Australia becomes open land for China's killers

Asio investigating Chinese plot to plant spy in Australia’s parliament after Liberal party member found deadOperatives offered $1m to fund party member Nick Zhao, who was found dead after approaching Asio to discuss plot
Australian Associated Press

Nick Zhao, Liberal Party Member Who Was Bribed and Murdered by China

Asio director general Mike Burgess has confirmed the agency was aware of a Chinese plot to infiltrate parliament, saying ‘hostile foreign intelligence activity continues to pose a real threat to our nation and its security’. 

The head of Asio has issued a rare public statement confirming the domestic spy agency was aware of a Chinese plot to infiltrate Australia’s parliament.
Explosive allegations aired on 60 Minutes suggested Chinese operatives offered $1m to fund Liberal party member Nick Zhao’s tilt at federal parliament.
The 32-year-old was found dead in a Melbourne hotel room after approaching Asio to discuss the plot.
“Australians can be reassured that Asio was previously aware of matters that were reported today, and has been actively investigating them,” Asio director general Mike Burgess said in a statement.
“Hostile foreign intelligence activity continues to pose a real threat to our nation and its security. Asio will continue to confront and counter foreign interference and espionage in Australia.”
The Nationals backbencher Barnaby Joyce said he was not surprised by allegations China tried to plant a spy in parliament.
“I know the Chinese, in one way or another, have been trying to infiltrate our parliament, whether online or directly through politicians,” he told the Seven Network.
“We must be resolute and strong and realise this is the new world order we are living in.”
Labor has asked the Morrison government for an urgent briefing and public explanation.
The deputy opposition leader, Richard Marles, said people needed to be confident Australia was free from foreign interference.
“We obviously want to understand everything that we can know about this,” Marles told the ABC.
“But on the face of it and what’s in the public domain right now, this is a very, very serious matter.”
The Liberal backbencher Andrew Hastie said he was briefed on Zhao’s death as chair of the parliamentary committee on intelligence and security.
“It was surreal, it was like something out of a spy novel happening in Melbourne with impunity,” he told 60 Minutes.
“This isn’t just cash in a bag, given for favours, this is a state-sponsored attempt to infiltrate our parliament.
“Using an Australian citizen and basically run them as an agent of foreign influence in our democratic system. So this is really significant and Australians should be very, very concerned about this.”
It was the second explosive allegation over the weekend of attempts by the Chinese government to influence Australian politics.
Nine newspapers reported on Saturday that a Chinese spy provided Asio with details of how Chinese military intelligence officers fund and conduct political interference operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia.

Chinese Peril

China furious, as Australians unite on barriers against its interference
By Michelle Grattan
Given Bill Shorten's national security stance, and the usual bipartisan functioning of the intelligence and security committee, it is not surprising that agreement has been reached on the bill. 

The Government couldn't have had a more appropriate week for the release of the report from the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, which has examined its legislation to counter Chinese interference.
Bipartisan agreement in the report, tabled Thursday, on the 60 recommendations, covering minor and more substantive amendments, has paved the way for a bill that has infuriated Chinese authorities to clear Parliament within weeks.
A couple of current instances have highlighted how China engages in unsubtle pressure.
Qantas confirmed it would bow to China over how the carrier refers to Taiwan in its advertising and on its website.

This followed a demand to three dozen airlines that they make clear that Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are part of China.
The Government was understanding of Qantas's position, accepting it had little choice.
On a very different front, former foreign minister Bob Carr, aka Beijing Bob, an outspoken friend of China, who heads the Australia China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, was unable to get visas for journalists (including from Fairfax and News Corp) to go on one of the sponsored visits to China he hosts.
Bob says "the assumption is that [this] is part of the freeze China is applying to bilateral visits" — a freeze that has hit ministers.
Then there is the much-publicised controversy about Facebook sharing user data with, among many companies, several Chinese ones including Huawei, a telecommunications-equipment giant that the Australian Government has not permitted to tender for National Broadband Network contracts.
We're well past the optimistic days when we believed it could be all upside in our relationship with China, which has over the years delivered an economic bonanza for Australia.

Turnbull, like Rudd, tough-minded on China
Trade Minister Steve Ciobo tries to shrug off problems as minor irritants, but presumably that's just his job. 

Others in the Government have become more forthright.
It's notable that of recent prime ministers, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, both very knowledgeable about China, have been the most openly tough-minded towards it. 

Before becoming PM, each was regarded as China-friendly.
Of the various causes of current tensions in the relationship, the legislation against foreign interference is on the top shelf (together with Australia's stand on the South China Sea).
The purpose of the legislation, unveiled late last year, is to "comprehensively reform key offences dealing with threats to national security, particularly those posed by foreign principals".
Among its provisions, it "introduces new foreign interference offences targeting covert, deceptive or threatening actions by foreign actors who intend to influence Australia's democratic or government processes or to harm Australia".
At its core, what this legislation does is to criminalise foreign interference that is one step below espionage. 

ASIO has always been able to investigate such interference, but it hasn't actually been a criminal offence.
While the Government goes out of its way to say the legislation is not aimed at any individual country, everyone knows China is in its sights. 

As is Russia, after the experience in the United States and elsewhere.

ASIO warned of 'unprecedented' foreign activity
Duncan Lewis, head of ASIO, emphasised the foreign threat in evidence to Senate estimates last month, describing the current scale of foreign intelligence activity against Australian interests as "unprecedented".
"Foreign actors covertly attempt to influence and shape the views of members of the Australian public, the Australian media, officials in the Australian Government and members of the diaspora communities here in Australia," he told the hearing.
"Foreign states maintain an enduring interest in a range of strategically important commercial, political, economic, defence, security, foreign policy and diaspora issues," he said.

Clarity on 'espionage', 'sabotage' and 'interference'
Where possible, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten tries to stick like glue to the Government on national security issues, for reasons of politics as well as substance. 

Given this, and the usual bipartisan functioning of the intelligence and security committee, it is not surprising that agreement has been reached on a refined version of the bill.
Many of the changes, as Attorney-General Christian Porter noted, are to definitions and drafting — which doesn't make them unimportant.
These include clarifying that "prejudice to national security" has to involve an element of harm, not just embarrassment. 

There'll be clarification of "espionage", "sabotage", "political violence" and "foreign interference".
Changes will reduce the maximum penalties for the new secrecy offences, and require the attorney-general's consent for a prosecution under them.
An amendment will ensure the staff of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security are properly protected.

Journalism defence beefed up
The changes will give greater protection to the media, expanding the public interest defence for journalists, and making it clear that editors, legal advisers and administrative staff will all be covered by the journalism defence.
Before a journalist can be prosecuted over reporting classified documents, the head of the relevant agency will have to certify that they were properly classified, and the attorney-general must consent to the legal action.
The Government, accepting some criticisms of the legislation, itself put forward certain amendments.
The committee — which is still examining an accompanying bill to set up a register of those working on behalf of foreign governments and other interests — said that after three years there should be a review of the operation of key parts of the foreign influence legislation.
The agreed changes haven't satisfied critics such as the Law Council and Amnesty International. 

But the political deal is now in place.
Meanwhile Mr Porter explicitly cast an eye to coming elections. 

"Activity which is designed to interfere or influence our democratic processes is at its most acute when democratic processes are taking place and that means five by-elections in late July and then the full general election," he said.
The Government, saying it wants the legislation passed before the Parliament rises at the end of June for the winter recess, is preparing for more angry reaction from Beijing.

Chinese Subversion

A secret government report uncovered China's attempts to influence all levels of politics in Australia
By Tara Francis Chan
Australia's red menace

A secret report commissioned by Australia's prime minister found attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to influence all levels of government.
The report found the CCP's interference attempts have been going on for a decade, and described China as the country that is most concerning to Australia.
The inquiry was led by a former government adviser who spoke to the US Armed Services Committee about China's growing political interference earlier this year.
A classified government report uncovered attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to influence all levels of politics in Australia.
The report was commissioned by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, and used the resources of both the prime minister's office and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO).
According to the Australian news outlet 9News, and later confirmed by Fairfax Media, the yearlong inquiry found the CCP has tried to influence policy and gain access to all levels of government for a decade. 

The report also described China as the most concerning country to Australia.
It was the work of this inquiry, which also looked into China's influence attempts on the media and academia, that led Turnbull to propose new laws targeting espionage, foreign political donations and foreign interference in December 2017.
At the time of the announcement, Turnbull confirmed the existence of the report, but did not indicate its findings.
"When I initiated a report into this in August last year, through my department, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) had made significant investigative breakthroughs and delivered a series of very grave warnings," said Turnbull. 

