Kevin Rudd, once a firm China sceptic, has become Australia’s first (former) prime minister to openly consort with the ruling Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).
The UFWD is responsible for spreading Chinese government interests in offshore nations — including Australia.
UFWD groups are disguised with dull and prosaic names, but their real purpose is to infiltrate nations across the world to influence business, politics, policy and education, and report directly back to Beijing.
Rudd, who was PM from 2007-2009 and again in 2012, spoke in the Communist Party’s UFWD’s Central Institute of Socialism in November 2017. In October 2018, he was greeted as a “rock star” according to a report in the AFR at the United Front-sponsored Australia-China Future Forum.
But it was his appearance this year with the leadership of the UFWD body Australia China Economics, Trade and Culture Association (ACETCA) that set China watchers abuzz. At an ACETCA event in Fujian, China, in June he was seen with Lin Yi, chair of Shenglong (Aqualand) and permanent honorary chair of ACETCA.
The connection with ACETCA is now very much a Rudd family business. Rudd’s youngest son Marcus is a principal at advisory firm Tam and Rudd Consulting. His business partner Ian Tam is a prominent United Front identity in Australia and vice-chairman of ACETCA.
Crikey understands Tam is the driving force behind the group. At the First International Grasslands Spring Festival Evening on Sydney Harbour, Tam was noted as the “representative of former Australian PM Kevin Rudd“.
Rudd himself is the head of New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute, which has a laser focus on China. His daughter Jessica, an author, is a lifestyle ambassador for Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group, a conglomerate closely connected to the CPP.
She sells Australian products into China via her Jessica’s Suitcase website, which is on the Alibaba platform. Her husband Albert Tse, who was working at Macquarie Group in Beijing less than a decade ago as an investment banker, now has his own own private equity firm, Wattle Hill Capital, that has the backing of several wealthy Chinese families.
Rudd was also made chair of the Chinese North International University Alliance international advisory board in March 2019, and last month was elected chairman of the China-backed Global Sharing Economy Forum.
In light of this, it’s worth noting that on November 25, Kevin Rudd launched Peter Hartcher’s Quarterly Essay, “Red Flag”, about Chinese influence and how Australia should deal with it, now the dominant narrative of China-Australia relations.
What happened to the feisty Rudd of yesteryear, who took on China over Tibet, and branded the Communist Party as “trying to rat-fuck us” after they sank the Copenhagen Climate Conference? What happened to the Rudd who described the country as a potential military threat in a 2009 defence white paper?
Now he’s downplaying concerns over Chinese influence in Australia.
Rudd said it was “kind of crazy to overreact and to get into reds under the bed land, to get into yellow peril land” regarding warnings from Australian security chiefs about Chinese influence. It’s hard to fathom a former prime minister describing credible information about the Chinese government trying install operatives in Australian Parliament as an “overreaction.”
Sure, Labor supported the foreign interference legislation, Rudd admits, but adds quickly that “should not result in some sort of anti-Chinese domestic political witch-hunt”.
But he failed to tell the gathered throng about his connections with UFWD organisations, that he has assiduously rebuilt his ties with Beijing and worked his way back into its good graces.
By 2017, Rudd was in deep. He started repeating a party propaganda line, claiming that under President Xi Jinping there had been more freedom of religion in China. In fact, under Xi, religious diversity is being repressed with an aggression not seen since the time of Mao Zedong. As well, Rudd has barely issued a murmur of the incarceration of 1.2 million Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang gulags.
There is, of course, another path for former political leaders — one that people like former US president Jimmy Carter have taken. And that is to use cachet and influence to work for the rights and freedoms of people trapped in authoritarian systems.
One person who could use Rudd’s help right now is writer Yang Hengjun who, it was revealed last week, has had his interrogation regime ratcheted up as Chinese authorities strive to force a “confession”, quite possibly through torture.
But that isn’t the sort of thing Rudd would want to chat about over a bottle of Moutai with his mates at the United Front.
Has the treasonous Andrew Robb? Think Darwin.
agreed
Oh come on old greybearded one I was hoping for a bit more enlightenment !
Certainly its a travesty that Landbridge / China was allowed to purchase (99 yr lease) the port of Darwin and the manner in which it was transacted. No worse surely than the US operation and control over Pine Gap ?
It defies comprehension how both these impingement’s on our sovereignty were waved through and I have failed to hear or see the obvious question asked –
Who are the main beneficiaries from the ownership/ lease of these facilities & what is their purpose?
Surely blind freddy can see that in the event of an escalation in hostilities between the US and China, that these countries will be protecting these respective assets, thus making ourselves a prime target !
Goodness, what an uninteresting diatribe about an entirely unsurprising number of connections between Kevin Rudd and the China’s United Front body, which unsurprisingly seeks to promote China’s interests overseas. This body seems strikingly like the AmericanAustralian Association, which has exactly the same suite of activities aimed at promoting ties between Australia and America. Are we to see connections between all post war Australian PMs and this Association as a reason to declare all our PMs agents of American influence in Australia? If not, might we give Kevin Rudd a break, despite the word being out that the US wants to confront China and that US agents of US influence in our media want to write nasty things about people who urge that we not go as far overboard in hostility to China as some in the US want?
