Fears raised for safety of defecting Chinese spy Wang Liqiang

Intelligence agent who has applied for asylum in Australia is now a target of Chinese killers

By Christopher Knaus and Ben Doherty

Security experts have urged Wang Liqiang’s minders to ‘double up’ protection.

The Australian minders of the Chinese defector Wang Liqiang have been urged to “double up” protection duties as experts raise significant fears about his safety.
Chinese state media have sought to discredit Wang as a convicted “fraudster”, liar and a fake after he publicly revealed his role within Chinese intelligence and his bid for Australia’s protection on Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers.
The Chinese government released a notice from the Shanghai public security bureau stating it was investigating him for fraud, and released an online court record suggesting a fraud conviction was recorded in 2016. 

Wang’s lawyer in Australia, George Newhouse, told Guardian Australia: “He denies those allegations.”
Wang is staying in an undisclosed location in Sydney. 

He is in the country on a tourist visa and has formally applied for asylum. 

Guardian Australia has been told he holds significant concerns for his own and his family’s safety.

One of the experts who helped investigate Wang’s claims, Alex Joske of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said there was reason to doubt the allegations aired by the Chinese government about his fraud conviction. 

He said it was clear from the Chinese police statements that Wang was now “a target”.
“He’d be a target of the Chinese government and we can see from the allegations that the Chinese government has made, those accusations from the police, that they are trying to go after him,” Joske said.
John Blaxland, a security and intelligence expert at the Australian National University, said the extraordinary revelations of China’s actions were unlike anything Australia has seen “in a generation”.
He said significant protective precautions must be taken to guard Wang against retribution. 

“If I was his minders, I would be looking to double up on protection duties,” he told the Guardian.
“And he must have minders. I’m assuming that someone is looking out for him and there are some protective measures in place. There’s a lot of egg being thrown around and it’s stuck on a lot of people’s faces.”
Asked about what was being done to keep Wang safe, prime minister Scott Morrison said simply that the public could “expect the same protections to apply to anyone who is living in our country, whether on a visa or any other arrangement”.
“Well he’s in Australia. He’s in Australia. And we have the rule of law in Australia,” Morrison said.
The concerns for Wang come after the death of Bo “Nick” Zhao in a Melbourne hotel room in March – which passed almost unnoticed at the time.
Nine newspapers reported allegations on Monday that Zhao had been approached by Chinese businessmen in Melbourne to run for federal parliament, effectively as an agent of Beijing.
Zhao, a 32-year-old car dealer who had run into financial difficulties, was found dead by a cleaner in a hotel room in Glen Waverley on 3 March this year.
Former colleagues remember him as quiet but determined.
Yvan Lieutier, who worked with Zhao through a Heidelberg car dealership for five months, told the Guardian he was a “very quiet” young man, but one who was “was pretty ambitious for his age”.
He was approached to run for parliament in early 2019, and reported the approach to Asio several weeks before his death.
A cause of death has not been established and Victoria police have referred Zhao’s death to the coroner.
Police said: “Local police prepared a report for the coroner in relation to the death of a 31-year-old man in Glen Waverley on 3 March 2019. As this matter is currently before the coroner, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”
The Victorian coroner’s court confirmed that its investigation into Zhao’s death was “open and ongoing” but that no decision had been taken on if, or when, a public hearing might be held.
Blaxland said the reports of Chinese influence, if accurate, were “grave”. 

“If what we are reading is correct, then we face a challenge the likes of which we have not seen in a generation,” he told Guardian Australia.

Chongyi Feng, an associate professor in China Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, said Wang’s claims required further investigation by Australian intelligence authorities.
“The claim by Mr Wang confirms many things that have been reported and discussed over the last two years,” Feng said. 