"But our agencies lacked the legislative tools they needed to act. And it's fair to say that our system as a whole had not grasped the nature and the magnitude of the threat.'
He added: "The findings of the report are necessarily classified. But I can say the reasons for initiating this work were justified and the outcomes have galvanized us to take action."
It has now been revealed that the inquiry, which also reportedly looked into political donors linked to China, was headed by John Garnaut, a former senior adviser to Turnbull and a former China news correspondent.
In March, Garnaut spoke to the US House Armed Services Committee about China's interference operations within Australia, describing the CCP as "very good at it" particularly compared to Russia.
"Unlike Russia, which seems to be as much for a good time rather than a long time, the Chinese are strategic, patient, and they set down foundations of organizations and very consistent narratives over a long period of time," Garnaut told the committee.
"They put an enormous amount of effort into making sure we don't talk about what it's doing," he said, adding that countries have "failed to recognize a lot of the activity that has been going on."
Garnaut's comments were echoed last week by the head of ASIO, though he did not explicitly mention China.
"Foreign actors covertly attempt to influence and shape the views of members of the Australian public, the Australian media and officials in the Australian government, as well as members of the diaspora communities here in Australia," Duncan Lewis told an Australian Senate estimates hearing. "Clandestine interference is designed to advance the objectives of the foreign actor to the detriment of Australia and to our national interests."
Relations have become strained between China and Australia ever since Turnbull proposed the new legislation last year.

CHINA’S OPERATION AUSTRALIA

The party line: The Chinese Communist Party is waging a covert campaign of influence in Australia and while loyalists are rewarded, dissidents live in fear.
By Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Sashka Koloff and Chris Uhlmann


University student Tony Chang had suspected for months that he was being secretly monitored, but it was a panicked phone call from a family member in China that confirmed his fears.
It was June 2015 and Chang’s parents had just been approached by state security agents in Shenyang in north-eastern China and invited to a meeting at a tea house.
It would not be a cordial catch-up.
As Chang later detailed in a sworn statement to Australian immigration authorities, three agents warned his parents about their son’s involvement in the Chinese democracy movement in Australia. The agents “pressed the point that my parents must ask me to stop what I am taking part in and keep a low profile,” the statement said.

From a Brisbane share house littered with books and unwashed plates, the Queensland University of Technology student told a Fairfax Media-Four Corners investigation that the agents had intelligence about his plans to participate in a protest in Brisbane on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and also during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Australia.
Chang’s activities in Brisbane meant that his terrified father in China feared that he too was being “watched and tracked”.
His father, a cautious, apolitical man, had already spent years worrying about his unruly son.
In 2008, when Chang was 14, he was arrested for hanging Taiwan independence banners on street poles in Shenyang.
His family was forced to call on Communist Party contacts to ensure Chang was released after several hours of questioning.

Tony Chang awaits questioning in a police station in China in 2008.

After Chang was questioned again in 2014 for dissident activities, he decided it was no longer safe to remain in China.
He applied for an Australian student visa.
The June 2015 approach to his parents back in China was the second time in two months that security agents had warned Chang’s family to rein in his anti-communist activism in Australia.
These threats helped convince the Australian government to grant Chang a protection visa.
Chang’s treatment as a teen is typical of the way the party-state deals with dissidents inside China. But the monitoring of the student in Brisbane and his decision to speak out about the threats to his parents in Shenyang, despite the risk it poses to them, provides a rare insight into something much less well known: the opaque campaign of control and influence being waged by the Chinese Communist Party inside Australia.

Tony Chang in Brisbane in 2017.

Part of this campaign involves attempts to influence Australian politicians via political donors closely aligned with the Communist Party – something that causes serious concern to Australia’s security agency, ASIO.
But the one million ethnic Chinese living in Australia are also targets of the Communist Party’s influence operations.
On university campuses, in the Chinese-language media and in some community groups, the party is mounting an influence-and-control operation among its diaspora that is far greater in scale and, at its worst, much nastier, than any other nation deploys.
In China, it’s known as qiaowu.
The recent chief of Australia’s diplomatic service, Peter Varghese, who is now chancellor at the Queensland University, told Fairfax Media and Four Corners that China’s approach to influence building is deeply concerning, not least because it is being run by an authoritarian one-party state with geopolitical ambitions that may not be in Australia’s interest.
“The more transparent that process [of China’s influencing building in Australia] is, the better placed we are to make a judgment as to whether it is acceptable or not acceptable and whether it is covert or overt,” Varghese says.
“This is an issue ASIO would need to keep a very close eye on, in terms of any efforts to infiltrate or subvert our system which go beyond accepted laws and accepted norms.”
The depth of the concern at the highest levels of the defence and intelligence establishment can be measured in recent public statements by the departing Defence Force Chief and the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Australia’s domestic spy chief Duncan Lewis warned Parliament that Chinese interference in Australia was occurring on “an unprecedented scale”.
“And this has the potential to cause serious harm to the nation's sovereignty, the integrity of our political system, our national security capabilities, our economy and other interests,” Lewis said.
A China expert, Swinburne professor John Fitzgerald, agrees.
“Members of the Chinese community in Australia deserve the same rights and privileges as all other Australians, not to be hectored, lectured at, monitored, policed, reported on and told what they may and may not think.”

The coercion category
The definitive text on Beijing’s overseas influence operations is Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese by China expert James To.
Citing primary documents, To concludes the policies are designed to “legitimise and protect the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power” and maintain influence over critical “social, economic and political resources”.
Those already amenable to Beijing, such as many student group members, are “guided” – often by Chinese embassy officials – and given various benefits as a means of “behavioural control and manipulation,” To says.
Those regarded as hostile, such as Tony Chang, are subjected to “techniques of inclusion or coercion.”
Australian academic Dr Feng Chongyi is another who falls into the “coercion” category.
In March, Feng travelled to China to engage in what he calls the “sensitive work” of interviewing human rights lawyers and scholars across China.
Feng expected to be closely watched and harassed when he arrived in Beijing but accepted it simply as an irritating feature of his job.
“It’s an open secret that our telephone is tapped, we are followed everywhere.”
“But that is a little thing that we have to accept if we want to work in China,” the University of Technology Sydney China scholar and democracy activist tells Fairfax Media and Four Corners.
Feng is a small, energetic man who has retained his Communist Party membership in the hope that he will live long enough to see some results from what has become his life’s mission: democratising China.
But he is also a realist, which meant he was initially unconcerned when, on March 20 and after he’d arrived in the city of Kunming, he was approached by agents from the Ministry of State Security. Feng was driven to a hotel three hours away to be questioned.
He expected the matter to end there but, a day later, he realised he was being followed by security agents to the sprawling port city of Guangzhou.
There he was told his interrogation would continue.
“That’s the time when I really realised something serious is happening,” he recalls.

Dr Feng Chongyi in 2017.

Big trouble
In a Guangzhou hotel room, the security agents subjected Dr Feng to daily six-hour questioning sessions, all of it video-taped.
Many of the questions were about his activities in Sydney, including the content of his lectures at UTS, the people in his Australian network of Communist Party critics, and his successful efforts to stop a concert glorifying the Communist Party founder Chairman Mao Zedong.
Then the agents turned their attention to Feng’s family, asking him specific questions to show him that his wife and daughter were also being closely watched. 
He describes this change in tactics as a means of getting him to fully submit to his inquisitors’ demands.
It is the only part of his story that the wily academic hesitates to recall, as if emotion might overtake him.
“I can suffer this or that but I’ll not allow my wife and my daughter and my other family members [to] suffer from my activities,” he says.
“That is the thing that’s quite fearful in my mind.”
When his inquisitors demanded Feng take a lie detector test on March 23, he called his wife who told him to make a run for it.
A few hours later, after midnight, Feng crept out of his hotel, hoping to board a 4am flight.
But as he sought to check in, an airport official told him he could not leave China because he was suspected of endangering state security.
“At that point, my wife told my daughter that I was in deep trouble,” says Feng.
Feng’s daughter immediately called a foreign affairs specialist in the Australian government and asked for help.
Feng’s questioning continued for six more days until his daughter was contacted by an Australian government official and told Feng would be permitted to board a flight back to Australia.
In his final interrogation session, the MSS agents presented Feng with a document to sign that forbade him from publicly discussing his ordeal. 
But by then, his detention had already been covered by several Australian media outlets.
When Feng landed at Sydney airport on April 1, a small group of supporters was waiting for him with banners.
Feng believes his treatment in China was designed to send other academics, along with his supporters in the Chinese Australian community, a message to “stay away from sensitive issues or sensitive topics”.
“Otherwise they can get you into big trouble, detention or other punishment.”

