In that misty, distant time called “pre-COVID”, one of my favourite restaurants in Melbourne was a dumpling place in Chinatown. Mountains of cheap, delicious dumplings.
The biggest cost was ignoring the Maoist propaganda on the walls, including the banner lauding the “great statesman, ideologist[… and] poet”. The only concession was a short line alluding to the “erroneous” Cultural Revolution.
It would be a minor irony of history if the place has been driven out of business by the Wuhan plague, but whether or not Melbourne’s Chinatown survives, Maoism is back in a big way in China itself, warns New Zealand scholar, Professor Anne-Marie Brady.
China is following a belligerent foreign policy which singles out countries such as Australia for punishment, as examples to other governments. Australia’s “offence”? Simply put: passing laws aimed at protecting the political system against Chinese Communist Party interference, launching freedom of navigation exercises in the international waters of the South China Sea through which the bulk of Australian shipping passes and daring to ask the Xi government to examine the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak that unleashed the devastating global pandemic.
Mao Zedong told China’s first diplomats: “Diplomatic work is a political struggle; you don’t engage in a war of weapons, you engage in a war of words.” Xi-era foreign affairs is engaged in a war on almost all fronts as well as a war of words. The CCP leadership evidently believes it is in a position of strength vis-a-vis the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia and other Western governments.
The great mistake made by Western governments and corporations has been to assume that the economic reforms of the Deng era have changed the Chinese communist regime in any substantial political way. Especially under the iron fist of Xi Jinping.
Soon after to coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping introduced a reset in China’s foreign affairs policy[…]
Xi is taking China backwards, restoring foreign affairs policies from the two most repressive periods of the Mao era — 1949 to 1952, when Mao’s policies squeezed out foreign businesses, journalists and missionaries to create “New China”, and the Cultural Revolution years from 1966 to 1969, when Mao launched drastic purges against foreign influence in Chinese society.
Xi’s purges include not just detaining or expelling foreigners, but subverting or pressuring politicians, journalists and analysts abroad. Professor Brady has herself experienced the wrath of the regime, especially at the hands of its sycophants and apparatchiks in academia.
Xi is buying off starry-eyed politicians with beguiling promises of riches under the auspices of the Belt and Road Initiative. Besides a welter of African nations, Xi has put the likes of Victorian premier Daniel Andrews in his pocket, to the alarm of the federal government and intelligence agencies. New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern is fast dancing off down the same primrose path to Chinese vassalage.
Whether or not China deliberately engineered and released the Wuhan virus, as some claim, the result has been the same. Everywhere, China is on the economic and propaganda attack.
Western social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were long ago banned in China. Yet Chinese diplomats and foreign propaganda outlets have set up accounts and launched a combative new style of foreign messaging, known as “Wolf Warrior diplomacy”.
The pandemic strengthened China’s relative hard power as well as its appetite for confrontation. In early 2020, CCP agencies instructed CCP proxy groups to buy up bulk quantities of personal protective equipment around the world and send them back to China. Then, when other countries were short on supplies, the CCP government threatened to withhold sales of PPE to states such as New Zealand that had early on closed borders to Chinese travellers.
Despite the undeniable evidence of China’s international bastardry and its increasingly shrill military aggression in the South China Sea and against Taiwan in particular, apologists in the West still insist on grovelling to the dragon.
Appeasing this level of aggression is not a wise strategy. Australia, as well as other like-minded states, must be prepared to accept a degree of short-term pain for the long-term benefit of defending core national interests.
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