“It is crystal clear that the Australian government and public should have done more and should do more to address Chinese interference. We already have effective new laws [targeting foreign interference], but those laws should be implemented with greater vigour.”
Zhao’s death needed “to be investigated very thoroughly,” he said.
Feng said he believed political concerns over Australia’s economic relationship with China were the most significant factor in an unwillingness to push back harder against Beijing.
“The intelligence officials of Australia understand what is happening, but … political leaders need to do more to address this, even if those actions might offend the Beijing authorities and may cause some commercial loss or lost business deals. Australia should put human rights and democracy before commercial interests.”
Asio’s director general, Mike Burgess, said his agency “was previously aware of matters that have been reported ... and has been actively investigating them.
“Given that the matter in question is subject to a coronial inquiry, and as not to prejudice our investigations, it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
Burgess said allegations of foreign interference were treated seriously, and that hostile foreign powers posed a significant threat to Australia.
“As the director general of security, I am committed to protecting Australia’s democracy and sovereignty,” he said.
“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.”
Wang has claimed in media interviews that he is a spy seeking to defect to Australia, and willing to reveal secrets of Chinese efforts to infiltrate and influence Australia’s political system.
He had engaged in espionage activities in Hong Kong, including helping to organise the October 2015 kidnapping of Lee Bo, the owner of Causeway Bay Bookshop, who was targeted by Beijing for allegedly distributing dissident materials.
Wang said Beijing covertly controls listed companies to finance intelligence operations, including surveilling dissidents, co-opting media organisations, and running “cyber armies” to shift political opinion.

ADVERTISING CHINA'S THUGGISH SOCIALISM

Promoting China's communist regime to Australia's 1.2 million ethnic Chinese

By Andrew Bolt

Cinema advertisements espousing Chinese propaganda’ and socialism are airing in movie theatres across Sydney, including before children’s films such as the latest How To Train Your Dragon sequel.
A bizarre advertisement promoting “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and aimed at increasing China’s “soft power’’ over Australia has appeared on the silver screen in a string of theatres.
So who pays for this?
Chinese film distribution company TangRen... is behind the advertisement.
The Daily Telegraph yesterday asked TangRen owner Jiayin Yuan if the company was financially supported by the Chinese government and why it was promoting socialism in Australia.
She directed the questions to company director Li Tongliang who did not respond.
The company’s website states TangRen distributes two thirds of all the Chinese and Korean films shown in Australia and New Zealand.
“TangRen promotes Chinese political philosophy and cultural concepts of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the advertisement states.
The propaganda is the carrot. 

Then there's the stick: a Chinese Australian critic of the regime gets arrested in China:
Yang Hengjun, the Australian-Chinese writer and democracy activist... was detained in China accused of spying.
He now has a friend release a letter:
In the letter, Mr Yang urges activists to "maintain belief in China's democratic future, and, when it doesn't put yourself or your family at risk, to use all your means to push China's democratic development to happen sooner... If I cannot come out or disappear again, remember my articles and let your children read them."
The 53-year-old had been living in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, before leaving for Guangzhou on January 18.
Yang admits in that letter he was also arrested by China in 2011 and forced to lie about it:
On Monday, Australian professor Feng Chongyi published an apology that Yang wrote to his supporters on US-based ­Chinese alternative news website Boxun, detailing his regret over how he handled his previous detention in China in 2011...
Back then, when Yang was ­released, he denied it occurred and said his phone was turned off and there had been a misunderstanding. 

Chinese dissidents and critics of the Chinese government abroad were suspicious of his ­explanation, and accused him of being a spy for the Communist Party...
In the letter, Yang said he did not reveal that he was detained publicly in order to be able to ­return to China and continue his work writing about Chinese democracy...
“I choose to ‘lie’ and let myself be insulted (in order to continue to be) able to do the things which I think right. Can you forgive me?”...
Dr Feng, a University of Technology Sydney professor who is also a critic of the Chinese government and has been detained in China, said Yang asked him to release the letter if he was ever detained again.
Chinese Australians here get the message. 

Here's Jieh-Yung Lo in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Since the news about Chinese-Australian writer and blogger Yang Hengjun broke, I received a call from my mother urging me to stop writing and commentating on issues relating to China. 

She pointed out it doesn’t matter what I write or how I write it, it will cause “unnecessary complications” and make myself and my immediate family a target.
But it's not just Chinese Australia critics who should worry:
After a quarter-century of researching China, Anne-Marie Brady is a veteran of Chinese government spying and harassment. 

"I was prepared for pressure in China," says the 52-year-old New Zealander, a well-regarded professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. 

"But I always felt safe in New Zealand. So that changed." ...
First came the pressure on her university. 

