Published by The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 March 2018
When writing my book Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia, I expected Communist Party spokespersons in Beijing to attack me as racist and “anti-China”. I didn’t expect people like Tim Soutphommasane, our Race Discrimination Commissioner, to parrot those criticisms in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Yet he leapt immediately into print condemning my book as “anti-Chinese” and recalling old fears of “yellow hordes”.
In writing about Chinese Communist Party influence in Australia, I could not have done more to head off that kind of criticism. Apart from my own history of anti-racism, I consulted with many Chinese-Australians about their experiences. The text reflects their voices.
In the book, I emphasise repeatedly the vital distinction between the Chinese party-state and the Chinese people, and strongly criticise the party for systematically conflating the two. In addition, the manuscript was read from cover to cover by three China experts with impeccable credentials and each highly sensitive to anti-Chinese racism.
My researcher, Alex Joske, is himself of Chinese heritage and the book received a strong cover endorsement from Professor John Fitzgerald, Australia’s leading Sinologist with deep links to the Chinese-Australian community.
In this light, Soutphommasane’s knee-jerk accusation that my book “smacks of the Yellow Peril revisited” is offensive to all of those whose views and professional judgments are reflected in the book.
His smearing of the book (the most cynical exercise in cherry-picking I have ever seen) aimed to poison the minds of his readers without engaging with the book’s arguments or the 100,000 words of accumulated fact.
But the ultimate rebuke to critics like Soutphommasane was delivered last Wednesday when over 100 Chinese-Australians packed into a room at NSW Parliament House for a book launch organised by the pro-democracy Australian Values Alliance and hosted by Greens MP Justin Field.
The overwhelming sense of the event was one of gratitude that someone from the mainstream had at last taken their concerns seriously and exposed the growing interference of the Chinese Communist Party in Australia, of which they are the primary victims.
Soutphommasane has dismissed the views of these Chinese-Australians as “conveniently confirming” the prejudice of others. In my view, for our Race Discrimination Commissioner to join in the silencing and marginalisation of these voices critical of the Chinese Communist Party is unforgivable.
When I made that point at the book launch there was an outbreak of applause. While our Race Discrimination Commissioner disrespects these Chinese-Australians, his attacks on me and my book as “Sinophobic” and “stoking anti-Chinese prejudices” echo precisely those made by the Chinese embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing.
I don’t believe for a moment that Soutphommasane is taking instructions from Beijing. But the Chinese Communist Party is as cynical as it is clever. It knows that accusing its Anglo critics in Australia of racism plays into this country’s continued anxiety about its history of racism and appeals directly to the institutions and social forces who are committed to rectifying past mistakes and purging Australia of its troubling remnants.
I’m referring not only to the institutions of multiculturalism but also to the warriors of “identity politics” on the left. For the latter, everything is seen through the lens of race, gender and sexual orientation.
The motivation for identity politics is a kind of competitive piety, verging on the sanctimonious. “I am more attuned to the oppression of minorities than you are.” I know how this works; I have played the game. Most of us grow out of this pious one-upmanship. But some get paid not to grow out of it.
Some years ago, Helen Garner wrote an essay reflecting on the hysterical reaction by some to her book The First Stone, which told the story of a sexual harassment incident at the University of Melbourne. She skewered her critics as people “who locate their sense of worth in holding to an already worked-out political position”.
NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge initially agreed to host the event for my book, until some Greens members launched a furious attack on him for “facilitating racism” (a charge amplified on social media by Beijing trolls). The pressure was too much, and he cancelled it.
“People in the grip of a primal response to the very existence of a book,” wrote Garner, “will read it — if they consent to read it at all — between the narrow blinkers of anger and fear.”
The Chinese Communist Party cynically simulates outrage. When they climb onto their high horses, the activists in the grip of a primal response to the very existence of my book help to disguise the party’s interference operations in Australia. I hope they will now listen to those Chinese-Australians who have hailed Silent Invasion as a breakthrough in their struggle, and ask themselves who is served when they denounce me and my book as Sinophobic.