Campus patriots
Mostly though, the Communist Party’s influence on Australian university campuses takes a subtler form, and works through the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations.
The Communist Party targeted these patriotic associations after the Tiananmen Square student uprising as a way of maintaining control over overseas students.
In Australia, which has 100,000 Chinese students, the associations are “sponsored” by Chinese embassy and consular officials.
Lupin Lu, an amiable 23-year-old communications student who is president of the Canberra University Students and Scholars Association, explains to Fairfax Media and Four Corners how Chinese embassy officials played an active role in organising a large student rally to welcome Li Keqiang when he visited Australia in March.
On the day, the rally had two shifts, the first starting at 5am.
Lu insists it was students rather than the embassy calling the shots.
“I wouldn’t really call it helping,” she insists of the embassy’s role, while confirming it provided flags, transport, food, a lawyer and certificates for students that would help them find jobs back in China.
“It’s more sponsoring,” Lu explains.

Li Keqiang and Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.

Lu says her fellow students are willing to assemble at 5am to welcome Li because of their pride at China’s economic rise.
Other factors are an early education system that extols the virtues of the Communist Party and the reality that positive connections with the government can help a person land a job in China.
Federal police officers still describe with awe events in 2008 at the Olympic torch rally, when hundreds of chartered buses entered Canberra from NSW and Victoria, delivering 10,000 Chinese university students “to protect the torch”.
“If the Aussie embassy in London issued a similar call to arms to Australian students in London, there would be two students and a dog,” an officer says.
Lu had another way of motivating her fellow students to assemble before dawn: she stressed the importance of blocking out anti-communist protesters.
Would she go so far as to alert the embassy if a human rights protest was being organised by dissident Chinese students?
“I would, definitely, just to keep all the students safe,” she says. “And to do it for China as well.”

Going viral
The extent to which this student nationalism is directed and monitored from Beijing, and what this means for academic freedoms, is uncertain.
Last year, ANU Emeritus Professor and the founding director of the Australian centre on China in the World, Geremie Barme, was so concerned he wrote a lengthy letter to Chancellor Gareth Evans.

Barme’s fears were sparked by a series of viral nationalistic videos created and posted by a Chinese ANU student, Lei Xiying.
One of Lei’s videos, “If you want to change China, you’ll have to get through me first”, attracted more than 15 million hits.
“I would opine that Mr Lei is an agent for government opinion carving out a career in China’s repressive media environment for political gain,” wrote Barme.
The ANU defended the student’s activities on free speech grounds, but Barme said the university was ignoring Lei’s sponsorship by an authoritarian government that routinely threatens scholars and journalists.
“Make no mistake, it is officially sanctioned propaganda,” Barme said.
He urged the university to confront the issue by debating it openly.
His supporters say that request was ignored.
Real media
A gracious host, Sam Feng is in a gregarious mood when he invites us to the headquarters of Pacific Times, the once proudly independent community Chinese-language newspaper he founded in the 1980s.
Over Chinese tea, Feng scoffs at suggestions that his paper is involved in financial dealings with an arm of the Chinese Communist Party that shapes its coverage.
“It is false. It is fake … They don’t need to do that,” says Feng, while insisting that questions of bias should be directed to Western media outlets whose coverage supports the US version of the world. “We are real media,” Feng explains of his small team of staff.
But corporate records suggest his paper is less independent than he claims.
Subsidiaries of the Communist Party’s overseas propaganda outlet, the Chinese News Service, own a 60 per cent stake to Feng’s 40 per cent in a Melbourne company, the Australian Chinese Culture Group Pty Ltd.
The results of this joint-venture deal appear evident in the newspaper’s content, vast chunks of which are supplied direct from Beijing where propaganda authorities control the media.
Academic Feng Chongyi describes Pacific Times as one of several Australian Chinese-language media outlets that have forgone any semblance of editorial independence in exchange for deals offered by the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.
“It used to be quite independent or autonomous,” he says, “but ... you can see the newspaper now is almost identical [to] other newspapers that exclusively focus on the positive side of China.”
In a backroom in Sam Feng’s West Melbourne headquarters is evidence suggesting his Beijing dealings extend beyond what is placed in his newspaper.
A well-placed source leaked to Fairfax Media photos of dozens of placards resting against a wall of the room.
“We Against Vain Excuse for Interfering in South China Sea,” reads one of the placards.
To a casual observer, the placards would barely warrant a glance.
But along with other information provided by the source, they point towards what Australian security officials suspect: that the Chinese Communist Party has had a hand in encouraging protests in Australia.
“The Chinese would find it unacceptable if Australia was to organise protests in China against any particular issue,” says former DFAT chief Peter Varghese.
“Likewise, we should consider it unacceptable for a foreign government to be [encouraging], organising, orchestrating or bankrolling protests on issues that are ultimately matters for the Australian community or the Australian government.”
The placards stored at Pacific Times were handed out to hundreds of protesters who marched in Melbourne on July 23, 2016, to oppose an international tribunal ruling – supported by Australia – that rejected Beijing's claim over much of the South China Sea.
Of Pacific Times owner Sam Feng, the source says the newspaper owner seeks to keep the Chinese Communist Party onside for commercial reasons: “He is a nationalist. But he just cares about business.”
A review of the corporate records of other large Chinese Australian media players reveals the involvement of Communist Party-controlled companies. 
Those who turn down offers to become the party’s publishing partners and seek to print independent news face the prospect of threats, intimidation and economic sabotage.

Overseas forces
Don Ma, who owns the independent Vision China Times in Sydney and Melbourne, tells Fairfax Media and Four Corners that 10 of his advertisers have been threatened by Chinese officials to pull their advertising.
All acquiesced, including a migration and travel company whose Beijing office was visited by the Ministry of State Security every day for two weeks until they cut ties with the paper.
Ma is happy to speak publicly because he has already been blocked from travelling to China.
His journalists, though, request their names and images not be used when we visit Ma’s Sydney and Melbourne offices.
They are fearful of retribution.
Ex-DFAT chief Peter Varghese and Swinburne Professor Fitzgerald says Australia should require more accountability and transparency around the way the Communist Party and its proxies are operating in the media and on university campuses.
Fitzgerald warns Communist Party influence operations in Australia not only risk dividing the Chinese community, but sparking hostility between it and other Australians.
“The Chinese community is the greatest asset we have in this country for managing what are going to be complex relations with China over the next decades – in fact for centuries to come – and we need them to help us in managing this relationship.
“If suspicion is sown about where their loyalties lie then we lose one of our greatest assets in this country now.”
The Vision China Times’ Don Ma has not only endured economic sabotage from the Communist Party but a campaign of vilification from pro-Beijing members of the local Chinese community.
Yet he keeps publishing, not only because he embraces freedom of the press but because many members of the disparate Chinese community urge him to keep doing so.
“The media here, almost all the Chinese media, was being controlled by overseas forces,” says Ma.
“This is harmful to the Australian society. It is also harmful to the next generation of Chinese. Therefore, I felt I wanted to invest in a truly independent media that fits in with Australian values.”

Chinese political donations pose a threat to Australian democracy

Concerns are being raised over political parties accepting substantial payments from sources linked to the Communist Party of China
By DANIEL FAZIO 

On June 5, the ABC television show Four Corners shed light on substantial donations to the Liberal-National coalition (LNP) and Labor (ALP) parties from Chinese sources linked to the Communist Party of China (CPC). 

These revelations raise serious concerns that require immediate action to prevent the further corrosion of Australian politics and the undermining of the country’s national sovereignty.
Current Australian electoral laws allow political parties to seek and accept foreign donations, so there is no suggestion that the parties have done anything illegal.
However, being beholden to foreign donors risks corrupting and compromising Australian national sovereignty. 

Indeed, Four Corners revealed this is why ASIO, the country’s chief intelligence agency, warned senior Liberal-National and Labor officials that China is exercising undue influence in Australian politics.
ASIO is also concerned about CPC influence in Australian universities, its monitoring of Chinese students and Chinese media in Australia to ensure they don’t engage in activities contrary to Beijing’s views.
One thing is certain: the Chinese are not donating hefty sums of money to the LNP and ALP because they have an altruistic desire to aid Australian democracy. 

Beijing is seeking to exploit Australia’s economic reliance on China because it serves its geo-strategic interests.
China’s increasing assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific region and growing presence in Africa indicates a calculated strategic move beyond Deng Xiaoping’s axiom: “hide your strength, bide your time.”
By deploying its soft power to increase its hard power, China is no longer hiding its strength or biding its time.
Should Australian political parties continue accepting Chinese donations, they risk facilitating growing Chinese influence in Australian politics which will undermine national sovereignty and compromise future Australian governments into acting contrary to Australian interests.
Chinese influence in Australian politics is already evident. 