Chinese officials demanded that her immediate superior stop her research...
Next, her office was broken into in December 2017.... 

If she had any doubt that she'd been targeted, she got a detailed warning letter from a concerned friend in the Chinese community to let her know that an official campaign of intimidation against her – and others – was under way.
Brady's home was next... 

The only things missing were laptops, phones and an encrypted memory stick from her last trip to China... 

Brady went to her office the next morning to discover that it had been broken into. 

Again. 

It was February 15 last year.
Brady was scheduled to give testimony to Australia's Parliament that afternoon... to two committees keen to know about, among other things, her groundbreaking research into the Chinese Communist Party's activities in Antarctica... 

Her work uncovered, for instance, that the Chinese People's Liberation Army had built three military facilities on Australian Antarctic territory...
The harassment in her own country seems to have been in angry response to her 2017 report in New Zealand, titled Magic Weapons: China's Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping.

The title is a reference to the fact that Xi named three "magic weapons" of Chinese Communist Party power – the People's Liberation Army, the party's program to strengthen and build itself, and the party's United Front Work Department that covertly spreads party influence through the overseas Chinese diaspora and elements of Chinese culture and business.
Given this growing Chinese authoritarianism, this seems very unwise:
Australia is playing a role in helping China develop its rival global positioning system that will be used for guiding missiles and other military technology, according to a leading expert.
New Zealand academic Anne-Marie Brady — who says she has faced a campaign of harassment and intimidation for her research on the Chinese Communist Party — said the "BeiDou" alternative to the American-controlled GPS carries significant benefits for the Chinese military.

Australia Probes China’s Detention of Australian-Chinese Writer

Yang Hengjun is detained in China after Canberra’s decision to ban Huawei from Australia’s 5G network
By Eva Dou in Beijing, Rob Taylor in Canberra and Yifan Wang in Hong Kong

The Australian-Chinese writer Yang Hengjun disappeared ahead of a visit to China by Australia’s defense minister. 

Australia’s government is investigating the detention of an Australian-Chinese political writer and academic in China amid heightened concern over detentions of Western nationals in the country.
Australia’s foreign ministry said it was seeking access to Yang Hengjun, an Australian spy novelist who once worked for China’s Foreign Ministry, and that no reasons had been provided by security or diplomatic authorities in Beijing for his detention.
Mr. Yang’s case threatens to cast a shadow over a visit to China by Australia’s defense minister. 

It follows months of tension between Australia and Beijing over Canberra’s decision to lock Chinese phone giant Huawei Technologies Co. out of future 5G communication networks and to challenge Chinese influence in the South Pacific.
His detention also comes as China enters a year of sensitive political anniversaries, including the 30th anniversary of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. 

Several labor organizers and student activists in multiple cities either have disappeared or been taken into police custody in recent days, in what some observers described as a sign authorities are on edge.
There were no immediate indications of whether Mr. Yang’s case was linked to those broader issues. Mr. Yang has been detained previously on trips to China, including in 2011, when a friend reported that Chinese authorities told him he could be released only if he agreed to say he had been sick for the preceding few days.
Australia’s defense minister, Christopher Pyne, was due to arrive in China Thursday in an effort to soothe recent tensions evident since Australia’s conservative government targeted foreign influence in domestic politics and society with counterespionage legislation, triggering a chill in trade and diplomatic relations.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement Wednesday that it wanted to know why Mr. Yang had been detained and was seeking “to obtain consular access to him, in accordance with the bilateral consular agreement, as a matter of priority.”
Asked about Mr. Yang’s case at a regular China Foreign Ministry news conference, spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she wasn’t aware of the situation.
Mr. Yang had flown from New York to Guangzhou on Jan. 18, but he didn’t continue onto a second flight to Shanghai, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, citing friends. 

It wasn’t immediately clear what the purpose of his trip was.
There has been concern about the risks for Western nationals in China in recent weeks after China detained Canadian researcher Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, in apparent retaliation for Ottawa’s arrest of Huawei’s finance chief at the U.S.’s request. 

Canada issued a travel alert this month, warning of the possibility of “arbitrary enforcement” of local laws in China.
More than 100 scholars and former diplomats from Western countries signed an open letter to Xi Jinping this week calling for the release of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor, saying it would make China experts think twice about visiting the country. 

