'Unprecedented atrocity of the century': Uighur activist urges Australia to take tougher stance against China

Rushan Abbas says countries doing business with China are enabling its mass detention of 3 million people, including her sister
By Sarah Martin

Uighur activist Rushan Abbas: China is using its economic power to silence world criticism of its detention of 3 million Muslims.

A leading Uighur activist, Rushan Abbas, has urged Australian MPs to take a stronger stance against the Chinese regime, while backing realist comparisons between the state’s authoritarianism and Nazi Germany.
Abbas, who met with MPs in Canberra on Thursday and held a roundtable at the US Embassy on the plight of the Uighur Muslim minority in western China’s East Turkestan colony, said that “modern day” concentration camps holding as many as 3 million Uighurs were a case of “history repeating itself”.
The Liberal MP Andrew Hastie sparked a controversy when he penned an opinion piece in the Nine newspapers in August, comparing the west’s complacency about China to France’s response to the rise of authoritarian Germany in the lead up to the second world war.
Abbas, the executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, said she strongly backed the comparison, saying the first German concentration camps were built in 1933 while the country was still trading with other democratic countries. 

The first Uighur camp was built in 2014, Abbas said.
“Most of the economically independent or rich countries, they continued to do business with Germany, they enabled Germany’s economy to murder more people,” Abbas said.
“Great Britain – they continued to do business with Nazi Germany at that time – what happened? 

They were then faced with the bombers flying over London. 

That’s exactly the same thing happening right now. 

Continuing to do business with China is enabling China’s economy to be the threat to the world community … its democracy and values.
“Continuing to do business with China is enabling China to murder my people.”
Abbas, whose sister and aunt were both abducted and detained in camps a week after she first went public as an advocate in the US in late 2018, said Uighurs were being detained because “our religion, our culture, our language is being targeted as a mental ideological disease”.
“[It is] not just the 3 million people in the concentration camps facing mental and physical torture, forced intense indoctrinations, forced medications, food and sleep deprivation, [but] even the people at large … living outside, are facing a complete surveillance police state.”
Abbas said she had not heard from her sister since she was abducted, saying: “I don’t even know if my sister is still alive.”
There are 17 Australian residents who are believed to be under house arrest, in prison or detained in the secretive “re-education” camps, Guardian Australia revealed in February.
Labelling the mass detention of Uighurs as the “unprecedented atrocity of the century”, Abbas hit out at western countries, including Australia, for being too timid in the face of China’s authoritarianism.
“[This] is the largest incarceration of one ethnic group since the Holocaust, since world war two – why we are not getting much attention in the international media?“It’s because China is using its economy and the market for silencing the world population.
“China has become a power able to strong-arm the world … and with all that they are actually successfully silencing the world communities,” she said.
She urged Australia to do more to raise human rights concerns in its dealings with China, saying the west could use its combined economic might to pressure China. 

She also called for the international community not to “reward” China with the hosting rights for the Winter Olympics in 2022 and the FIFA World Cup in 2021.
“Freedom is not free – any kind of doing the right thing comes with a price,” Abbas said.
“Yes, there might be some economic burden, but when it comes down to what is right, and when it comes down to the basic rights of human beings that is endangered right now … we shouldn’t be only shortsighted to see the economy today, or next year or next five years.”
She also called for the establishment of a Uighur friendship group and for Australia to advance its own version of the US Magnitsky Act, which would impose sanctions on individuals who commit gross human rights abuses.
The foreign minister, Marise Payne, has tasked parliament’s joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade to conduct an inquiry into Australia’s legal standing in response to international human rights abuses.
Such legislation has already gained support from the Labor senator Kimberley Kitching and the Liberal senator James Paterson.

Australia's foreign minister Marise Payne labels China's treatment of Uighurs 'disturbing'

Last month, Payne labelled reports of China’s mass internment of Uighurs as “disturbing” and called on China to end arbitrary detention, following leaked internal Chinese government documents which included directives from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to “show absolutely no mercy” in the “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”.
Abbas also called on the Australian government to do more to prevent the “harassment and surveillance” of the 3,000-strong Uighur community in Australia.
“They are feeling threatened for their own safety and for their relatives back home,” Abbas said.
On the call to strip China of the Olympic Games hosting rights, Abbas also pointed to the historical comparison of Berlin’s hosting of the 1936 Olympic Games, which at the time faced calls for a boycott, and was used by the Nazi regime as a platform for rampant nationalist propaganda.
“The Olympic Games is a celebration of the differences and unity in the world, bringing together all different regions, different nations … a country holding 3 million innocent people because of their race and religion is the last country qualified to host such a game.”

