Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong:
You’re Disgracing Australia With China
It doesn’t seem at all hypocritical to you to issue a statement on December 22, 2022 condemning the Taliban for its “ban on women attending university” while at the same time re-engaging with the Chinese Communist Party primarily to, let’s be honest, get tariffs lifted? Tariffs that were imposed after Australia’s previous government ethically pressed for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.
In February, 2020 the U.S. State Department-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute estimated 80,000 Uyghurs had been relocated after “graduating” from re-education camps. They were compelled to work in factories supplying dozens of global brands including Nike, Apple, and Amazon. One state-owned manufacturer was engaged in a $2-billion contract to build high-capacity trains in Melbourne.
In February, 2021 I asked Kmart Australia’s managing director if they’d help lead the way in curbing the CCP’s excesses and its growing impact on world affairs by no longer sourcing products from China. He also oversees Target Australia, with a combined 452 stores across Australia and New Zealand. Kmart’s General Manager of Corporate Affairs called me to say they were monitoring the situation.
A week later I sent them a tweet, by a senior fellow in China studies, about more revelations: “The BBC’s video: Ghulzira Auyelkhan tells on camera how she, a female camp detainee, was given the job of handcuffing naked Uyghur girls to beds so that the Han men could go in and rape them. The men paid money to pick which girl they wanted to rape.”
Two years later, despite ongoing reports of torture, mass detention of its own citizens, brainwashing, compulsory sterilisations, and an estimated 25,000 Uyghurs killed each year for their organs, Kmart’s shelves and racks continue to be predominantly stocked with products made in China.
This is about more than products being made with forced labor — which can additionally be hidden from plain sight or tracking. If companies and governments had ceased to conduct business with China after 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre, it wouldn’t have grown to be the international threat it is today, including regionally to Taiwan and Japan along with the arrests, curbed voting rights, and limits on press and free speech in Hong Kong since the imposition of a sweeping national security law.
Companies and governments, including I’m frankly ashamed to say, Australia’s, are still dreaming of making a killing in China, ignoring the potential long-term consequences of a bigger and yet-more powerful China. The willingness to sacrifice integrity in all manner of ways, in effect disregarding their fellow citizens’ safety and wellbeing, spans from major film companies to elite sports to Wall Street to the much-protested live export of cattle. In 2020 a ship carrying 5,867 live cattle to China from New Zealand capsized, also drowning 41 crew members.
The Women’s Tennis Association has been one of the few organizations willing to take a stand. In November, 2021, Peng Shuai, who had been ranked world no. 1 in doubles and as high as no. 14 in singles, accused a retired Chinese official of sexual assault three years earlier. After she subsequently “disappeared” from public view, the WTA announced that it was suspending all tournaments in China and Hong Kong.
The Chinese government’s official Tiananmen toll was 241 dead, including 218 civilians, 36 of them students, 10 People’s Liberation Army soldiers, and 13 People’s Armed Police, as well as 7,000 wounded. University of British Columbia professor Timothy Brook found that 11 Beijing hospitals had in fact received at least 478 bodies. He says the dead were mostly Beijing residents supporting the students’ pro-democracy movement, including blocking roadways to prevent the army from reaching the Square.
They were primarily killed or wounded by PLA soldiers using AK-47 variant assault rifles and copper-clad bullets, prohibited by international law for warfare between countries, “which literally tear the body open.” Imagine if democratic leaders had immediately ended all trade relations with China, and all investment, until it became a democracy.
In August, 2020 Australia’s previous government initiated an inquiry into the CCP having recruited over 300 researchers and academics. China’s Thousand Talents research program has been described by the FBI as “economic espionage” and a “national security threat.” Academics “are typically paid a salary of $150,000” and “must agree to patent their inventions in China and abide by Chinese law.”
During the UK leadership race last year, now-prime minister Rishi Sunak promised he would close all Confucius Institutes on campuses and “stop China taking over our universities.” In his first major foreign-policy speech in November, 2022, he said, “Let’s be clear, the so-called ‘golden era’ is over, along with the naive idea that trade would lead to social and political reform. We recognise China poses a systemic challenge to our values and interests, a challenge that grows more acute as it moves towards even greater authoritarianism.”
That authoritarianism includes lockdowns within China during the pandemic so severe that when a fire broke out in an apartment block in November, ten people died because, locals said, the fire brigade was prevented from reaching it by Covid-19 measures. The nephew of a woman killed in the blaze described the region as an “open-air prison.” It resulted in rare protests, with demonstrators chanting, “We are human beings.”
On November 24, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 25–6 to set up a fact-finding investigation into abuses in Iran. China tried but failed to remove investigative powers from the motion. Just the month before, the same council voted 19–17 to reject a United States-led proposal to debate a report by the Council’s own commissioner on China’s human rights abuses and “possible crimes against humanity in Xinjiang province.” Prime Minister Albanese and Senator Wong, you’re now actively pursuing warm relations with this kind of government “on the basis of mutual respect”?
How different from the Australian values I was taught, including the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ response to the Japanese Massacre in Nanjing, China in 1937. It called for a boycott of Japanese goods and an embargo on the export of iron to Japan. In November, 1938 members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia refused to load pig iron onto a steamship that had been chartered to supply the Japan Steel Works in Kobe, part of a contract for 300,000 tons of pig-iron. The Japan Steel Works was producing military materials for Japan’s undeclared war in China.
Will you unequivocally put principles first in this equally dangerous new era instead of conveniently condemning Afghanistan and Iran while helping empower China further for its export value? You have no mandate for what you’re doing. According to the Lowy Institute’s June, 2022 Poll, only 12 percent of Australians trust China to act responsibly in the world.
Paul Sanderson is the author of “Briggs: Love, Cancer, and the Medical Profession”. His related petition has been signed by 35 stars, legends, and professors. He has written articles on that subject for Fortune, HuffPost, and the Medical Journal of Australia’s MJA InSight. Also a playwright and filmmaker, he moved back to Australia after living in London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York.