In 2016, it emerged Labor Senator Sam Dastyari had received gifts and payments for legal and travel bills from Chinese contacts.
During last year’s federal election, a Chinese donor threatened to withdraw a promised A$400,000 (US$303,700) donation to the ALP after its shadow defence minister, Stephen Conroy, expressed support for freedom of navigation laws in the South China Sea, which were contrary to Beijing’s claims in the area.
It has also transpired that Australia’s former trade minister, Andrew Robb, accepted an A$880,000 a year consultancy with a Chinese firm before he left parliament after having negotiated the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
Australia needs to immediately ban foreign donations for all political parties and mandate full disclosure of all donations from all organisations and individuals.
Current Australian electoral law means donations below A$13,000 don’t have to be disclosed. 

Total transparency is the only way to minimize corruption and subversiveness of the political process.
The issue of the Chinese donations are symptomatic of the closed operational culture of the LNP and ALP. 

This lack of transparency plays into Chinese hands. 

Secrecy serves the designs of the political parties and those who seek to influence them.
Australian political parties are very opaque. 

They operate in a democracy but their internal culture and workings are not open or democratic. 

Within the party structures, power and decision-making is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of individuals.
Dissenting views are not tolerated and it is almost impossible for those aspiring for internal party positions and a parliamentary career to make headway without currying favor with the power brokers. A political operative once told me “election day” is the only day democracy operates in Australian politics.
The current state of Australian politics offers little hope for genuine and transparent reform. 

Voters are becoming increasingly apathetic, cynical and disillusioned. 

The political parties are content to perpetuate this vicious cycle because a disengaged electorate allows them to avoid proper scrutiny.
Party officials, determined to keep power concentrated in their hands, vehemently resist calls to democratize. 

This singular focus on the pursuit and maintenance of power leaves parties open to be compromised by vested interests. 

This will further corrode the political process and weaken national sovereignty.
Political parties in comparable nations such as Britain, Canada and the US are much more democratic than those in Australia. 

The revelations about the Chinese donations are a warning to the Australian electorate to emerge from our apathetic stupor and deploy our collective power at the ballot box and demand openness and accountability from our elected representatives and their parties.
Lord Acton said, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Transparency and accountability are the only real safeguards against undue Chinese influence upon the political process and national sovereignty.

CHINA’S OPERATION AUSTRALIA

The go-betweens
ALP donor Helen Liu had deep ties to Chinese spy Liu Chaoying, who was caught out trying to influence US politics. So why did ASIO give Helen Liu the all clear?
By Richard Baker, Nick McKenzie and Philip Dorling

Helen Liu with John Howard and Joel Fitzgibbon.

As befitted a man who spent his life in the shadows, General Ji Shengde chose to wait in the kitchen of an abalone restaurant in the Chinese coastal resort town of Zhuhai until his dining companions arrived.
The ultra-secretive chief of Chinese military intelligence was on the lookout for his protege, a well-dressed, 37-year-old businesswoman called Liu Chaoying. 

She was bringing her new friend, a California-based entrepreneur called Johnny Chung who had a penchant for over-the-top jewellery and a knack for getting inside Bill Clinton’s White House.
Once the pair arrived and the group was seated, they talked American politics. 

It was 1996 and Clinton was running for a second term.
“We really like your president. We hope he will be re-elected,” General Ji told Chung.
“I will give you $300,000. You can give it to your president and Democrat party.”
A few days after this August 11 meeting, Liu Chaoying wired $300,000 into Taiwan-born Chung’s account. 

This money ended up in the coffers of the Democrat’s Clinton re-election campaign in breach of US laws banning foreign political donations.
This transaction later became the focus of US criminal and congressional investigations into a major political scandal dubbed Chinagate by the US media. 

It was part of a broad Chinese plan to influence American politics to favour Beijing’s acquisition of sensitive, advanced technology.
Today, Fairfax Media can reveal a direct Australian connection to the Chinagate scandal that raises serious questions about a series of Chinese donations to the Australian Labor Party.
A summary of banking records contained in NSW Supreme Court files show that, just 10 days after the meeting in the abalone restaurant, a Sydney-based company owned by Chinese-Australian businesswoman, Helen Liu, wired $250,025.00 from her Australian company into the account of one of Liu Chaoying’s Hong Kong companies called Marswell Investments.

Just why Helen Liu’s company Wincopy Pty Ltd sent this money to Liu Chaoying is not known. Whatever the case, the transfer effectively topped up the bank account of a company US prosecutors later claimed as a front for China’s military intelligence. 

A copy of Wincopy’s financial statements and reports prepared by the company's accountant -- and obtained from a Federal Court file -- recorded the $250,025.00 transfer as “overseas marketing expenses”.

Like the others, Helen Liu was interested in politics. 

But her focus was Australia. 

At the time of the quarter-of-a-million-dollar transfer into Liu Chaoying’s Marswell company, she had just made her first donation to the ALP and had forged links to the federal Labor front bench and the NSW Labor government.
Australia’s freewheeling donations laws meant that Liu’s donations never created a scandal like that seen in the United States, and the links have never been adequately examined by Australian authorities. 

But evidence uncovered by Fairfax Media and the ABC means that might be about to change.

The networker
Helen Liu arrived in Sydney from Shandong province in northern China in the late 1980s as a seemingly modest student and worked at a firm exporting wool to China. 

But it did not take too long for her life to undergo a massive transformation.
“It was like the tap had been turned on and all this money suddenly started pouring out,” said a close associate at the time. 

“Top-line European cars were being bought with cash.”
The money came from Chinese Government-controlled entities such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Beijing Hengtong Trust, the Jinan Iron and Steel Group and the Shandong Fisheries Corporation. 

All had entered into joint ventures with companies associated with Helen Liu and her then boyfriend, Humphrey Xu.
The pair set about amassing a Sydney property portfolio worth tens of millions of dollars. 

Among their tenants was a NSW government department. 

They exported Australian iron ore and wool to China. 

In their homeland, the couple embarked on huge real estate developments across several provinces in close co-operation with local officials.
They achieved Australian citizenship through sham marriages to a far younger Sydney couple then began building a network of politically powerful friends in their adopted country. 

Their target: Australia’s most ruthless political faction, the NSW Labor Right.
The foundation stone of this relationship was laid in 1993 when one of Helen Liu’s companies, Diamond Hill International, took a knockabout federal Labor MP, the late Eric Fitzgibbon, on a first-class trip to Liu’s home province of Shandong. 

Fitzgibbon’s job was to shake hands with an array of Communist Party officials and tell them just what a big deal Helen Liu and her boyfriend were back in Australia.

Eric (above) and Joel Fitzgibbon (at right) in Shandong in 1993.

Eric Fitzgibbon asked if his son Joel, a rising star in NSW Labor, could come along. 

Joel Fitzgibbon, a trained auto electrician who was working as his father’s electorate officer, was Eric Fitzgibbon’s prospective successor as Labor candidate in the working-class regional seat of Hunter at the 1996 federal election.
That Shandong trip was the beginning of a long friendship between Helen Liu and the Fitzgibbons which only became public in 2009 when Joel Fitzgibbon was Australia’s defence minister. 

His early political career was supported by $40,000 in donations from Helen Liu, including $20,000 for his 1998 election campaign from her company Wincopy – the same company that sent $250,000 to Liu Chaoying’s Hong Kong account in 1996.
Fairfax Media makes no accusation of wrongdoing or impropriety against Joel Fitzgibbon in this report. 

No evidence has emerged to suggest he knew of Helen Liu’s links to Liu Chaoying.
In a statement made through her Sydney lawyer, Helen Liu has admitted a personal and business relationship with Liu Chaoying. 

But she has sought to distance herself from the more controversial aspects of Liu Chaoying’s life.
While she has not outright denied the Wincopy payment of $250,000, she has attempted to cast doubt on the documents obtained from Federal and Supreme court files in NSW which formed part of a bitter 1990s legal battle with her former boyfriend and business partner Humphrey Xu.
Fairfax Media has found no evidence to suggest Helen Liu or her legal team during the 1990s had contested the veracity of these financial documents, many of which were obtained under subpoena.

Helen Liu and Bill Clinton.

There is no doubt that NSW Labor itself reaped at least $100,000 from Helen Liu and her sister Queena in donations and fundraising between 1999 and 2007. 