While Australia’s government has been cautious with its criticism to protect trade ties, several Australians signed, including Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister and president emeritus of Mr. Kovrig’s employer, the International Crisis Group.
China has accused the two Canadians of activities that endanger national security, without specifying what those activities are. 

They haven’t been formally charged.
On Jan. 16, Mr. Yang posted a comment on his Weibo social-media account criticizing a travel warning China issued for Canada, warning Chinese citizens to be careful of their safety and follow local laws. 

“Canada is pretty much one of the top three countries that treat tourists the best,” he wrote.
Mr. Yang, who was born in China, joined China’s Foreign Ministry in the 1980s, and at one point he posted a photo of himself online in a police uniform. 

He later switched to academic work and moved abroad.
It has been unclear what happened during his previous disappearances in China. 

When he emerged in 2011, he only said he had fallen ill and had communication issues, leading to what he called a misunderstanding.
Feng Chongyi, a friend and a Sydney-based academic who was himself detained in China last year, expressed concern that Mr. Yang had been detained on national-security grounds.
“It is an extension of China’s hostage-diplomacy issue,” Mr. Feng said. 

He said he had tried to warn Mr. Yang against travel to China following the detention of the two Canadians.
In a sign that Chinese residents critical of government policy also face heightened risks, police from the southern city of Shenzhen took six labor activists into custody on Sunday night, according to friends and family members. 

Three of the activists were formally detained on suspicion of “disturbing social order,” while another has since been released, they said.
Separately, five current students and two recent graduates from top universities in Beijing who belong to a group that supported worker-unionizing efforts in southern China last year disappeared on Monday, according to friends. 

The seven were hiding out in an apartment in the coastal city of Tianjin while the group released statements excoriating Beijing police for having shown several of them videotaped confessions by fellow activists detained last year, friends said.
One of the people detained, Peking University student Zhang Ziwei, described others being grabbed by unidentified people in messages he sent to friends by smartphone late Monday night. 

In a video message, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Zhang said he could hear the people going to door-to-door.
“The proletariat doesn’t fear death, much less repression!” he said in the video. 

Friends said he later stopped sending messages and they haven’t been able to reach him since.
The Shenzhen Public Security Bureau didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Chinese State Terrorism

Chinese-Australian Writer Yang Hengjun Disappears in China

By Damien Cave and Chris Buckley

Yang Hengjun in San Diego in 2012.

SYDNEY, Australia — A well-known writer and former Chinese official with Australian citizenship flew from New York to China on Friday despite warnings from friends who told him it was too dangerous.
Now, he is missing and appears to have been detained by the Chinese authorities.
The writer, Yang Hengjun, did not answer his Chinese cellphone despite repeated attempts to reach him on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Nor did he answer messages on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media service.
Deng Yuwen, a Chinese journalist and current affairs commentator who knows Mr. Yang, said that the writer appeared to have vanished shortly after landing in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
“We don’t know what Yang Hengjun did that would prompt the Chinese government to detain him,” Mr. Deng said by telephone from New York. 

“In recent years, he’s been very low key and hasn’t published anything that could be construed as antigovernment.”
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that the government “is seeking information about an Australian citizen who has been reported missing in China.”
A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said she had no information about the case. 

American officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Yang was detained in 2011, but his disappearance now carries additional risk.
China’s relationship with the United States and its democratic allies continues to deteriorate. 

A trade war between the two countries is rattling the Chinese economy. 

Xi Jinping has pushed the country toward a more muscular brand of authoritarianism. 

And the December arrest in Canada of a senior executive from Huawei, China’s most important telecommunications company, has led to tit-for-tat retaliation from China.
Last month, the Chinese police detained two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, as officials in Beijing pressed Canada to free Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive who was held for extradition to the United States on fraud charges.
If Mr. Yang’s detention is prolonged, he could become another strain in Australia’s volatile relations with China. 

Australia’s economy has been buoyed by raw material exports to China, especially iron ore. 

But in recent years relations between the two countries have been troubled by Australian complaints of political interference from Beijing.
In August, Australia rejected potential participation by Huawei in developing the country’s 5G telephone network, a step that angered the Chinese government.
Mr. Yang, 53, a novelist and commentator who worked for the Chinese foreign ministry before moving to Australia and becoming a citizen in 2000, has spent the past two years with his family in New York, where he works as a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
In his writing, he has been critical of the Chinese government. 

