purchases in non-mainstream media have not been a matter of public policy debate in Australia where national media policy focuses more on private media concentration across mainstream English-language platforms than upon foreign government influence over domestic foreign-language media. China’s approach to local Chinese-language media could compel rethinking this matter. One team of media researchers anticipates that “for those concerned with or involved in charting the future direction of media and multicultural policies in Australia, this is a trend worth taking into serious consideration.”¹⁰

What is the effect of control from Beijing? Leninist propaganda systems are less notable for what they say, which can be taken with a grain of salt, than for what they prevent others from saying. In 2013, central Party officials added seven subjects to the list of topics never to be mentioned in colleges, the media, or the Internet. The seven taboo issues include “freedom of speech,” “judicial independence,” “civil society,” “civic rights,” and “universal values” in addition to criticism of the CCP and allusions to its privileged and wealthy leadership. Even mentioning to foreigners the existence of the document that lists these banned subjects is considered a betrayal of state secrets in China—an indiscretion that appears to have landed veteran Chinese journalist Gao Yu in detention in China in April 2014.

Chinese-language media conglomerates in Australia, which depend on Beijing funding for their programming, do not report the existence of the mystery document nor do they provide open and critical coverage of the banned topics. Independent sources that might report them are no longer hosted by stations loyal to Beijing. China Radio International prevents independent voices such as the BBC World Service from appearing on networks with which it has entered into contractual agreements, such as Radio 3CW in Melbourne. The effect is that freedom of speech can no longer be taken for granted among Chinese Australians.

Surveillance

Chinese government monitoring of its diaspora goes back at least a century. From imperial times to the present day, authoritarian governments have looked upon people of Chinese descent living abroad as presenting grave threats to their authority in China. Successive governments have felt the need to monitor and threaten them. In 1895 revolutionary dissident Sun Yatsen was kidnapped in London by a group of thugs from a security detail attached to the Emperor’s London mission. Sun managed to secure his freedom with the help of sympathetic English supporters and went on to be proclaimed provisional president of the new Republic of China in 1912.

Efforts to manage and control Chinese abroad did not stop with the founding of the Republic. In Australia, they accelerated pace. The Republic of China’s earliest consuls in Australia sought to register every person of Chinese descent in the country but were foiled by local Chinese community opposition. President Chiang Kai-shek’s consulates in Melbourne and Sydney, nevertheless, monitored and harassed Chinese Australians who spoke out against the KMT government’s timid response to the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1932 and its tepid reactions to Japan’s incremental invasion of North China before the outbreak of war in 1937. On moving to Taiwan, the KMT government stepped up its surveillance operations, compiling detailed records through the 1950s and 1960s of key Chinese-Australian community leaders, and mobilizing local Chinese communities to support Taiwan’s strategic objectives through sponsored social organizations and the local Chinese-language press.

What has changed in recent years is the scale of surveillance operations and the opacity of the clandestine organizations engaged in the operation run from Beijing. In 2005, an officer based in the Sydney Chinese consulate, Chen Yonglin, came out with the claim that a thousand or more informants were reporting on the political, social, and religious affiliations of Chinese-Australians and short-term residents from China. He wanted out, claiming that the falungong religious movement was a particular focus of surveillance. Evidence that China’s secret security system had expanded in Australia in response to the growth of falungong and other alleged threats to the Party state indicated that the CCP’s efforts at suppressing dissent in China were no longer a domestic affair. Freedom of religion could no longer be taken for granted among Chinese Australians either.

By Chen’s account, the size and impact of the CCP’s informant network in Australia reached well beyond the small cohort of cloak and dagger intelligence operatives based in embassies, consulates, information bureaus, travel agencies, and other legitimate businesses. Like the old East German Stasi informant system, the CCP’s informant network is built on the benign principles of neighbourhood watch under the less benign supervision of paid operatives. These operatives gather and file information from a large number of volunteer informers in Australia, who report on their fellow students and working colleagues, who then pass on reports to higher authorities in the intelligence system back in China. The surveillance system is modelled on the pattern of CCP and Youth League cells in China, which multiply in proportion to the scale of those under surveillance. It is estimated that one in fifty East Germans was an unpaid Stasi informant. At the time of Chen Yonglin’s defection there were, tourists aside, around fifty thousand annual visitors from China. Today there are three or four times that number. The number of informants has expanded accordingly.

The opacity of the system is also a matter of concern. But for Chen Yonglin’s brave testimony, the massive clandestine surveillance operation in Australia would remain hidden from view. This was not so under Nationalist China. At the height of its surveillance activities, the KMT was a publicly registered political organization in Australia with buildings bearing the name Kuo Min Tang set among main streets in many cities and towns. For nearly a century the KMT’s Australian branches have been publicly registered in their own names, have listed their board members and office bearers, and posted their contact addresses. People generally knew what the KMT was, where they could find it, and what it was up to, even if they did not like it.

