14/03/2019

Australia canary in the coal mine

Originally published by the Taipei Times on 11/03/2019.

In March last year, journalist John Garnaut warned readers of Foreign Affairs that “Australia is the canary in the coal mine of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference.”

He highlighted numerous cases of the CCP working to covertly manipulate his country’s political system, from access buying and Beijing-linked political donors to the hijacking of universities for party propaganda.

Similar meddling has also been documented in New Zealand by academic Anne-Marie Brady, a China specialist, who as a result has herself been the target of pro-China harassment.

Miners used to quickly exit the toxin-filled mine shafts after their caged canaries dropped dead, but when it comes to Beijing and its suffocation of free societies, liberal democracies have been slow to notice the early indicators.

Read full article here.

The case of Gui Minhai: The Rushdie affair revisited – with less bloodshed and less international interest

Originally published on the Hong Kong Free Press on 10/03/2019.

Thirty years on from the Rushdie Affair, the ongoing detention of Gui Minhai in China is yet another reminder of the threat that dictators pose to free expression.

At the end of the 20th century you could be forgiven for being an optimist. Fifty years after the defeat of fascism in Europe, the other great totalitarian threat, Soviet communism, had crumbled as the world witnessed a succession of democratic waves from Latin America to East Asia. It was not that history itself had ended but as Francis Fukuyama put it, that liberal democracy had won.

The year 1989 will go down as a turning point in this struggle. In that year the Hungarian government began, physically, dismantling the iron curtain and the people of Poland ended communist party rule. Across Czechoslovakia thousands called for freedom while across the Baltic states a human chain, repudiating Soviet rule, formed. In November, the Berlin Wall, a cold war behemoth which had divided the city since 1961, was opened—momentous changes were taking place.

Yet, despite this huge release of human energy not all dictatorships fell and not all tyrants bowed to cries for freedom. The year 1989 also witnessed two events which foreshadowed the current challenges to free societies, and the ability of their citizens to express themselves.

Read full article here.