But in recent years he has eschewed interviews with the news media and avoided outright opposition to the Communist Party.
In December, he retweeted one of his earlier articles about rule of law in China, which said: “I have faith in the future, but without today’s endeavors and sacrifices, the future will never come. For people like me, the goal, the dream is for the future to arrive earlier.”
Friends of his said they had told him that none of his calibrated caution mattered, and that his Australian citizenship would not act as a deterrent because the Chinese government sees anyone of Chinese descent as under the jurisdiction of the country’s Communist Party.
“The intention of his writing is clear — he wanted to educate people about democracy and universal values, and has influenced many young people,” said Weican Meng, a friend of Mr. Yang’s and the founder of Boxun News, a Chinese-language website in the United States.
“Before he went back to China, we had a meal together and a number of friends told him it’s not a good time to go,” added Mr. Meng, whose pen name is Wei Shi. 

“The situation in China right now is like during the Cultural Revolution: People are being punished for talking about very minor things.”
On Thursday, China’s minister of public security, Zhao Kezhi, told a meeting of police commanders in Beijing to guard against political subversion and attempts to foment “color revolution” against the government.
Mr. Yang’s family and friends believe Mr. Yang is being held in Beijing.
Feng Chongyi, a friend of the writer’s and an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney who was himself detained by the Chinese authorities in 2017, said he had spoken to Mr. Yang’s relatives. 

They told him that Mr. Yang had landed in Guangzhou early Friday morning, but that he did not make his planned connection to Shanghai, Mr. Feng said.
According to Mr. Feng, Mr. Yang went to China in part because his United States visa was to expire in a few months and he was waiting for a residence visa in Australia for his wife and stepdaughter. They had traveled with him to China on this trip.
According to Mr. Feng’s conversations with the writer’s relatives, Mr. Yang and his wife were interrogated for over 12 hours — probably at the airport in Guangzhou — before Mr. Yang’s wife was then allowed to go to Shanghai to drop off her daughter.
“At home in Shanghai,” Mr. Feng added, “she was in tears and asked relatives to not contact them again, but said she would post their whereabouts.”
The writer’s wife, Yuan Rui Juan, posted a picture on her Weibo page on Saturday from Beijing’s main airport, with the caption “It’s been a long time, my eyes are filled with tears.”
Mr. Feng said that family members were fearful and appeared to have been silenced about Mr. Yang’s status. 

“When asked about Yang’s situation, they say that they’re not in a position to discuss the matter,” he said. 

“And they implored us not to ask.”
Mr. Feng said he had been talking to security sources in China and believes that Mr. Yang could be charged with espionage, a broad charge in China that can include simply discussing matters that the government deems sensitive.
In Mr. Yang’s last blog post on his website, he praised President Trump for trying to close “loopholes” that Mr. Yang said had allowed other governments and migrants to Western countries to take advantage of these societies’ tolerance and hospitality.
Mr. Yang developed a large following as a blogger in China in the previous decade, and then an equally avid audience on WeChat, where he also advertised lectures and classes for which he charged a fee.
One of his last announcements on WeChat invited readers to sign up for his classes on studying and living in the United States, Australia and other Western countries, lessons that would also include his “thoughts on history, economics, culture and politics.”
Since Friday, his account has been silent.

Honeytrap: 'My Chinese wife is not involved'

Darwin Lord Mayor denies conflict of interest over China agreement

• Concern raised over Confucius Institute posing a danger to academic freedom in the Northern Territory
• Kon Vatskalis's Chinese wife's historic involvement in the institute has been raised as a conflict of interest
• Push for more Chinese money and sex is playing directly into the Chinese Government's long-term power strategy

By Matt Garrick, Rosa Ellen and Mitchell Abram

Chinese honeytrap: Kon Vatskalis and his new wife.

