{"id":58933,"date":"2020-09-09T14:30:24","date_gmt":"2020-09-09T04:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=58933"},"modified":"2020-09-09T14:22:07","modified_gmt":"2020-09-09T04:22:07","slug":"australian-journalists-escape-from-china-a-warning-for-the-rest-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/australian-journalists-escape-from-china-a-warning-for-the-rest-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian journalists\u2019 escape from China a warning for the rest of the world"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The prospect that the Australian Financial Review<\/em>\u2019s Mike Smith and the ABC\u2019s Bill Birtles were going to spend months in China\u2019s notorious black jails, being interrogated and having no access to lawyers, drove them to seek Australian diplomatic protection and a negotiated exit from China. As Smith<\/a> put it, \u2018I feared being disappeared.\u2019 That was a very real prospect given the arrest of another Australian journalist, Cheng Lei, on 14 August, apparently for \u2018endangering national security\u2019.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re wrong if we think these incidents are primarily about the Australia\u2013China relationship, although reactions from various commentators have largely taken the approach of centring things on \u2018the relationship\u2019 and it \u2018hitting rock bottom<\/a>\u2019, with figures like former foreign minister Bob Carr blaming<\/a> the deterioration on the lack of nuance in diplomatic messaging by Australia. It\u2019s partly about the bilateral relationship, but it\u2019s more about the direction in which Xi Jinping is taking China domestically and internationally\u2014and the collisions this is causing with other nations and their citizens.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s true that Australian government officials searched the homes of Xinhua<\/em><\/a> journalists in June, no doubt Beijing will tell us this explains its treatment of Birtles and Smith. That\u2019s a false equivalence, though: any Xinhua<\/em> staff were at zero risk of detention in a black site in Australia where they would be interrogated daily for months without access to a lawyer or consular support. But that was a likely prospect for Birtles and Smith. That stark difference was captured in Birtles\u2019s simple words<\/a> on landing in Australia: \u2018It\u2019s a relief to be back in a country with a genuine rule of law.\u2019<\/p>\n

Xi is closing China to external voices. The Great Firewall that stops the broad flow of information into and out of China is not new, but the level of intimidation of foreign journalists and the restrictions on their travel and access to officials are greater than before. Similar, tighter restrictions are in place for foreign embassy officials.<\/p>\n

China is also intimidating and expelling foreigners whose governments act against Beijing\u2019s interests\u201414<\/a> journalists (including two Australians) from the New York Times<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em> and Wall Street Journal<\/em> were expelled earlier this year. Two Canadians<\/a> have been in detention in China now for some 20 months and both were charged in July with the improbable offence of \u2018spying on national secrets\u2019.<\/p>\n

Xi is simultaneously intimidating and arresting his own people because he fears dissenting voices. This year, at least five<\/a> Chinese activists and citizen journalists have been forcibly disappeared \u2018for reporting independently on the pandemic\u2019, joining some 48<\/a> Chinese journalists arrested by the regime in 2019.<\/p>\n

Xi has also just begun an internal purge of the very people who knocked on the doors of Birtles and Smith\u2014his internal security apparatus in the form of the Ministry of Public Security and the People\u2019s Armed Police. His reason<\/a> is that \u2018two-faced people\u2019 (those who pretend to obey but secretly resist) and those who are \u2018straddling the fence without showing the flag\u2019 need to be \u2018thoroughly removed\u2019. Even China\u2019s internal security agencies and staff are at risk of detention, arrest and jail if they do anything other than implement Xi\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

So, there\u2019s a pattern here about the tighter, more ruthless control that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi is exercising over anyone who lives in its jurisdiction\u2014citizen or foreigner\u2014particularly those who report on the regime or who say anything that\u2019s not supportive of it. All are facing greater risk of detention and arrest on broad, opaque grounds. Australia and Australians are part of this pattern, and likely higher priority targets because of our successful influencing of international debates on issues like 5G, foreign interference and an inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic that are important to the government in Beijing.<\/p>\n

What do we do from here?<\/p>\n

First, we must stop pretending it\u2019s primarily about how our government is \u2018managing the relationship\u2019 and how much nuance and sophistication we can bring to sneakily marketing decisions that we must make in our national interests.<\/p>\n

Our policy and action from here must be to work in partnership with other governments and societies that are also profoundly challenged by the direction China is taking and are facing the same risks. As a start, that\u2019s a broad set of partners from Tokyo to Delhi and Washington, and from Brussels to Taipei, Paris and Berlin. We\u2019ve also got to consider whether continuing to give Chinese state media free access to our own societies so that they can spread propaganda makes sense given China is closing itself to our own reporters.<\/p>\n

Even more immediately, every business and organisation with Australian employees living and working in China must reassess their need to do so in light of the high and growing risk to their personal safety. Beyond the immediate safety risk, fundamental business strategies about access to the Chinese market must be reassessed, because the assumptions they were based on just a year ago have now fundamentally changed.<\/p>\n

We have to live with the China we see under Xi Jinping, not the China we wanted as recently as 2014 when Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Xi shook hands<\/a> over a free trade agreement. The only good news now is that Australia is not alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The prospect that the Australian Financial Review\u2019s Mike Smith and the ABC\u2019s Bill Birtles were going to spend months in China\u2019s notorious black jails, being interrogated and having no access to lawyers, drove them to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":58937,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2212,1383,333,204],"class_list":["post-58933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia-china-relations","tag-ccp","tag-journalism","tag-xi-jinping"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAustralian journalists\u2019 escape from China a warning for the rest of the world | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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