During this time, Helen Liu grew close to other Labor politicians as notable as long-serving NSW premier Bob Carr. 

She was photographed with former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd and former Opposition leader Kim Beazley – not to mention Bill Clinton, who her friend Liu Chaoying was also snapped with.
Helen Liu’s friends in the ALP have long decried any notion that financial support from her or other Chinese donors raises a national security risk. 

But the revelation that Helen Liu had a direct connection to a key player in the Chinese military intelligence operation to influence an American presidential campaign makes it necessary to examine her involvement in Australian politics through a different lens.
The admiral’s daughter
When Liu Chaoying came to spend time with Helen Liu in Sydney in 1997, those who met her were left in no doubt as to her importance. 

With a love of high fashion and gambling, Chaoying was never shy about her position near the top of China’s government and military.
“She was introduced to me as a director of China’s Long March missile program,” recalled one of Helen Liu’s long-standing business associates, “and she was straight down to business. The first thing she asked me was if I knew where she could source metallurgical coal for making steel.”
Liu Chaoying was vice-president of China Aerospace International (CASIL) Holdings, a state-owned company responsible for China’s missile, satellite and rocket technology. 

She was also a Lieutenant Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), working closely with its military intelligence unit, the Second Department of the PLA General Staff.

China Aerospace runs China’s missile and satellite technology.

Her biggest claim to fame was that her father, Liu Huaqing, was the most senior military officer in China during the 1990s. 

Credited with building China’s modern navy, Admiral Liu was vice-chairman of the country’s Central Military Commission and a member of the all-powerful Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee.
That family connection made Liu Chaoying a so-called princeling, a child of the Communist revolution’s elite. 

Her heritage and connections opened doors and opportunities in China and abroad. 

Like other princelings and other Chinese intelligence assets, her personal and business interests were often closely entwined with those of the state.

Liu Huaquing in Beijing in 1996.

What is known of Liu Chaoying’s military and business career shows that she had a deep involvement in the procurement of weapons and military technology as well as communications. 

It has been reported in the Hong Kong press that she played a crucial role for Chinese military intelligence in financing the deal that procured the former Soviet aircraft carrier Varyag from Ukraine. 

Now refurbished and renamed, the carrier Liaoning is the pride of China’s rapidly expanding navy.
For most ordinary Chinese, someone like Liu Chaoying was an untouchable.
She was an intimidating figure, someone to treat with caution and respect. 

But for Helen Liu there was no sign of deference. 

“They were like sisters,” recalls one observer.

According to Helen Liu’s statement though, she had no idea about Liu Chaoying's military role: “Helen only knew that Liu Chaoying was a director of Hong Kong listed company and knew her through the business relationship in the telecom company. She did not know (if it be the case) that Liu Chaoying worked for China’s military intelligence or the PLA.”
Helen Liu was also from a family of some renown in China, particularly in Shandong province. 

Her father, who she described in a court affidavit as a “ranking official” in China’s government, was responsible for appointing various Communist Party officials to provincial power. 

This created a powerful network for his family.
By 1997, Helen Liu’s property empire in Sydney and China was worth tens of millions of dollars. 

She was a fixture on the NSW Labor scene, mixing business and pleasure through lavish dinners at the Golden Century Chinese restaurant next to the ALP’s NSW headquarters in Sydney’s Sussex Street. 

Her connection with the Fitzgibbons, Joel and his father Eric, and her generous donations were well known to senior NSW Labor figures.

Helen Liu’s companies also paid for wave after wave of Chinese officials such as current Hebei province party secretary Zhao Kezhi -- who some tip to be a future Chinese leader -- to visit Australia. 

Itineraries for these visits show that meetings were scheduled with Labor Party figures such as Bob Carr, Joel Fitzgibbon and Mark Arbib. 

Often when a senior Chinese leader, such as former presidents Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao, toured Australia and the Pacific, Helen Liu was in the travelling party.

Helen Liu and former PLA officer Ren Xingliang at a Communist Party event in Henan Province. 

This made Helen Liu the ultimate go-between. 

Chinese government companies tasked her with sourcing iron ore from Rio Tinto, BHP and Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting.
Helen Liu became vice-chairwoman of a Chinese government-linked organisation called the World Federation of Overseas Chinese Associations. 

This organisation was led by a former PLA officer, Ren Xingliang, and worked closely with the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department to promote Beijing’s objectives through the Chinese diaspora. 

US intelligence analysts have long regarded the United Front as a facilitator for China's overseas influencing campaigns.

Helen Liu enters court for a defamation case in 2011.

A bombshell
While Helen Liu’s star was rising, Liu Chaoying had some real troubles. 

Early in 1997, legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward dropped a bombshell report in the Washington Post declaring that the FBI and US Justice Department were investigating foreign donations to the Democratic campaign to have Bill Clinton re-elected in 1996.
The money trail from Johnny Chung led back to Liu Chaoying and Marswell Investments and, soon enough, their names were on the front pages of America’s biggest newspapers. 

Liu Chaoying was publicly identified as a Chinese military intelligence officer in Newsweek magazine and elsewhere.

Liu Chaoying

But the Chinagate publicity in the US did little to temper Liu Chaoying’s ambition to expand her corporate presence in Australia. 

Throughout 1997 and 1998, records show that she established four companies in Australia. 

She also became a director of the Australian branch of China Aerospace.
Links with Helen Liu were evident in many of her dealings. 

Paperwork for one of Liu Chaoying’s personal companies, Llexcel Pty Limited, was filed by a young Sydney lawyer called Donald Junn who had power of attorney for all of Helen Liu’s main Australian businesses.

The Sydney address given by Liu Chaoying for Llexcel was the same one Helen Liu used to register a company in Hong Kong in the same year.

Being outed as a Chinese intelligence operative didn’t stop Liu Chaoying from expanding her operations in Australia. 

Her precise objectives remain unclear but almost certainly involved a mixture of her own interests and those of the Chinese state.
As for Helen Liu, she claims in her statement that she was not aware of her business partner’s troubles in America. 

And she said that the common address for their respective companies was the Sydney residence of her sister, Chun Mei Liu.

The congressman
Liu Chaoying’s $300,000 payment to Johnny Chung is the case US Republican congressman Mike McCaul can’t let go of.
McCaul was a prosecutor at the Department of Justice before entering politics. 

He spent 1997 and 1998 leading the investigation into the political financing activities of Chung, Liu Chaoying and other players in the Chinagate scandal.
McCaul, who now chairs the US House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee, secured Johnny Chung’s testimony about the meeting with General Ji and Liu Chaoying in the abalone restaurant and his receipt of $300,000.
Although he knew more than anyone about Liu Chaoying’s business activities, McCaul said he was not aware of an Australian connection to her until he was approached by Fairfax Media and Four Corners with records showing Helen Liu’s company’s $250,000 transfer. 

McCaul was unable to uncover the Australian transfer because the Chinese government had blocked his attempts to access Liu Chaoying’s Hong Kong bank accounts.
Of the company Liu Chaoying used to make the US political donation, McCaul said: “I believe Marswell was really a front for Chinese intelligence activities.”
McCaul believes the Chinese wanted Clinton re-elected because his administration had eased export restrictions on satellite technology to China. 

This area was one of Liu Chaoying’s specialities at China Aerospace.
The congressman’s view is supported by the finding of a bipartisan congressional committee, which is specially convened to investigate China’s political donations. 

It described the $300,000 as an attempt to “better position [Liu Chaoying] in the United States to acquire computer, missile and satellite technologies”.
Classified US intelligence material provided to congressional investigators also put Liu Chaoying at the forefront of illegal arms sales and smuggling operations. 

She was twice found to have entered the US using false identities.
McCaul said the revelation that a prominent Chinese donor to Australian politics such as Helen Liu was financially and personally involved with Liu Chaoying at the time of Chinagate was “deeply disturbing”.
“Quite frankly, I was a bit surprised [to learn] that Australia does allow foreign contributions.”
“And if you look at the numbers, which I was privy to, a lot of these donations are coming from China. They want a stronger presence in Australia and what better way to do that than to influence political figures through foreign contributions,” McCaul said.
Despite the controversy in the US, Helen Liu appeared unperturbed about continuing to do business with Liu Chaoying. 

Hong Kong court records show the pair established a company in the British Virgin Islands in 1999 with the intention of investing in telecommunications in China.
But their relationship soured in 2001 when a Hong Kong bank took them to court after they failed to make repayments on a substantial loan.

Helen Liu in 2011 during a court action against The Age. 