Darwin Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis has denied his decision to sign a "cooperation agreement" between Darwin City Council and a Chinese district was in any way related to his Chinese wife's historic links to the Chinese Government-run Confucius Institute.
An Australian academic raised concerns about the influence of the institute within Australian universities, including at the Charles Darwin University campus in Darwin's northern suburbs.
Associate Professor Feng Chongyi, of the University of Technology in Sydney, said "it is not appropriate to have that sort of operation on the campus in Australia" and any ties to government leaders could be seen as a risk to "political integrity".
Vatskalis late last month signed a "letter of intent on strengthening cooperation" between his council and the economic powerhouse of Yuexiu District, in Guangzhou, China, "for the purpose of expanding upon the traditional friendship between the two countries and further developing the exchanges and cooperation between the two cities".
The Australian newspaper reported on the agreement earlier this week and said Chinese "media reports cast [the agreement] as falling within Yuexiu's One Belt, One Road economic and cultural exchanges".
The One Belt, One Road Initiative has attracted concern from Australian Government officials because it was being used as a strategy to push China's long-term global influence.

Confucius Institute link 'a worry'
The Confucius Institute is an education organisation promoting Chinese language and culture run by the Chinese Communist Party, and designed as a soft power push to promote the policies of Xi Jinping's Government.
Vatskalis's Chinese wife Amy Yu-Vatskalis lectures in Mandarin at CDU, and was seconded to the university from Hanban, the Confucius Institute's Chinese headquarters, in 2012.
While not employed by the Confucius Institute at CDU, Yu-Vatskalis was understood to attend their speeches and events.
Professor Feng said having China-centric Confucius Institute campus within the Northern Territory's only university posed a risk to "academic freedom, freedom of free speech" and any links to government officials could "compromise political integrity".
He said Yu-Vatskalis's historic links to the Confucius Institute were a "worry" and "absolutely" posed a conflict of interest considering her husband's role as Darwin Lord Mayor.
"If the Government and the family or the relative would work with the Confucius Institute, it will compromise the political integrity of this country," Professor Feng said.
"It means you are part of the Chinese influence network."
Professor Feng said Confucius Institute was part of the Chinese Government's soft power strategy in the Asia Pacific region and promoted the oppressive regime and policies of Xi Jinping.
"If you look at the bigger picture, the overall big picture of the Chinese Government operation, to establish Confucius Institute is part of the so-called [People's Republic of China] United Front strategy, to create friendship between Chinese Government and Australian Government, [and] between the Australian public and the Chinese Government," Professor Feng said.
Chinese-owned Landbridge Group has a 99-year lease for Darwin Port. 

He also said he thought Vatskalis's dealings in China, and his public support for furthering relations with the Chinese was playing into the Chinese Government's long-term strategic plans.
"It will create an environment for the Chinese Government to have harder interest, such like the Darwin Port, and One Belt, One Road initiatives," he said.
The Darwin Port was leased to Chinese company Landbridge for 99 years in 2015, a move also seen by academics as a play into China's long-term strategic aims.

Council 'may not have understood'
In relation to the letter of intent signed in Yuexiu, Vatskalis said the City of Darwin "was not at pressure to sign anything about the Belt Road Initiative".
"It's an issue for the State Government and the Federal Government, I'm staying out of the politics with that," Vatskalis said.
Michael Shoebridge, the Director of Defence and Strategy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, also raised questions about the agreement between the Darwin City Council and the Chinese municipality.
He said he was concerned the symbolism of the initiative may not have been fully understood by Darwin's council.
Darwin City Council has signed up to a "letter of intent" to develop ties with a powerful district in China. 

"The BRI is a signature strategic, political, and economic initiative by the Chinese State as part of trying to establish strategic and economic dominance, that's what it's about," he told ABC Radio Darwin.
The deal was being used symbolically by the Chinese to apply pressure on Australia.
"To say, hey, a part of Australia is supporting BRI -- and they're doing that because they would love to drive a wedge between the different levels of government in Australia, to put pressure on the Federal Government to change its policy."

Beijing Is Holding Sino-Americans Hostage in China

Exit bans are a new tool in China’s global coercion campaign.

By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

In its ongoing campaign to extend its reach beyond its borders, the Chinese government has found a new form of leverage: Sino-Americans in China.
Last year, Beijing prevented several Sino-Americans from leaving China, including a pregnant woman, according to email correspondence obtained by The Daily Beast. 