Although the CCP has been operating party and Youth League cells to monitor and mobilize Chinese Australians for almost as long as the KMT, it has yet to set out its organizational structure and articles of association, to list the names of its members and officers, to post its contact addresses, or to rivet “Chinese Communist Party” onto a building façade on any street in Australia. The CCP’s Australian operations are more clandestine than those of the old-time triads that used to run surveillance and stand-over rackets in Australia’s Chinatowns.

It is time for the CCP to come out. There are precedents. A century ago, underground secret society networks were rumored to run immigration rackets, plan Tong wars, and manage gambling and opium operations across Australia. Such rumors did immense reputational damage to Chinese community organizations. One hundred years ago the Yee Hing Society, the most powerful secret-society network in Australia, came out as a publicly-registered organization—the Chinese Masonic Society—to distance itself from claims of standover tactics. Since that time Chinese Masons have listed their premises, their public officers, and their official papers and publications on the public record, and have gone on to make major contributions to the commercial and cultural life of Australian towns and cities through their community activities and broader public engagements, including charitable events.

The lack of transparency among CCP and Communist Youth League fronts in Australia presents a comparable risk to the reputation of Chinese community organizations today as the Yee Hing posed a century ago. Some damage has already been done. In 2008 the Australian community was taken aback by the orchestrated efforts of consulates and Youth League affiliates to drown out the voices of pro-Tibetan independence and falungong demonstrators along the route of the Olympic Torch relay in Australian cities. More recently, a report on systematic surveillance of Chinese students in Australia by Fairfax journalist John Garnaut prompted concern at a number of universities where student journalists interviewed Chinese classmates, who confirmed they were under surveillance and that their careers and their families would suffer if they stepped out of line.¹¹ Despite the risk of reputational damage associated with secret surveillance and standover tactics, the CCP and Youth League front organizations are unlikely to go public in Australia anytime soon. Even in Hong Kong where the CCP is the sovereign power, Christine Loh reminds us, the Communist Party “demeans itself by functioning as an underground party.”¹²

In Australia, the party ranks control and management of the Chinese diaspora community well above damage to that community’s reputation. Beijing considers the 2008 counter-demonstrations orchestrated along the route of the Olympic Torch relay in Australia not as a disgraceful display of extra-territorial hubris but as a successful endorsement of its strategy harnessing Chinese residents of other countries to its national objectives. The party’s point of reference is not the widespread suspicion that events of 2008 generated among non-Chinese communities abroad but the anti-communist demonstrations that shook the diaspora a generation earlier following the 1989 Beijing Massacre. The turnaround within the Chinese diaspora community from open opposition to open support for the communist government over these 25 years has been remarkable. For Beijing this is all that matters.

Secrecy remains a precondition for Beijing’s success in cultivating the diaspora. From a close reading of official cadre handbooks on “Overseas Chinese Work,” James To concludes that Beijing counsels its diplomats, agents, and cadres overseas to conceal their roles in coordinating and assisting Chinese community organization “from a distance, without them being aware of it.” The aim is to appear benign in public, while exercising proactive management and control of Chinese community organizations and media in foreign jurisdictions.¹³ If managing and controlling its diaspora takes precedence over wider community optics in Australia, and secrecy is a condition of diaspora control, it follows that Beijing is likely to maintain secrecy at the cost of extensive reputational damage to the Chinese-Australian community organizations it manipulates in addition to damaging China’s standing as a benign regional player.

It was all very well to respect the value differences that separate Australia from China while each country went about its business. This may have been the case in Prime Minister Howard’s day, but it is certainly not the case today. China is determined to change the status quo in the region, to project its values through public diplomacy, and increasingly to link trade and investment with political trade-offs. In Australia, the CCP is mobilizing and policing its diaspora to flaunt its distaste for liberal-democratic values. Howard used to say that Australia faces a phony choice between its economic interests and its basic values in balancing relations with China and the United States. The problem for Prime Minister Abbott is that it may no longer be Australia’s choice whether or not to exercise even a phony choice. In arriving at this point, Australians have handicapped themselves by ceding too much to China on national values and reflecting too lightly on the universal character of their own.

These liberal values could usefully be restated and defended by compelling the CCP and Youth League to cease behaving as a clandestine organization in Australia, to stop intimidating religious believers, and to allow alternative voices to be heard on Chinese community media under its control in Australia. China’s national values now matter for Australia.