An unusual letter
In February 2009, a senior Australian defence department official posted anonymous letters to two of the journalists who have written this story, one at the investigations unit of The Age, the other then at The Canberra Times.
The letter referred to a potential conflict of interest involving Fitzgibbon’s brother’s company, health insurer NIB, and its interest in government contracts. 

But much of the letter was taken up with the then defence minister’s relationship with a Chinese-born businesswoman and Labor donor named Helen Liu.
The letter revealed that the minister received a suit from his friend and was living in a Canberra townhouse he rented from Helen Liu’s family. 

Most notably, the letter specifically asserted that Helen Liu was associated with Chinese military intelligence.
Until this point, Helen Liu was unknown to anyone in the Australian media let alone the wider public. Despite 15 years of involvement in Australian politics through donations and fundraising, she remained beneath the radar. 

Fitzgibbon’s register of interests lodged with Parliament made no mention of Helen Liu despite their long friendship.
Ahead of the publication of a series of Fairfax articles about Helen Liu in 2009, Fitzgibbon was asked if he had received any gifts or benefits from Helen Liu that would require declaration. 

His answer was no – as it was when asked the same question at a doorstop on the day the story broke.
But later that night, his office announced that the minister had forgotten to declare two very quick trips to China in 2002 and 2005 that had been paid for by Helen Liu. Just why he took those trips and what he did on them remains unclear.
The failure to declare the trips badly weakened his grip on his Cabinet position.
Since amending his records, Joel Fitzgibbon has consistently maintained he has received nothing further from Helen Liu that he needed to declare nor had ever been involved in or benefited from her business affairs.
Fairfax Media makes no suggestion that Fitzgibbon has anything else to declare. 

But he has not answered questions about whether other members of his immediate family, such as his late father Eric Fitzgibbon, had received cash, gifts or company shares from Helen Liu.
Fresh documents obtained by Fairfax Media show Helen Liu was often keen to include a meeting or a meal with her friend Joel Fitzgibbon MP on the itineraries of Chinese officials she would pay for to tour Australia.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with meeting and dining with visiting foreign dignitaries. 

It is an often tedious but necessary part of the job for many Australian MPs.
Joel Fitzgibbon said he could recall possibly two occasions where he had dined with Chinese associates of Helen Liu during their visits to the Hunter Valley. 

“My memory is that they were Government officials,” he said.

Fairfax Media understands that federal and state Labor politicians used their official letterheads to write to various Chinese leaders and Australian immigration officers on behalf of Helen Liu and her immediate family. 

Mr Fitzgibbon said he was not among them. 

“I have never written to a Chinese official,” he said. 

Helen Liu said she had no recollection of asking any politician for such favours.


The ASIO all-clear
Perhaps the strangest thing in the Helen Liu saga was the statement released by Australia’s top counter-espionage agency, ASIO, a day after the initial story about her broke in late March 2009.
Kevin Rudd’s Labor government was already having problems on the China front. 

The Mandarin-speaking Rudd had just been criticised after he “secretly” hosted the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda chief at the Lodge. 

Before that, Rudd and other Labor MPs were in the gun over a series of trips they made – and declared appropriately – to China paid for by Chinese entrepreneur and political donor Ian Tang.
ASIO’s customary approach is to never publicly comment on security matters involving individuals or organisations. 

It is a policy endorsed by both Coalition and Labor governments and almost always strictly adhered to.
But in the case of Helen Liu, Rudd’s government decided to buck convention. 

There is not yet evidence that Kevin Rudd received money from Chau Chak Wing

Hours after Fairfax’s first article about Helen Liu was published, the office of Labor’s attorney-general, Robert McClelland, released a statement saying “the Acting Director General of Security has advised me that ASIO has no information relating to Ms Helen Liu which would have given rise to any security concern regarding her activities or associations.”
Paul Monk is one of Australia’s foremost experts on China’s intelligence apparatus. 

A former head of the China desk at Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisations, Monk is perturbed by the circumstances that led to the former Rudd government releasing such advice from ASIO.
“First, [that the ASIO statement] contravened long-standing intelligence community practice in commenting publicly on operational matters; second, that it should have lacked such information, in all the circumstances; and, third, that unimpeachable information has now come to light showing that, in fact, there were, well before 2009, grounds for very grave concern about Helen Liu’s bona fides and links with Chinese military and intelligence agencies at the highest level,” Mr Monk said.
The ASIO statement was used by the Labor government as a shield against critics raising security concerns in relation to Helen Liu and her close ties to the defence minister. 

Ministers relied on it to repel opposition Senate estimates questions.
Helen Liu’s closest friends in Labor went on the attack.
Bob Carr said it was “pretty shameful for the media to brand this woman as suspect on security grounds without the remotest evidence – indeed in the face of ASIO stating she is of no interest to them.”
NSW state MP Henry Tsang wrote that Helen Liu has been “wrongly portrayed as a national security threat”. 

Joel Fitzgibbon said his friend was a “highly regarded and respected Australian businesswoman”.
“Her name has been dragged through the mud … and her reputation has been tarnished in a highly defamatory way. I’ll certainly be taking any action I can to ensure she’s not personally attacked in that way in the future.”
The ASIO statement was even used by senior Australian Defence Department officials to privately assure their American counterparts that there was no need to be concerned about Helen Liu, according to leaked State Department cables released by Wikileaks.
As for Helen Liu, she told News Limited tabloid The Daily Telegraph she was “brokenhearted”.
“It is unfair to me what people have said. I know people have said that I am a national security threat.”

China's fifth column: Joel Fitzgibbon in 2017.

Litigation and legacies
Joel Fitzgibbon survived as defence minister until mid-2009. 

And it wasn’t his ties to Helen Liu that did for him in the end. 

It was a conflict of interest involving his brother’s company.
But the story of Helen Liu wasn’t going away. 

Subsequent reports based on material supplied by new informants resulted in a long-running and expensive legal battle instigated by Helen Liu in a bid to find out their identity.
Thanks to his standing in the NSW Labor right, Joel Fitzgibbon became federal Labor chief whip in 2010 and served as a member and briefly chairperson of the Parliament’s influential Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.
Following the June 2013 Labor leadership spill, he was appointed agriculture minister in Kevin Rudd’s second ministry. 

He now serves as shadow agriculture minister on Labor leader Bill Shorten’s front bench.
As for Liu Chaoying, she and her family appear to be on the rise again in China after some difficulties in the early 2000s when her father fell out with then president Jiang Zemin, resulting in her brief arrest, and her boss, General Ji, receiving a 20-year prison sentence for corruption.
In 2007, US diplomats reported that Liu Chaoying was “involved in arms sales to foreign countries through Huawei and other military or quasi-military companies on whose boards she sat”. 

Her elder brother, Liu Zhuoming, is an influential navy admiral and member of the National People’s Congress.
In September last year, Xi Jinping paid a lengthy personal tribute to Liu Chaoying’s late father on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, declaring Liu Huaquing to be one of the greatest leaders of the modern Chinese military.
Meanwhile, it is understood that Helen Liu has spent nearly all of her time in China in recent years. 

Two of her family’s companies have encountered some legal trouble in China. 

A 2014 court judgement from Hainan Island records that the chairwoman of Australia Diamond Hill Holdings Limited admitted to having bribed a local official with $34,000 and a bottle of red wine.
The judgement identifies a female with the surname "Liu” as chairwoman but does not specify whether it is Helen Liu, her sister or someone else.

Chinese media reports between 2000 and 2012 name Helen Liu as the chairwoman of Australia Diamond Hill Holdings. 

In her statement she denied any recent involvement with the companies named in the Hainan court judgement.
Her Double Bay residence has long appeared neglected and empty. 

Recently, however, she and her sister re-established a corporate presence in Australia. 

Just what this means remains to be seen.

Chinese Fifth Column

Chinese businessman subject of ASIO warning donated $200,000 to WA Liberals
By Rebecca Trigger

Chau Chak Wing's $200,000 donation was the largest one-off donation to the WA Liberal Party in 2015-16.

A $200,000 donation to the WA Liberal Party from a billionaire property developer with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party has raised questions, WA Deputy Premier Roger Cook says.
Chau Chak Wing's company Kingold Group donated the sum to the WA branch of the Liberal Party in 2015/16.
Chau, who is an Australian citizen, also made donations to the Labor Party federally.
Kingold is headquartered in Guangzhou, in southern China, and develops projects including international trade centres, commercial buildings, hotels, office and residential buildings.
A joint investigation by the ABC and Fairfax revealed earlier this week, that Chau's links to the Chinese Government were referenced in a briefing by ASIO chief Duncan Lewis in 2015.
In secret meetings with senior federal administrative officials in the major parties, Mr Lewis warned of the risks associated with accepting foreign-linked donations.

