You get the gist of this article from the headline. “Red Scare”. Harking back to the infamous McCarthy witch hunts. So, according to Su-Lin Tan, China is unfairly hammered by racist, nationalist, isolationist, flag-waving right-wing Australians who slander all those fine folk supporting China as “China sympathisers” and appeasers”. They are creating an unnecessary “Red Scare” and are — of course!— driven by Trump and his acolytes’ Sinophobic rhetoric.
Most of the comments on the article buy this line. Yes, they agree, Australia is the most racist country in the world and in China policy is just America’s lapdog.
The “red scare” faction — I’ll call them China Doves — set up one straw man after another. Eg, quoting ex head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (the one I was in for seven years), Dennis Richardson:
For one group to continually wrap themselves in the flag and want to imply that those who disagree with them are not loyal Australians is simply crossing a line,” Richardson said…
He’s referring to remarks of one politician which he then ascribes to all China critics — the straw man argument — who are simply “wrapping themselves in the flag”.
Or, quoting mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest:
…he said he would “crack on with helping my country, unapologetic to those who think racism or isolationism is a viable path for Australia.”
Again, the straw man is that every critic of China and our trade relations is a racist isolationists. There are no doubt some who are. But I know Australian businesspeople living on the mainland for over forty years, married to Chinese, who are pissed off — and have been for a long while — with the increasing mercantilism, ripping off foreign businesses in more and more blatant ways. That’s why they’re critical. Not because they’re racist or isolationist. They just want a fair go. Mainlanders don’t know about these frustrations because China bans 125+ websites, including our own ABC.
Or, quoting Jocelyn Chey, our ex Consul-General in Hong Kong:
Anti-communist sentiments have been there for decades and again it has been fanned by Breitbart, Fox News and the Falun Gong media, spreading to Australia and other English-language parts of the world
Here my criticism is not so much that it’s a straw man argument (though it is) as the suggestion that having “anti-communist sentiments” is somehow wicked and down to wicked right wing media.
I’ve had “anti-communist sentiments” since I arrived in a China in 1976 and saw what communism had done to the country. And then witnessed what introduction of market forces did in the subsequent forty years. Chey co-authored a slim book in 1975 titled “China’s New Society”. I have a copy in my bookshelf it’s deservedly rare. A disturbingly over the top paean of praise for Maoism, it landed on shelves shortly before China itself ditched that very same Maoism that Chey was in thrall to. It would seem those sentiments have necer quite been abandoned by Chey, in her mocking, today, of people who are a bit leery about communism, whether Maoist, Marxist, or, like Xi Jinping, good old Leninist, even if leavened with “Chinese characteristics”.
The article mocks concerns about Beijing’s furtive influence in Australian society, especially in education and the media. But the influence is real and widespread, via its United Front Works Department. It’s naive and dangerous to downplay it.
And all the above is before we get to the Uygurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, and, yes, even Tiananmen.
A final observation, mostly ad hominem, but then so are the comments by those interviewed. All he interviewees, bar one, are superannuated public servants. The one not is Twiggy Forrest, but then his fortune comes from digging up earth and shipping it to China. All the others, Richardson, Chey, Clifton, Barratt, Smith, and are all ex public servants, now superannuated or in academic sinecures. Not a one of them knows what it’s like to meet a wage bill. Not a one of them knows what it’s like to actually do business in China. As one who has and does, I can say it gives you a very different perspective on things.
Wouldn’t this article have been rather more balanced if it had included comments from the front line of business with China?