The man can’t help himself! He must have been frightened by a plate of fried rice or a dimsim as a child!
I quite like the idea of declaring all Australian PMs since WW2 as agents of American influence (except Gough of course – and you know what happened to him). However there probably needs to be a new category – agents of Murdock influence.
Thank you Peter for your concise and balanced response and jolting our memories of what Gough stood for.
A vision of an Australia for ALL Australians.
Yes the great Gough who was never shy of standing up for OUR interests and pursuing them on the world stage, his recognition of China, for example, ahead of the US was a great boost to our international standing.
It is well documented how his criticism of the US, in not only ending our slavish commitment by the LNP to the Vietnam War, but also his concern over the role of US bases on our soil like Pine Gap & questioning their roles, played a big part in his demise with CIA involvement.
Murdoch’s role in the making and breaking of Gough and his government is also well documented.
No doubt he would be turning in his grave to see the unfathomable depths that not only the Labor Party, but the country has descended to in poor governance and the trashing of his vision.
One interesting little item about Gough’s overthrow is that there I clear evidence of its being at least a bit of a CIA thing. Khemlani, who conveniently flew into Australia to trigger blocking supply in the Senate, was later in life convicted of a criminal offence in the US and then received an immediate US government pardon. That was a privilege for people who had acted as agents of the US government.
I love the use of terms “openly consort” and “infiltrate” I guess OK as long as these terms are used to characterise American influence and monitoring.
I still am intrigued that the following receives no press or even a reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-peril.html?hp
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chinese-government-and-networking-firm-huawei-a-960199.html
Rudd is a side issue. The real issue is in the battle of future global hegemony: Will we side with the USA or PRC. We cannot do both. Eventually the Australian elites will have to pick sides. I think Rudd will be on the wrong side, but no doubt his sensitive political antenna will pick up on this and we will experience a revision in his thinking.
The USA is a nasty hegemonic empire that has been responsible for the death of millions since WW2. The PCR is just as bad, but until now they haven’t had the money or the guns to project their malign influence beyond their immediate neighborhood and on their social minorities who quite rightly think they are totalitarian arseholes.
In both cases it is not the people of these countries who are evil, it is the elites like Trump and Xi Jinping and before them Obama and Hu Jintao. These are the perpetrators of international crimes. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, under the Nuremberg principles of international justice every US president since WW2 could have been indited of the same war crimes Hitler and the Nazis were.
The elites don’t care a damn about the people they represent, they see them as the internal enemy who they can brainwash into fighting the external enemies who challenge the elites wealth and privilege and most importantly their narcissistic egos.
When is the moderation going to be done?
Robert, you have fallen into the trap of ‘the PRC is just as bad’ which falls under the ridiculousness of ‘whataboutism’! Please describe where they are spreading their ‘malign influence’. In which part of China do their ‘minorities’ think the central government are ‘totalitarian arseholes’? To merely throw out these accusations without any evidence to back them up, is merely doing a ‘Fairbairn’!
Those of us on here who have some surface knowledge of China sneer at the Uyghur ‘concentration camp’ nonsense. We are well aware that Xinjian is part of the New Silk Road Initiative. The US would like nothing better than to disrupt this initiative through arming Turkic terrorists. Are you aware of this? If you are, why are you not presenting this in your initial post?
Are you aware that there is an article on Times of India regarding where representatives from various Muslim Countries visited Xinjiang and were impress at the way China was re-educating members that had been co-opted into IS and other fundamentalist groups? At the end of the re-education programme those having come through it are given a certificate and a job offer! Quite different to the US response of killing all and sundry, even non-combatants!
As Fairbairn has yet to gain any respect from his readers, may I suggest that you don’t follow in his footsteps.
As Max Such says in his SMH letter “Spies and damned lies” of 7 December:-
“Brian Toohey’s article underlined the inherent exaggeration of the statements now made by senior members of the security/intelligence/defence departments about the “Chinese threat” (”Reports of China spies and takeover plots are fanciful”, December 6).
These exaggerations appear to be in the ascendant in the Canberra bureaucracy and in the thinking of the cabinet. At least Duncan Lewis’s claim that China is seeking to “take over” Australia’s political system was made on the record. We can measure the officer against his words.
The conspiratorial material, unsourced, that often purports to document the Chinese threat, can only come, directly or indirectly from the intelligence community’s conduits and media handlers.
They are making a smart choice. These “scoops” have made the threat the dominant theme in discussion of relations with China in what is the liberal wing of the Australian media, which might usually be expected to be a bit more sceptical about the actual dimensions of the threat.
It would be interesting to know if the Prime Minister and the national security committee of cabinet has approved this media campaign or whether, as in the 1950s and 1960s, the spooks are freelancing in pursuit of greater budgets and power, confident that no thoughtful minister with a spine will challenge or discipline them. – Max Suich, Milsons Point”