Chinese fifth column: An ASIO investigation sparks fears the Chinese Communist Party is influencing the Australian political system as questions are raised over foreign political donations.

The agency also reportedly briefed senior federal politicians including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, his predecessor Tony Abbott, and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.
Mr Cook on Saturday said it was important for all political parties to stick to the absolute spirit and letter of electoral laws.
"A $200,000 donation to a state branch of a political party is a hefty sum, and so you would have to ask questions in relation to the nature of that donation," he said.
"I hope what political parties are making sure is that while they acknowledge and accept political donations are a reality of our modern democratic system, and one that we rely on, that that in no way impacts upon the policies of the parties and it certainly does not impact in any way in terms of good government decisions when those parties are in Government."
WA Liberal Party director Andrew Cox said in a statement the party always conducted its fundraising in an ethical manner and fully adhered to state and federal electoral laws.
He said the Labor Party should tell the WA public how much the union movement donated to it, and what "political favours" were being provided in return.
The ABC was unable to reach Chau Chak Wing for comment.

However he told The Australian newspaper on Friday that the media reports had caused him great distress.

Chau Chak Wing is a member of a provincial-level People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and also owns a newspaper in China. 

The press in China are closely monitored and influenced by the central government.
Chau also made donations to the federal Liberal Party of $560,000 in 2016, and $100,000 to the NSW branch.
He donated $200,000 to Labor federally.
Chau has made donations to non-political causes in Australia, most notably $20 million for the construction of a business school at the University of Technology, named the "Chau Chak Wing building".
According to Kingold's website, Chau hosted and attended events during Li Keqiang's recent visit to Australia.

Push for overseas donation reform
Notre Dame Politics and International Relations Associate Professor Martin Drum said foreign donations to political parties were banned by many Western countries but not on a state or federal level in Western Australia.
"When we don't know the structure that foreign entities operate under, their ownership structure, we don't understand the relationships they have with other overseas entities such as foreign governments, then there's extra cause for concern," he said.
Dr Drum said a recent federal parliamentary inquiry recommended foreign donations be banned.
He said under current rules entities could also make donations up to $13,200 to each political party in each state, and the federal party, without having to declare it publicly.

Watch the Four Corners report "Power and Influence" on ABC iview.

Australia's New Masters

The Chinese Communist Party's power and influence in Australia
By Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Sashka Koloff and Chris Uhlmann

Tony Chang's activities in Brisbane meant that his terrified father in China feared he was being "watched and tracked".

University student Tony Chang had suspected for months that he was being secretly monitored, but it was a panicked phone call from a family member in China that confirmed his fears.
It was June 2015 and Mr Chang's parents had just been approached by state security agents in Shenyang, in north-eastern China, and invited to a meeting at a tea house. 

It would not be a cordial catch-up.
As Mr Chang later detailed in a sworn statement to Australian immigration authorities, three agents warned his parents about their son's involvement in the Chinese democracy movement in Australia.
"[The agents] pressed the point that my parents must ask me to stop what I am taking part in and keep a low profile," the statement said.
From a Brisbane share house littered with books and unwashed plates, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) student told Four Corners the agents had intelligence about his plans to participate in a protest in Brisbane on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and also during the Dalai Lama's visit to Australia.
Mr Chang's activities in Brisbane meant that his terrified father in China feared he was being "watched and tracked".
His father, a cautious, apolitical man, had already spent years worrying about his unruly son. 

In 2008, when Mr Chang was 14, he was arrested for hanging Taiwan independence banners on street poles in Shenyang.

Tony Chang was questioned for several hours when he was a teenager in Shenyang, China.
His family was forced to call on Communist Party contacts to ensure the teenager was released after several hours of questioning.
After Mr Chang was questioned again in 2014 for dissident activities, he decided it was no longer safe to remain in China. 

He applied for an Australian student visa.
The June 2015 approach to his parents back in China was the second time in two months that security agents had warned Mr Chang's family to rein in his anti-communist activism in Australia.
These threats helped convince the Australian Government to grant Mr Chang a protection visa.
Mr Chang's treatment as a teen is typical of the way the party-state deals with dissidents inside China, as revealed in a joint investigation by Four Corners and Fairfax Media.
But the monitoring of the student in Brisbane and his decision to speak out about the threats to his parents in Shenyang, despite the risk it poses to them, provides a rare insight into something much less well known: the opaque campaign of control and influence being waged by the Chinese Communist Party inside Australia..

An influence-and-control operation by the Communist Party
Part of this campaign involves attempts to influence Australian politicians via political donors closely aligned with the Communist Party — something that causes serious concern to Australia's security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
But some of the 1 million ethnic Chinese living in Australia are also targets of the Communist Party's influence operations.
On university campuses, in the Chinese-language media and in some community groups, the party is mounting an influence-and-control operation among its diaspora that is far greater in scale and, at its worst, much nastier than any other nation deploys.
In China, it is known as qiaowu. 

The most recent chief of Australia's diplomatic service, Peter Varghese, who is now chancellor at the University of Queensland (UQ), said China's approach to influence-building was deeply concerning, not least because it was being run by an authoritarian one-party state with geopolitical ambitions that are not in Australia's interests.
"The more transparent that process [of China's influencing-building in Australia] is, the better placed we are to make a judgment as to whether it is acceptable or not acceptable, and whether it is covert or overt," Mr Varghese said.
"This is an issue ASIO would need to keep a very close eye on, in terms of any efforts to infiltrate or subvert our system which go beyond accepted laws and accepted norms."
The depth of the concern at the highest levels of the defence and intelligence establishment can be measured in recent public statements by the departing Defence Force chief and the director-general of ASIO.
Australia's domestic spy chief Duncan Lewis has warned Parliament that Chinese interference in Australia were occurring on "an unprecedented scale".
"And this has the potential to cause serious harm to the nation's sovereignty, the integrity of our political system, our national security capabilities, our economy and other interests," Mr Lewis said.
A China expert, Swinburne professor John Fitzgerald, agrees.
"Members of the Chinese community in Australia deserve the same rights and privileges as all other Australians, not to be hectored, lectured at, monitored, policed, reported on and told what they may and may not think," he said.

The coercion category
The definitive text on Beijing's overseas influence operations is Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese by China expert James To.
Citing primary documents, Mr To concludes the policies are designed to "legitimise and protect the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power" and maintain influence over critical "social, economic and political resources".
Those already amenable to Beijing, such as student group members, are "guided" — often by Chinese embassy officials — and given various benefits as a means of "behavioural control and manipulation", Mr To said.
Those regarded as hostile, such as Mr Chang, are subjected to "techniques of inclusion or coercion".
Australian academic Feng Chongyi is another who falls into the "coercion" category.

Feng Chongyi has made it his life's mission to democratise China.
In March, Dr Feng travelled to China to engage in what he called the "sensitive work" of interviewing human rights lawyers and scholars across China.
He told Four Corners he expected to be closely watched and harassed when he arrived in Beijing, but accepted it simply as an irritating feature of his job.
"It's an open secret that our telephone is tapped, we are followed everywhere. But that is a little thing that we have to accept if we want to work in China," the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) China scholar and democracy activist said.
Dr Feng is a small, energetic man who has retained his Communist Party membership in the hope that he will live long enough to see some results from what has become his life's mission: democratising China.
But he is also a realist, which meant he was initially unconcerned when, on March 20 and after he had arrived in the city of Kunming, he was approached by agents from the Ministry of State Security (MSS).
Dr Feng was driven to a hotel three hours away to be questioned.
He expected the matter to end there but, a day later, he realised he was being followed by security agents to the sprawling port city of Guangzhou. 

There he was told his interrogation would continue.
"That's the time when I really realised something serious is happening," he recalled.

'I was in deep trouble'
In a Guangzhou hotel room, the security agents subjected Dr Feng to daily six-hour questioning sessions, all of it videotaped.
Many of the questions were about his activities in Sydney, including the content of his lectures at UTS, the people in his Australian network of Communist Party critics, and his successful efforts to stop a concert glorifying the Communist Party founder Mao Zedong.
Then the agents turned their attention to his family, asking him specific questions to show him that his wife and daughter were also being closely watched.
He described the change in tactics as a means of getting him to fully submit to his inquisitors' demands.

Chongyi Feng's detention in China was designed to intimidate Chinese Australians who are critical of the Chinese Government's interference in Australian domestic affairs.

It was the only part of his story that the wily academic hesitated to recall, as if emotion might have overtaken him.
"I can suffer this or that but I'll not allow ... my wife and my daughter and my other family members [to] suffer from my activities," he said. 