Chinese Peril

China’s influence on campus chills free speech in Australia, New Zealand
By A. Odysseus Patrick and Emanuel Stoakes

Students hold placards during a protest at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, on July 31. 

SYDNEY — Chinese students poured into Australia and New Zealand in their hundreds of thousands over the past 20 years, paying sticker prices for university degrees that made higher education among both countries’ top export earners.
Now, as a more-authoritarian China projects its influence deeper into the South Pacific, attempts by Chinese students and diplomats to interfere with anti-Beijing dissidents and stifle free speech on campus pose an uncomfortable challenge for both U.S. allies.
The immediate trigger for the flare-ups was mass protests in Hong Kong, which authorities in the semiautonomous Chinese territory are struggling to contain.
Protesters there have assailed what they say is the steady erosion in Hong Kong’s rule of law, aided and abetted by the city’s pro-Beijing leaders.
Students, academics and officials in Australia and New Zealand, two of the modern world’s older democracies, now find their natural sympathy for the Hong Kong protesters colliding with their nations’ economic dependency on Beijing — a weakness the Chinese Communist Party isn’t hesitating to exploit.
The most visible flash point is on campus.
Students who support and oppose the Chinese Community Party have spent recent days erecting, ripping down, and restoring walls covered with cards and Post-it notes calling for freedom in Hong Kong at universities in the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart, and in New Zealand.
“Beijing’s influence on campuses is responsible for widespread self-censorship by universities and academics in Australia and New Zealand,” said Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra and author of “Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia.”
“The events of the last couple of weeks on Australian campuses have proved to be a serious escalation of Beijing’s interference,” he said.
Every pro-democracy protest is countered by Beijing’s well-drilled student supporters.
When some University of Sydney students proposed a protest on Friday, which did not proceed, opponents shared notes on the Chinese WeChat platform about how to respond.
“The pro-Hong Kong independence demonstration on August 9 is planned by some forces of Sydney University,” one person wrote, according to an image taken by a student.
“We will not use force, but will absolutely not sit idly by and do nothing. [We] will fight the separatist forces to the end using legal means. Never make a concession!!”
The person, who could not be reached for comment, added in the message that they had “reported this to the education section” of the Chinese Consulate.
After years of feeling fortunate about their economic relationship with China, Australians are starting to worry about the cost.
On Thursday, a ruling-party lawmaker, Andrew Hastie, compared China’s expansion to the rise of Hitler's Nazi Germany before World War II and suggested it posed a direct military threat.
“Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbor has become,” Hastie wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Hastie’s comments ricocheted between Beijing and Canberra, where the Chinese Embassy condemned the former officer in Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment, an elite army special forces unit.
As the smallest members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance that includes the United States, Britain and Canada, Australia and New Zealand are attractive targets for Chinese influence and espionage operations, analysts say.
Paul Buchanan, a strategic analyst based in Auckland, said that New Zealand is an “ideal liberal democratic lab rat” for China to experiment with ways to use “the very freedoms and transparency of democratic systems against them.”
Chinese diplomats in both Australia and New Zealand appear to be encouraging confrontations by praising counterprotesters.
On July 29, a student at New Zealand’s Auckland University was confronted by a group of men who objected to her involvement in adorning a protest site, known as a “Lennon Wall,” with messages of support for Hong Kong demonstrators.
Cellphone footage uploaded to social media showed one of the men moving aggressively toward the student, who fell to the ground.
Three days later, the Chinese Consulate in Auckland published a statement that supported the actions of the assailant and his companions, conveying its “appreciation to the students for their spontaneous patriotism,” while condemning unnamed individuals for “inciting anti-China sentiment.”
Protests and counterprotests have taken place since; participants say they have received threatening messages from unknown senders.
Defenders of free speech say the episodes are a wake-up call.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said this week that officials have reminded their Chinese counterparts that New Zealand “will uphold and maintain our freedom of expression.”
Standing up for such values comes at the cost of worsening relations with Beijing, the top trade partner of both countries and a lucrative source of funds for universities, which lack the big endowments of American colleges.
China’s purchases of iron ore, coal and dairy products have helped power Australia and New Zealand’s prosperity.
The University of Queensland, where punches were thrown at a Hong Kong sympathy protest two weeks ago, is so close to Chinese authorities that it appointed the Chinese consul general in Brisbane a visiting professor of language and culture last month.
The consulate then praised the “patriotic behavior” of 300 pro-Beijing students after the violent incident, prompting Australia’s defense minister to warn foreign diplomats against interfering in free speech.


