A free kick given to the CCP by the loony left

It seemed as though people were so intent on overthrowing the government that they’d do without representative democracy, the very thing that allows them to comment so vocally on social media. A fairly toothless response by the Chinese government to the feds’ abrogation of Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ agreement with the CCP was greeted by a round of catcalls from the gallery. 

China’s decision to suspend talks that most people on social media never knew existed made the news on Thursday and the crowing was audible across town. But if you were Chinese such behaviour would be simply impossible because the CCP monitors Chinese social media and suppresses activity of which it disapproves. People’s understanding of realities that govern the lives of millions of people are blanketed by a myopic hunger for revenge on an administration whose election – in mid-2019 – is still regretted by a healthy section of the community.

You find all sorts of strange ideas if you spend any amount of time watching what passes for debate these days. The word “debate” must be used loosely as there is no order in the proceedings such as you find, for example, in federal Parliament. One person makes a statement and another person jumps in to rubbish it in a way that makes discussion impossible. Seasoned journalists who engage in this environment occasionally and openly celebrate the ability to block people from seeing what they write.

The Communist Party of China, meanwhile, presses on with its long-term program of shutting down all debate that it itself does not want. It has used its consulates in Australian cities to harass advertisers of local Chinese language newspapers who still pay for ads, when the Party takes exception to a story that runs. Its chosen delegates open up their own newspapers and run the Party line, making sure that the message from Beijing is communicated widely. It makes life difficult for Australian journalists working in China, and sometimes these individuals choose to leave the country rather than risk incarceration. Books full of their thoughts have just been published in Australia. ‘The Truth About China’ by Bill Birtles can be bought now in bookshops and at Amazon. There’s also ‘The Beijing Bureau’ written by a number of foreign correspondents.

So it’s not that there’s no information, it’s just that people refuse to look. Yet they still spout their vague opinions criticising a government that has been forced to negotiate a tortuous path by the CCP. The Belt and Road initiative was just the latest in an ongoing financial relationship that includes the sale of multiple assets to Chinese companies. And remember that each of these concerns must have a senior executive who is a Party member, so that Party discipline is maintained along the entire value chain.

About four years ago I was working on a story that never got published. The story was about Asian investment in Australian agriculture. In the process of researching the article I found a number of different plays that were part of the continuing economic relationship between China and Australia. Here are the non-land plays worth over $100 million.

Here are the land plays worth over $100 million.

The non-land plays worth under $100 million:

The land plays worth under $100 million:

And finally the smaller plays, worth under $20 million:

You can see from looking at these tables that the biggest investor at the time – my research was mainly conducted at the end of 2017 – was China. That might’ve changed in the intervening years but China will still be a major player in Australian agriculture today. What the Twittersphere ignores is the fact that the government here still allows Chinese companies to buy assets in Australia – despite the fact that the reverse is impossible. An Australian company that wanted to buy, say, a shipping port on China’s eastern seaboard, would not be allowed to complete the transaction.

When it comes to China, two sets of rules apply. China wants to profit from the global consensus but it wants to do so on its own terms. For its companies and for its government there is one set of rules. For everyone else there is another set of rules. The loony left supports this settlement because it is solely focused on the small picture. In its eagerness to remove the Morrison government from power it ignores the facts and sticks to a line the Party applauds because it is in its interest to see the Liberal Party – which has so warmly welcomed Chinese ownership of Australian assets – criticised. Twitter is doing the Party’s work for it.