Shaoquett Moselmane

At a time when foreign interference is at the front and centre of the political agenda, a NSW Labor MP has delivered an extraordinary speech parroting Beijing’s narrative of Western victimisation and the need for a “new world order” in which China will “force a change to the rules”.

Shaoquett Moselmane, a Labor Legislative Councillor, opened a meeting of the Sydney Institute for Public and International Affairs in Parliament House on June 25, where Bob Carr and two academics spoke on “China’s Rise from Poverty to Economic Power.” In his rather clunky speech, Moselmane offered a potted history of communist China, including that Mao Zedong’s “restructure” led to “terrible unintended consequences as the collective experiment left a controversial legacy, one that temporarily scarred the Revolution.”

It is estimated that Mao inflicted tens of millions of deaths through famines induced knowingly by his policies, as well as the murder of millions more Chinese and minorities at the direction of Mao and the Party — and his successors today.

Moselmane then turns to the future and warns that “China will not be satisfied to operate within an existing word order with the rules of the game designed to favour the west. A new world order is what China will in future demand.” Moselmane argued “the rules of the game” favour its opponents, “so the rules have to change”.

“China cannot continue to rise the way that it has within a West-designed world order, in a Western-designed global financial system, and in a West-controlled international legal trade structure dominated and controlled by Western powers.”

Moselmane goes on to say that, “The only way for China to reach its potential is for China to force a change to the rules and create a new world order.”

The argument about whether China is a rule-taker or rule-maker is an old one, but Moselmane couches it in Beijing’s terms, with China as a victim of its opponent’s self-interested international order. Curiously, this appears to not be the view of the Trump administration, which argues that China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation — one of the core elements of the international order — was a mistake and that China has been too successful at gaming the trade system. Nor, in the South China Sea, can one see China being hedged in by international rules — it has brazenly defied international law to annex and militarise territory to which it has no lawful claim. That is, it’s behaving just like another great power, the United States, which claims to adhere to international rules but which picks and chooses which ones it follows and happily breaches those if it is in its interests to do so.

Global media and the engine of social media are in the hands of China’s opponents. The Arab Spring has seen the power of Western propaganda satellites in manipulating and misinforming the public leading the Arab world to chaos and the result has been death and destruction. Today China has been able to block that intrusion into China’s internal affairs.

Moselmane also lauds Chinese censorship. “It needs greater control of the global media,” he argues.

Moselmane’s conspiracy theory about sinister Western media — or as he calls it, propaganda — destabilising non-Western countries would presumably comes as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Bahrainians, Iranians and Syrians who paid no heed to Western media in trying to protest against the murderous regimes that ruled them — and paid with their lives for doing so. Just the dupes of Western journalists and editors and tweeters, apparently — with no agency of their own. Like the “unintended” victims of Mao’s mass slaughter, perhaps they’re just a “controversial legacy” for Moselmane.