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Among themselves, mainland Chinese students share advice on how attract sympathetic coverage in confrontations with the left-wing activists they call the “baizuo,” a pejorative term for Western liberals that translates as “white left.”
“UQ students please be calm, don’t resort to violence,” said a recent post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service.
“Try to learn from the tricks of those pro-Hong Kong independence activists. If you push me I will fall over. Fake tumble, cry and wail, call campus police. We are too strong, which won’t work in the world of baizuo.”
“It’s very tense,” said Drew Pavlou, one of the student organizers of the University of Queensland protest, in an interview.
“It doesn’t feel safe. I have had to have security walk me to some classes.”
In New Zealand, an event commemorating China’s 1989 suppression of pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square scheduled for June 3 was moved away from Auckland University of Technology following pressure from Chinese officials.
Emails obtained through freedom-of-information requests by online outlet Newsroom revealed that China’s vice consul met with the university’s president on May 31 to request that the event be scuttled. 
The university received emails from the consulate on the matter, too.
In Australia, officials are so concerned about Chinese influence that the attorney general has asked his department to examine why 14 Confucius Institutes — Chinese-funded education units within Australian universities — have not been registered as agents of foreign influence under a new law directed at Chinese espionage, influence and propaganda.
At the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, a Confucius Institute shares a building with the office of Anne-Marie Brady, a professor who has researched Chinese government influence.
Brady has complained of threats, break-ins at her home and attempted sabotage of her car. 
Police investigated but were unable to identify a culprit.
Reflecting a growing unease that Australia’s economic future depends on an unpredictable adversary, former prime minister John Howard said this week that unrest in Hong Kong “perhaps represents a glimpse of the future for Chinese society.”
“If you’ve been born into relative affluence and comfort you take that for granted and you resent being told how to run your life,” he said.
“Perhaps over the next 50 years we’re going to see just how all of that works out.”

Chinazism

China is compared to the Nazis in dire warning to Australia and the world

• MP Andrew Hastie says Australia will face its biggest security test over next decade
• Compared China to Nazi Germany
• Said Australia ignored role of ideology in communist China's push for influence

By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS

Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie

The chair of parliament's powerful security and intelligence committee has warned Australia against underestimating China, pointing to the experience of Europe in the face of an aggressive Nazi Germany.
Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie says Australia will face its biggest democratic, economic and security test over the next decade as China and the US compete for global dominance.
The West once believed economic liberalisation would naturally lead to China becoming a democracy, just as the French believed steel and concrete forts would guard against Germany in 1940.

The chair of parliament's powerful security and intelligence committee has warned Australia against underestimating China, pointing to the experience of Europe in the face of an aggressive Nazi Germany (pictured is Chinese dictator Xi inspecting PLA Navy honour guard)

The West once believed economic liberalisation would naturally lead to China becoming a democracy, just as the French believed steel and concrete forts would guard against Germany in 1940 (pictured is Adolf Hitler and Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler inspecting guard of honour parade)

'But their thinking failed catastrophically. The French had failed to appreciate the evolution of mobile warfare,' Mr Hastie wrote in an opinion piece published on Thursday in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
'Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become.'
'What Scott Morrison needs to do, is he needs to come out and say whether this is the government's view or whether there are divisions in the government,' he said.
Mr Hastie, a former SAS captain, said Australia had ignored the role of ideology in communist China's push for influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
'We keep using our own categories to understand its actions, such as its motivations for building ports and roads, rather than those used by the Chinese Communist Party,' he said.
He noted western commentators once believed Josef Stalin's Soviet Russia was the 'rational actions of a realist great power'.
'We must be intellectually honest and take the Chinese leadership at its word,' he wrote of Xi Jinping's speeches referencing Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

Australia faces a delicate diplomatic balancing act with the US, the nation's closest strategic ally, and major trade partner China, going toe-to-toe in a trade war.
Mr Hastie said it was impossible to forsake America or disengage from China.
'The next decade will test our democratic values, our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian history,' the Liberal backbencher wrote.
Mr Hastie says 'choices will be made for us' if Australia fails to grasp the challenges across politics, education, civil society and business.
'Our sovereignty, our freedoms, will be diminished.'

