As a billion Chinese already know, China’s totalitarian panopticon state misses nothing. As millions of Chinese dissidents also know, the communists resolutely seek out and punish anything and everything the Party disapproves of. Countless Chinese students have learned the hard way that the Party’s tentacles reach all the way to Australia.
Australian swimmer Mack Horton is learning the same lesson: poke the dragon and you will be punished. Swiftly and mercilessly.
Horton made headlines last year at the world swimming championships in South Korea, when he refused to mount the podium with known drug cheat, Chinese swimmer Sun Yang. Horton has revealed the vicious backlash that ensued.
The family home in suburban Melbourne was broken into amid threats against their youngest son, Chad, who was preparing for his Year 12 exams. At the Rio Games Brazilian commandos shadowed Mack, Andrew and Cheryl; the computer system at Horton’s firm was hacked; and the family was targeted with death threats and vile abuse online[…]
For nearly four years the family has lived in a virtual state of siege. Supporters of Sun, most believed to be on student visas, regularly bang pots and pans late at night in the alley behind the back fence and abuse the family from the driveway. Plants have been poisoned, dog shit hurled over the fence, and a man speaking broken English calls Andrew Horton regularly to threaten his daughter (he has no daughter). Last year, after South Korea, Cheryl was cleaning the family pool when she discovered “a bucket load” of broken glass at the bottom.
“Student visas” is a polite way of saying “Chinese nationals”. Some of the harassment may be spontaneous misplaced patriotism – or, like the pro-China demonstrations on university campuses, more likely there is an organised agenda at work.
The family’s ordeal is believed to be well-organised and part of a systematic pattern of harassment and intimidation directed at perceived critics of China. “This is not an amateur operation,” says a national security analyst who declines to be named. “The Hortons’ story is very disturbing … It says something about the reach of foreign powers within Australia.”
We already know the extent of China’s reach in Australia. Whether it’s universities quietly altering their course content to remove anything that might “offend” China, to Chinese-owned companies snapping up strategic assets. Or Australian politicians taking literal bagloads of cash from CCP-connected donors. Or the quiet pillaging of Australia’s medical supplies in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak.
What the Hortons’ story shows is just how personal and how vindictive China’s reach can be.
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