Chinese Takeaway
Hong Kong once symbolised the hope that Chinese tyranny could be softened by freedom and prosperity. The world now knows otherwise. By Nick Cater.
Survivors of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 31 years ago this week, escaped to freedom in Hong Kong, arriving on speed boats under cover of darkness fearful of being caught and returned.
Today pro-democracy leaders have been fleeing Hong Kong for Taiwan, employing the same perilous means of transport. Again, they are trying to outrun the Hong Kong police, who this time are trying to stop them leaving.
The Chinese Communist Party government is about to introduce a national security law outlawing almost every form of dissent. It spells the end of the freedoms guaranteed under the “one country, two systems” arrangement signed by Britain and China in 1984.
Fear that China would use the distraction of COVID-19 to stamp its authority on Hong Kong took hold as early as January. The theory began circulating that the virus was a biological weapon that had escaped from the lab before it could be unleashed on its real target, Hong Kong.
In other circumstances, such a conspiracy theory would be incredible. Yet the absence of transparency by Chinese authorities, including its curious reaction to Australia’s proposal for an international inquiry, provided a breeding ground for such paranoia.
When Margaret Thatcher visited Beijing in 1982, China’s then president Deng Xiaoping reputedly told her: “I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon.”
“There is nothing I could do to stop you,” Thatcher is said to have replied. “But the eyes of the world would now know what China is like.”
We know a good deal more about China thanks to the crash course provided by the pandemic. We are also better informed about the Chinese dependency of some Western institutions and their role as patsies of a totalitarian state. At the University of Queensland enrolments of overseas students have doubled in five years, most of them from mainland China. Their fees are worth more to the university than government grants for Australian students.
The concentration of overseas students has doubled from 18 to 36 per cent, while the number of local students has dwindled under the leadership of vice-chancellor Peter Hoj, a regular visitor to China, who is due to step down at the end of the month.
Not all his students are happy about the presence of the Confucius Institute on campus, an offshoot of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, dedicated to promoting a better understanding of China and its culture.
In July last year, a peaceful protest outside its building in support of freedom demonstrators in Hong Kong was broken up by organised thugs wearing sunglasses and backpacks and sporting earpieces. The role of the Chinese consulate in organising the counter-protest is speculation. There is, however, a string of similar-fact evidence from similar protests elsewhere in Australia that points to the role of Chinese diplomats.
A statement the next day from the Chinese consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, praising the counter-protesters for their “self-motivated patriotic behaviour” in reaction to “anti-China separatist activities”, breeds little comfort. Separatism is a capital crime in China.
The tactic of disrupting peaceful protests with violence has been widely deployed in Hong Kong, famously at Yuen Long train station 11 months ago when white-shirted thugs, reputedly paid by China, attacked democracy protesters with batons. The police were nowhere to be seen.
In Brisbane, the university’s inquiries into the Confucius Institute incident concluded last week with the suspension of the designated troublemaker, Drew Pavlou, a 20-year-old student who organised the peaceful protest, apparently provoking a bunch of goons to turn violent.
The university has added insult to injury by issuing a statement that the university’s disciplinary procedures “are not driven by politics”. It was simply trying “to provide a safe environment for students”.
Nor should we read anything strange into the vice-chancellor’s appointment as a regional delegate to the Chinese government’s Confucius Institute Council in November 2017, the university assures us in another statement.
As for the appointment of Xu as an adjunct professor in the university’s school of languages, that sort of thing goes on all the time.
This disquieting incident on Australian soil is, however, a mere skirmish in the contest of values between the West and China and the foreign interference to which our universities have become prone.
The frontline right now is Hong Kong, which is about to become independent in name only under a Beijing-imposed law granting broad powers to prevent and punish conduct deemed to endanger national security. High on the list are activities displaying the kind of foreign influence that the Chinese consulate assures us it is not exercising in Brisbane.
As a foretaste of what Hong Kong will be like under the new law, the police are rounding up political dissenters — including octogenarian Martin Lee, a moderate pro-democracy campaigner under British colonial rule.
Pro-Beijing figures in the Hong Kong administration, such as chief executive Carrie Lam, are now threatening to implement the dreaded Article 23 of the Basic Law, giving force to any law passed in Beijing “to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government”.
Until recently, Hong Kong had a police force people felt they could trust, one that operated with the consent of the people, rather than one that imposed the authority of the state.
The heavy-handed response by police towards protesters during last year’s pro-democracy gatherings severely damaged that image.
With the arrest of political dissenters in recent weeks, the Hong Kong Police Force has abandoned the pretence that it operates under the principles inherited from Britain, as citizens in uniform, rather than the enforcers of state.