Australia's Chinese Mole Chau Chak Wing

In Australia, Fears of Chinese Meddling Rise on U.N. Bribery Case Revelation

By Emily Baumgaertner and Jacqueline Williams

Chau Chak Wing, center right, in 2015 at the opening of a University of Technology Sydney building that bears his name. Chau is accused of bribing a United Nations diplomat.

A billionaire businessman, previously accused of meddling in Australia’s politics on behalf of China, conspired to bribe a prominent United Nations diplomat, an Australian politician said on Tuesday, raising new concerns about China’s efforts to interfere in democracies worldwide.
Andrew Hastie, chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, identified the businessman, Chau Chak Wing, as the person in a 2015 bribery case previously called only Co-conspirator No. 3.
“CC-3 is Dr. Chau Chak Wing,” Mr. Hastie said in a speech in the Australian Parliament’s Federation Chamber, adding, “The same man who co-conspired to bribe the U.N. president of the General Assembly, John Ashe.”
He continued, “The same man with extensive contacts in the Chinese Communist Party, including the United Front.”
In a criminal complaint filed in 2015, American prosecutors said several conspirators had paid John W. Ashe, an Antiguan diplomat and former president of the United Nations General Assembly, more than $1 million in luxury goods and cash from sources in China to assist with business deals.
Several people accused in the complaint were named, and the Australian news media had suggested in the past that Co-conspirator No. 3 was Chau. 

But his identity as the co-conspirator was confirmed only Tuesday.
Chau, a well-connected political donor in Australia, has also sued news organizations that he says have wrongly linked him to the bribery case. 

Mr. Hastie said he sought to issue a broader warning about China’s interference in Australian politics and the press.
“In Australia, it is clear that the Chinese Communist Party is working to covertly interfere with our media, our universities and also influence our political processes and public debates,” Mr. Hastie said.
Mr. Hastie’s speech is likely to fuel a global debate about China’s efforts to shape opinions and policy in the world’s democracies and democratic institutions.
Several Australian politicians have accused China of meddling in its politics. 

Australia’s intelligence chief identified Chau, an Australian citizen, in June as an agent of the Chinese government.
Duncan Lewis, the director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, warned politicians against accepting contributions from Chau and another man of Chinese descent because of their ties to China’s government.
Chau, a billionaire property developer who immigrated to Australia decades ago, has said his campaign contributions are benign and unrelated to the Chinese government. 

He could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Chau is chairman of the Kingold Group, a business conglomerate based in Guangzhou, China, that has expanded to Australia. 

His name graces the modernist Chau Chak Wing Building at the University of Technology Sydney, to which he donated $15 million. 

Chau also owns New Express Daily, an Australian newspaper.
Chau filed a defamation suit last year aimed at two Australian news media companies: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national broadcaster, and Fairfax Media, a newspaper publisher. 

He has sought damages from them for a news report that the suit says damaged his personal and professional reputation.
In his speech, Mr. Hastie argued that Chau was trying to silence the press.
“My concern is that defamation cases can have a chilling effect on our free press,” Mr. Hastie said. “Any attempt to silence our media from telling the truth — provided it is the truth — through a defamation claim cannot stand.”
In the speech, Mr. Hastie said Australians “deserve the truth.”
Since the accusations of political meddling, Australia has taken steps to curb foreign interference. 

A series of bills introduced in December would strengthen the country’s espionage laws, outlaw foreign political donations and criminalize efforts to interfere in Australian democracy.
Senator Sam Dastyari, a member of the opposition Labor Party, resigned in December amid accusations that he pushed China’s foreign policy interests after taking money from Chinese-born political donors.
He had been widely criticized by opponents as a symbol of China’s efforts to compromise Australia’s democracy.
But the accusations leveled against  Chau on Tuesday extend the reach of concern, suggesting that China’s efforts to meddle span national borders.
The 2015 bribery case, U.S. v. John W. Ashe et al, was considered the worst financial scandal at the United Nations in decades. 

That complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York.
The court did not respond to a request for comment.
The corruption case accused Ashe, the Antiguan diplomat, of accepting Rolex watches, bespoke suits and a private basketball court in exchange for official actions that benefited Chinese interests.
In particular, Ashe accepted $200,000 in exchange for his attendance at the Global Summit of Small and Medium Enterprise Leaders in November 2013 in Guangzhou. 

The meeting was organized by Chau’s Kingold Group at the lavish Imperial Springs resort, according to the complaint.
Ashe died in an accident in June 2016 while awaiting trial. 

Several other defendants in the case were convicted and either got prison time or were awaiting sentencing. 

Co-conspirator No. 3 was never indicted, but it is not known why.

Chinese-Australian billionaire involved in UN bribery case

Chau Chak Wing has links with Chinese Communist party and conspired to bribe former UN president John Ashe
By Amy Remeikis and Katharine Murphy

Chau Chak Wing at the opening of the Chau Chak Wing building at the University of Technology, Sydney. 

The chair of Australia’s intelligence and security committee has taken the extraordinary step of using parliamentary privilege to identify one of Australia’s biggest political donors of conspiring to bribe one of the United Nation’s top diplomats.
Andrew Hastie used a speech in the parliament’s Federation Chamber to identify Chinese-Australian billionaire Chau Chak Wing, as “co-conspirator 3” in a 2015 American bribery case, which alleged John Ashe, the former president of the United Nations General Assembly, had been paid to assist in the smooth progress of business deals.
Hastie said he confirmed Chau’s identity while leading a delegation to the United States to discuss Australia’s foreign interference and espinage laws, as the chair of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee and believed it his “duty” to share what he had learnt.
“During discussions with United States authorities I confirmed the long suspected identity of CC3,” he said.
“It is now my duty to inform the house and the Australian people [that person] is Chau Chak Wing. The same man who co-conspired to bribe the UN president of the general assembly, John Ashe. The same man with extensive contacts in the Chinese Communist Party, including the United Front.
“I share it with the House because I believe it to be in the national interest. My duty first and foremost is to the Australian people and the preservation to the ideals of the democratic traditions of our Commonwealth.”
Hastie’s explosive statements in the Federation Chamber comes at a time when the Turnbull government has been attempting to calm diplomatic tensions between Canberra and Beijing prompted by the Coalition’s foreign interference laws.
With relations between Canberra and Beijing tense, the trade minister Steve Ciobo has travelled to China, and the foreign minister Julie Bishop held a lengthy meeting with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Argentina.
Bishop characterised the bilateral discussion with Yi as “very warm and candid and constructive” and said she would shortly visit the Chinese capital.
Her Chinese counterpart was cooler. 

In a translated press statement after the G20 talks, the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi acknowledged China-Australia relations had “encountered some difficulties”.
He also urged Australia to adopt a more positive disposition towards Beijing. 

“If Australia sincerely hopes that the relations between the two countries will return to the right track... they must break away from traditional thinking, take off their coloured glasses, and look at China’s development from a positive angle,” Wang said.

Andrew Hastie in parliament on Tuesday. 

Hastie, a Western Australian conservative, told the chamber on Tuesday night he was naming Chau to ensure Australia’s democracy – and free press – could operate without interference.
“CC3 is a Chinese-Australian citizen. He has also been a very significant donor to both of our major political parties,” he said.
“He has given more than $4m since 2004. He has also donated $45m to universities in Australia. The Australian press has reported these matters and others and have been sued for defamation by CC3.
“CC3 disputes a number of the reported allegations.
“The merits of these defamation cases are appropriately left for a court. 

“My concern is defamation cases can have a chilling effect on our free press.
“Any attempt to silence our media from our telling the truth, provided it is the truth, through a defamation claim can not stand.
“Our democracy only works if we have a free press which can publish information which serves the public interest.
“We don’t always like what the press writes, but they are essential to a free and flourishing democracy. The Australian people deserve the truth.”