"That is the thing that's quite fearful in my mind."
When his inquisitors demanded Dr Feng take a lie detector test on March 23, he called his wife who told him to make a run for it.
A few hours later, after midnight, Dr Feng crept out of his hotel, hoping to board a 4:00am flight.
But as he sought to check in, an airport official told him he could not leave China because he was suspected of endangering state security.
"At that point, my wife told my daughter that I was in deep trouble," Dr Feng said.
His daughter immediately called a foreign affairs specialist in the Australian Government and asked for help.
Dr Feng's questioning continued for six more days until his daughter was contacted by an Australian Government official and told he would be permitted to board a flight back to Australia.
In his final interrogation session, the MSS agents presented Dr Feng with a document to sign that forbade him from publicly discussing his ordeal.
But by then, his detention had already been covered by several Australian media outlets. 

When he landed at Sydney airport on April 1, a small group of supporters was waiting for him with banners.
Dr Feng believes his treatment in China was designed to send other academics, along with his supporters in the Chinese-Australian community, a message to "stay away from sensitive issues or sensitive topics".
"Otherwise they can get you into big trouble, detention or other punishment," he said.

Dr Feng was greeted by a small crowd of supporters when he arrived back in Australia in April. 

Campus patriots
Mostly though, the Communist Party's influence on Australian university campuses takes a subtler form, and works through the Chinese Students' and Scholars' Associations.
The Communist Party targeted these patriotic associations after the Tiananmen Square student uprising as a way of maintaining control over overseas students.
In Australia, which has 100,000 Chinese students, the associations are "sponsored" by Chinese embassy and consular officials.
Lupin Lu, an amiable 23-year-old communications student who is president of the Canberra University Students' and Scholars' Association, explained how Chinese embassy officials played an active role in organising a large student rally to welcome Li Keqiang when he visited Australia in March.
The Chinese Master: Malcolm Turnbull with Li Keqiang during his March visit to Australia. 

On the day, the rally had two shifts, the first starting at 5:00am.
Ms Lu insisted it was students rather than the embassy calling the shots.
"I wouldn't really call it helping," she insisted of the embassy's role, while confirming it provided flags, transport, food, a lawyer and certificates for students that would help them find jobs back in China.
"It's more 'sponsoring'," Ms Lu told Four Corners.
Ms Lu said her fellow students were willing to assemble at 5:00am to welcome Li because of their pride at China's economic rise.
Other factors include an early education system that extols the virtues of the Communist Party and the reality that positive connections with the Government can help a person land a job in China.
Federal police officers still describe with awe events in 2008 at the Olympic torch rally, when hundreds of chartered buses entered Canberra from NSW and Victoria, delivering 10,000 Chinese university students "to protect the torch".
"If the Aussie embassy in London issued a similar call to arms to Australian students in London, there would be two students and a dog," an officer said.
Ms Lu had another way of motivating her fellow students to assemble before dawn: she stressed the importance of blocking out anti-communist protesters.
Would she go so far as to alert the embassy if a human rights protest was being organised by dissident Chinese students?
"I would definitely, just to keep all the students safe," she said. 

"And to do it for China as well."

The extent to which this student nationalism is directed and monitored from Beijing, and what this means for academic freedoms, is uncertain.

But last year, ANU Emeritus Professor and the founding director of the Australian Centre on China in the World, Geremie Barme, was so concerned he wrote a lengthy letter to chancellor Gareth Evans.
Professor Barme's fears were sparked by a series of viral nationalistic videos created and posted by a Chinese ANU student Lei Xiying.
One of Mr Lei's videos, "If you want to change China, you'll have to get through me first", attracted more than 15 million hits.
"I would opine that Mr Lei is an agent for government opinion carving out a career in China's repressive media environment for political gain," Professor Barme wrote.
Professor Barme said Mr Lei was sponsored by an authoritarian government that routinely threatens scholars and journalists.

"Make no mistake, it is officially sanctioned propaganda," Professor Barme said.
He urged the university to confront the issue by debating it openly. 

His supporters have said that request was ignored.

'We are real media'
A gracious host, Sam Feng is in a gregarious mood when he invites us to the headquarters of Pacific Times, the once proudly independent community Chinese-language newspaper he founded in the 1980s.
Over Chinese tea, he scoffs at suggestions that his paper is involved in financial dealings with an arm of the Chinese Communist Party that shapes its coverage.
"It is false. It is fake ... they don't need to do that," he said, while insisting that questions of bias should be directed to Western media outlets whose coverage supports the US version of the world.
"We are real media," Mr Feng explained of his small team of staff.
But corporate records suggest his paper is less independent than he claims.
Subsidiaries of the Communist Party's overseas propaganda outlet, the Chinese News Service, own a 60 per cent stake to Mr Feng's 40 per cent in a Melbourne company, the Australian Chinese Culture Group Pty Ltd.
The results of this joint-venture deal appear evident in the newspaper's content, vast chunks of which are supplied direct from Beijing where propaganda authorities control the media.
UTS associate professor Dr Feng describes Pacific Times as one of several Australian Chinese-language media outlets that have forgone any semblance of editorial independence in exchange for deals offered by the Communist Party's propaganda apparatus.
"It used to be quite independent or autonomous," he said. 

"But... the newspaper now is identical [to] other newspapers that exclusively focus on the positive side of China."
In a backroom in Sam Feng's West Melbourne headquarters is evidence suggesting his Beijing dealings extend beyond what is placed in his newspaper.
A well-placed source leaked to Fairfax Media photos of dozens of placards resting against a wall of the room.
"We Against Vain Excuse for Interfering in South China Sea," reads one of the placards.

See how China is converting reefs to military facilities by building artificial islands in the South China Sea.

To a casual observer, the placards would barely warrant a glance.
But along with other information provided by the source, they point towards what Australian security officials suspect: that the Chinese Communist Party has a hand in encouraging protests in Australia.
"The Chinese would find it unacceptable if Australia was to organise protests in China against any particular issue," former DFAT chief Peter Varghese said.
"Likewise, we should consider it unacceptable for a Chinese government to be [encouraging], organising, orchestrating or bankrolling protests on issues that are ultimately matters for the Australian community or the Australian Government."
The placards stored at Pacific Times were handed out to hundreds of protesters who marched in Melbourne on July 23, 2016, to oppose an international tribunal ruling — supported by Australia — that rejected Beijing's claim over much of the South China Sea.
Of Pacific Times owner Sam Feng, the source said the newspaper owner sought to keep the Chinese Communist Party onside for commercial reasons: "He is a nationalist, but he just cares about business."
A review of the corporate records of other large Chinese-Australian media players reveals the involvement of Communist Party-controlled companies.
Those who turn down offers to become the party's publishing partners and seek to print independent news face the prospect of threats, intimidation and economic sabotage.

Don Ma, who owns the independent Vision China Times in Sydney and Melbourne, said 10 of his advertisers had been threatened by Chinese officials to pull their advertising.
All acquiesced, including a migration and travel company whose Beijing office was visited by the Ministry of State Security every day for two weeks until they cut ties with the paper.
Mr Ma said he was happy to speak publicly because he had already been blocked from travelling to China.

Don Ma embraces freedom of the press.

His journalists, though, request their names and images not be used when we visit his Sydney and Melbourne offices. 

They are fearful of retribution.
Ex-DFAT chief Mr Varghese and Swinburne's Professor Fitzgerald said Australia should require more accountability and transparency around the way the Communist Party and its proxies are operating in the media and on university campuses.
Professor Fitzgerald has warned Communist Party influence operations in Australia not only risk dividing the Chinese community, but sparking hostility between it and other Australians.
"The Chinese community is the greatest asset we have in this country for managing what are going to be complex relations with China over the next decades — in fact for centuries to come — and we need them to help us in managing this relationship," he said.
"If suspicion is sown about where their loyalties lie, then we lose one of our greatest assets in this country now."
Mr Ma has not only endured economic sabotage from the Communist Party, but a campaign of vilification from pro-Beijing members of the local Chinese community.
Yet he keeps publishing, not only because he embraces freedom of the press but because many members of the disparate Chinese community urge him to keep doing so.
"I felt that the media here, all the Chinese media, was being controlled by China," he said.
"This is harmful to the Australian society. It is also harmful to the next generation of Chinese. Therefore, I felt I wanted to invest in a truly independent media that fits in with Australian values."

Watch 'Power And Influence: How China's Communist Party Is Infiltrating Australia' on Four Corners, ABC TV, Monday 8:30pm.