The education tours arranged by Australian interest group China Matters were bound to end in tears. All it was ever going to take to scuttle the efforts of the organisers to improve bilateral understanding through parliamentary visits was for Australian politicians to speak their minds and shine a light on issues that Beijing prefers to keep in the shade. Not hard to see that coming.
To anyone familiar with the current leadership in China, it could hardly have come as a surprise, either, that Beijing would refuse to issue visas for Liberal politicians Andrew Hastie and James Paterson on account of things they said. How often do officials in Beijing need to tell Australians to shut up or suffer the consequences for that message to hit home?
But a closer look at the language in which the embassy couched its response suggests that the idea of parliamentary education tours to China was not just unworkable but fundamentally ill-conceived.
The China Matters team billed the event as a “nuanced” education tour. For Beijing it was a re-education tour – an effort behind closed doors to convert the tourists to the Communist Party’s point of view. The idea of education as re-education is implicit in the embassy’s response.
As long as people genuinely “repent”, the embassy declared, the door remains open to all Australians. No further correspondence on this matter will be entered into as “China will never yield to colonisation of ideas and values”.
The phrasing of the embassy’s response is eerily similar to the language employed by officials in Beijing in trying to explain why they are holding a million Uyghur Muslims in forced education camps in Xinjiang: it’s about education, repentance, and awakening. Australians appear to be in need of similar treatment.
Official documents recently leaked to The New York Times illustrate how this kind of education is explained to the family members and friends of those incarcerated in Xinjiang. Officials concede that people undergoing forced education have done nothing wrong. Still, they harbour “unhealthy thoughts” that need to be remedied through education. For those who take part in the forced education programs and then sincerely repent, awaken, and embrace the beliefs of the party, the door of the prison will be open too.
The embassy’s remark that the door “will always remain open” if Hastie and Paterson “repent and redress their mistakes” echoes these official explanations of mass forced re-education because both stem from a common set of assumptions about authority and education under party rule. The party is both absolutely powerful and absolutely correct and there is no room for disagreement.
The party is also exceptionally generous in extending its forgiveness to people with unhealthy thoughts who publicly recant. In the case of Xinjiang, according to the Times, critics of the internment policies are told to be grateful for the party’s help and to stay quiet. For Australians, the message is that the door is open to those who appreciate the party’s generosity and remain silent.
This is where the party’s claim that it won’t tolerate colonisation of ideas and values starts to come unstuck. Its antiquated language of repentance, reform, and awakening is itself a colonial borrowing from Japanese prison reform initiatives of the colonial era and from Christian conversion-moralising of the same period.
Christian conversion language was transplanted into the party lexicon through 19th century hymns and sermons which missionaries translated into Chinese and recited in that country’s church halls and public squares before circulating them through the new mass commercial presses they founded around the turn of the 20th century. Preeminent nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, a Christian himself, transposed many Western missionary terms such as ‘conversion’ and ‘awakening’ into a colloquial nationalist vocabulary which was fused with Leninism in the early protocols of the Chinese Communist Party.
When party leaders speak of the need for repentance and conversion to their point of view, they follow a colonial logic more potent than any that Australians can muster, a colonial logic of their own devising.
Of course there is a vast difference between being held in camps and being told you can’t visit China. But when it comes to being lectured at by party authorities, Australians don’t like being colonized any more than the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.
“Draw?” is my call.
On one side :
A) A totalitarian, authoritarian regime that controls media, that has a deplorable human rights record (especially toward “cleansing/reprogramming/re-educating” ethnic minorities);
blocks
B) entry to a couple of foreign alt-right zealot ideologues (one “schooled” in the IPA no less) attempting to go to A) on the pretext of a “study “tour” – for which one would expect a prerequisite “open mind”?
Both foreigners = members of an evolving autocratic government that :-
* can’t abide criticism. That persecutes whistle-blowers, and raids the offices and homes of the media that would “leak” what that sneaky dictatorial government has been up too;
* has a lap-dog police farce that turns a selective blind eye to those that leak to it’s advantage;
* treats it’s indigenous minorities the way it does – from a “stolen generation” to cutting funds for infrastructure to those that want to “stay on country” – on the grounds that their remote communities are “lifestyle choices” – as articulated by Tony “SEITNA” Abbott, Morrison’s hand-picked “Special Envoy on Indigenous Terra Nullius Affairs(?)”?
I’d say the optics play out well for both sides – to a certain demographic – at home?
klewie…you forgot the biggest hypocritical action of this ‘autocratic’ government:
* locking up asylum seekers on remote off-shore islands for six+ years, when they have
committed NO crime.
And they have the audacity to say China ‘locks people up’. This abominable government is NO better!!
Was going to comment that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving couple of zealots but klewso has beaten me to it. I may have blinked and missed it but I’ve seen no evidence of any commitment to civil liberty and human rights here in Australia by these two Cold War warriors.
Thoughts and prayers to all involved.
Oh, that’s so gooood.
Crikey is learning fast and following the Chinese lead – I have noticed the use of in increasing frequency of
— Comments are switched off for this article. —
appearing each day – at least we have the option of not renewing our subscription when it falls due.
Agree DG…this ‘comments are closed for this article’ business is wearing a bit thin.
When we pay our subs, Crikey leads us to believe that comment is acceptable. Perhaps they should only be writing articles we CAN comment on.
Then again…perhaps they don’t give a rat’s…. what we think??!!
Yes totally agree for the third or fourth time. INQ are not protected work experience kids. Ok, sub judice matters we can wear, but the great subscription cancelling wave is looking at lots of you. I’m likely to cancel the Age after the latest 20% price increase after 30 odd years. Stan went and Netflix is on borrowed time. I only relented with Crikey a week before my renewal this year. We’re a crude bunch of curmudgeons at times but to me the comments are often at least as good as the article.
Really? Not a lot of quality comment in this thread.
Comments are disabled on only a tiny number of articles and always matters either before the courts or extremely likely to be so soon.
Also, the fact that you’re having this conversation IN THE COMMENTS should have made you pause for thought surely?
If it is before the courts – the articles shouldn’t be written – or is it only journalists who have that freedom – seems to sound familiar recently.
If it is likely to be before the courts it is not now
if it to be soon then it will come – it is not now
the readiness all – so should the commentaries.
Now for a second comment if I may, about the Fitzgerald piece itself and specifically his myopic view that study tours such as these are not, by their very nature, used by the host country to seek to influence the perspectives of the participants. China is hardly unique in this, even Australia does it! Probably the most sustained and successful exponent is Israel and it’s paid off in spades when you look at bipartisan Australian foreign policy vis a vis Israel/Palestine.
Hastie & Paterson have a nerve trying to moralise about China’s Human Rights when at this time Federal & State Governments are trying to suppress legitimate and orderly political dissent with anti-demonstration laws aimed at gagging the Public, and we have yet to incorporate a Bill of Human Rights in our own Constitution. The reason why, from one politician, was: “It’d take too much power from us.” How good is our hypocrisy?
Our only protection seems to come (so far) from the Courts. Scott Ludlam’s bail conditions were deemed excessive and revoked by the NSW Deputy Chief Magistrate, and trespass charges against Bob Brown were quashed in Court also. Bob’s appeal against the Tasmanian Government’s repressive anti-demonstration laws was only recently upheld by the High Court. The Governments concerned have been officially reminded that the Right of Dissent is the Linchpin of Democracy and such legislation is intolerable in a Free Society. It’s time, I think, for the Hard Right to reconsider such folly.