It’s shaping up as the biggest communist spy scandal since the Cambridge Five or the communist infiltrations of Hollywood and the US political bureaucracy in the 1930s and 1940s. When academic Clive Hamilton published Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia he was immediately attacked by China sympathisers in academia, business and politics.
As it turns out, Hamilton was more right than he knew.
The nation’s top spy agency has begun investigating revelations that Chinese Communist Party members have been working in Australia’s consulate in Shanghai for years.
An investigation by The Australian found at least 10 consulates in Shanghai had CCP members employed as senior political and government affairs specialists, clerks, economic advisers and executive assistants.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The leaked database shows that literally millions of CCP members have insinuated themselves into critical institutions throughout the West.
The investigation, based on a leak of official CCP membership records from Shanghai — the first of its kind in the world — also revealed how CCP branches were embedded in major companies, including those holding sensitive defence contracts with the Australian and US governments[…]
The database shows CCP members have been or are currently employed in Australian, US, British, German, Swiss, Indian, New Zealand, Italian and South African missions in Shanghai.
“There’s intelligence-gathering going on,” one source said[…]
The Australian’s investigation followed a leak of official CCP records that exposed the personal details of 1.95 million members. It found members and even party branches at some of the world’s largest companies including vaccine manufacturers AstraZeneca and Pfizer, aerospace giant Boeing and at ANZ.
It has to be absolutely borne in mind that these are not just Chinese citizens, they are CCP members – with all that that entails.
“Being a member of the party is not just a casual thing. What that means is that if you want to become a member, the party will have an ability to call on you to do what they want you to do.
“If you work at a consulate, you can be guaranteed the party will be aware of that and expecting their party member to furnish them with any info that is useful”[…]
CCP members, of whom there are 92 million, must pledge an oath that puts the party’s interests above all and “be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the party”.
This is the stark reality of dealing with Beijing.
[US] Republican Party senator Joshua Hawley, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, said the reports should serve as a wake-up call.
“CCP agents have no place in US government facilities, and this report should serve as a much-needed wake-up call to Washington DC and corporate executives, who continue to welcome the Chinese government with open arms,” Senator Hawley said.
Liberal MP Dave Sharma, Australia’s former ambassador to Israel, said it was “a well-known secret in diplomatic circles that your missions in some countries are selectively targeted for staffing by the governments of those countries”[…]
“We’ve got to worry about the people who are CCP members, but even those who are not are nonetheless susceptible to pressure and suasion from their government.
“That’s the reality of the political system in China — the state is supreme to the individual”[…]
Rex Patrick, a key crossbench senator, said Foreign Minister Marise Payne, who declined to comment on the revelations, needed to answer questions about why DFAT used an employment firm that recruited CCP members to consular roles.
The Australian
What this leak shows is that Australia, like much of the West, has been dangerously blasé about China. At all levels – from Barack Obama, who completely failed to anticipate or seek to counter China’s aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, to the Howard government which approved the 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin, not to mention the businesses and academics who greedily chased the Yuan without a second’s thought – the West made the fatal mistake of assuming that Communist China is “just like us”.
The reality is, as former Australian politician John Anderson warns: “We should have never have lost our understanding of the simple fact that a communist is a communist. In the end, a communist will behave as a communist does”.
This should not, of course, be used as an excuse for a wholesale pogrom against Chinese in the West. Many actively fled the communist regime, after all.
But it does mean that the West’s dangerous naïveté must end. At the very least, any citizens of China must absolutely be thoroughly vetted before being employed in government agencies – and most likely barred from accessing sensitive information.
At a minimum, the Morrison government must use its new foreign interference laws to tear up Victoria’s BRI agreement and close down “Confucius Institutes” in Australian universities. The purchase of Australian land and infrastructure by Chinese-owned interests must cease immediately. Frankly, confiscation of assets doesn’t seem a step too far, either – call it compensation for the economic carnage of the Wuhan virus.
Just because you’re paranoid, after all, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
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