The Silent Invasion Has Won

Would we ever tolerate the open bullying, brutalisation and intimidation being perpetrated on Australian soil by a foreign power, if it was anyone else but China? Has our national soul been so corrupted by Beijing’s money that we simply allow a genocidal dictatorship to do as it pleases in our own country?

Academic Clive Hamilton was first inspired to write his Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia when he witnessed Chinese security forces and “tens of thousands” of “angry and aggressive” Chinese students waving red flags attack a small group of pro-Tibet protesters on the lawns of Australia’s Parliament House.

On the very doorstep of Australia’s house of democracy, goons from a foreign communist dictatorship were violently threatening peaceful protesters. How was this allowed to happen?

Why is it still allowed to happen?

Anti-Beijing firebrand Vicky Xu is back in the fray after making a strategic withdrawal in the face of unprecedented threats to her life, friends, and family – punished, she says, for her work revealing the Chinese Communist Party’s wrongdoings.

Xu was born in China and her father is a Chinese Communist Party member. Watching a documentary, as a student in Australia, about the Tiananmen Square massacre, and interviewing a Chinese dissident, changed her mind. She has lead-authored a report into China’s genocide of Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

All this has cost her dearly.

Her work brought her the ire of the Chinese government and its legions of social media bots and supporters: she has been stalked by mysterious people, her family and friends in China had been interrogated, and she has sustained industrial levels of abuse online, Xu said […]

“National fame, or notoriety, was bestowed on me overnight by the Chinese party-state and its propaganda apparatus,” she said.

“I was condemned in state and commercial and social media for being one of China’s biggest ­traitors. Death and rape threats were through the roof.

Xu was targeted in public in Australia. Chinese strangers approach her in the street.

“The state has gone after me in a really personal way. There has been – what I would call – psychological torture on my loved ones back in China. They’re isolated and treated with overwhelming hostility in their communities.

“Some have been repeatedly interrogated.”

The Australian

It’s not just Chinese-born Australian residents like Xu who are targeted.

When Australian swimmer Mack Horton spoke out about Chinese drug cheating in sport, he and his family were subjected to relentless abuse. Everything from threatening phone calls to broken glass dumped in their swimming pool.

Australian activist Drew Pavlou has been a particular target of Chinese authorities — and their Australian stooges. As a student at University of Queensland, Pavlou was subjected to an extraordinary campaign of harassment — apparently at the behest of the university’s CCP-linked funders — for organising protests at CCP influence on campus.

Since leaving university, Pavlou has continued his activism, including running anti-CCP candidates at the last Australian election. He has been arrested (for holding a blank sign one inch above the pavement outside the Chinese consulate in Brisbane), thrown out of a public speaking event with the Chinese ambassador, and manhandled, punched and dragged out of stadia hosting China-Australia basketball games.

China doesn’t even have to send in its own goons: security at Australian-owned stadia are more than happy to do Beijing’s dirty work. Stadium-owning corporations shamelessly kowtow to the CCP by banning signs and T-shirts supporting disappeared tennis champion Peng Shuai. Peng vanished after she publicly accused Zhang Gaoli, a retired Chinese vice-premier and high-ranking CCP member, of sexual assault.

Even more bizarrely, International Basketball Federation (FIBA) officials in Melbourne banned and confiscated Taiwanese flags from a match where the Taiwanese team was playing the Chinese. Chinese flags were allowed.

Why would China ever bother invading Australia? We could be forgiven for thinking they’ve already won it, without firing a shot.