The total number of so-called exit bans placed on Sino-Americans in China is unknown, but at least two dozen cases have occurred within the past two years, according to one analyst’s estimate.
Chinese authorities typically target U.S. citizens of Chinese heritage for exit bans, usually in connection with an investigation. 

Sometimes, Beijing uses Sino-Americans to try to coerce family members residing in the United States to return to China or to cooperate with Chinese authorities in investigations.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has championed a sweeping anti-corruption campaign with an international element, known as “Operation Fox Hunt,” aimed at pursuing Chinese citizens who have fled abroad after allegedly committing economic crimes. 

The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China and in the past has rarely cooperated with Chinese demands to repatriate Chinese citizens whom Beijing considers to be fugitives. 

Beijing has previously deployed undercover agents to the United States to coerce targets into returning to China, violating U.S. visa laws and prompting U.S. government indignation.
Now the People’s Republic seems to have found another lever of pressure. 

If one of Beijing’s targets living in the United States has relatives in China, Chinese authorities aren’t shy about applying pressure to those relatives, even if they are U.S. citizens. 

Exit bans are a “pretty new tool in the Chinese toolbox” for exerting such pressure, said John Kamm, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation, which works on sensitive human rights cases in China.
“That individual might be treated as a material witness,” said Kamm. 

“Or that individual might be in effect being held as a hostage in an effort to get the people back.”
The Trump administration has pushed back quietly but firmly against exit bans. 

For example, in the lead-up to the first U.S.-China Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity Dialogue, held in Washington, D.C., in October 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed for China to allow the free travel of three Sino-Americans who had been prevented from leaving China, including a pregnant woman, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“Both sides will continue to cooperate to prevent each country from becoming a safe haven for fugitives and will identify viable fugitive cases for cooperation,” reads the U.S.-China joint statement released on Oct. 6, after the dialogue concluded. 

“Both sides commit to take actions involving fugitives only on the basis of respect for each other’s sovereignty and laws.”
It’s a delicate balancing act for an administration that also wishes to deport Chinese citizens who are in the United States illegally. 

In the past, China has often refused to accept deportations, leaving the United States with a large number of Chinese asylum seekers with final deportation orders. 

In 2015, Beijing’s refusal to accept deportees began to coincide with its push to repatriate fugitives it claimed were guilty of corruption. 

The Obama administration signed a memorandum of understanding with China to help expedite the deportation process, but remained reluctant to agree to Chinese demands to extradite fugitives.
Human rights groups have warned that fugitives may face torture or death back in China, also expressing concerns that Beijing might use trumped-up corruption charges to get their hands on troublesome political dissidents abroad.
The Department of Justice did not respond to emailed questions. 

The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
The State Department declined to comment regarding the fate of those three U.S. citizens, citing privacy concerns, but a State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. government had not agreed to repatriate any Chinese citizen due to pressure from exit bans.
However, in January, the State Department warned Sino-Americans that going to China could be risky.

“Exit bans have been imposed to compel Sino-Americans to resolve business disputes, force settlement of court orders, or facilitate government investigations,” states the travel advisory for U.S. citizens traveling to China, particularly U.S.-China dual nationals. 

“Individuals not involved in legal proceedings or suspected of wrongdoing have also be subjected to lengthy exit bans in order to compel their family members or colleagues to cooperate with Chinese courts or investigators.”
It’s difficult to know exactly how many Sino-Americans have been affected. 

The State Department declined to confirm the number of cases, citing privacy concerns, but Kamm said he knows of about two dozen cases over the past year and half alone.
“One of the problems with exit bans is that you don’t know that there is an exit ban on you until you actually get to the airport,” said Kamm. 

“There may be people in the country who have exit bans on them and they don’t know it.”
Exit bans have also been applied to ethnic Chinese of other nationalities. 

Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai was subject to an exit ban after he was kidnapped from Thailand and taken into custody in mainland China. 

The Swedish government has objected to his treatment there. 

Australian academic Feng Chongyi was interrogated by security officials while visiting China in 2017 then prevented from leaving the country. 

He was permitted to return to Australia a week later amid international media attention.
China has frequently used exit bans on its own citizens, most notably in 2010, when it prevented Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and others from traveling to Norway for Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. 

Chinese authorities have also revoked the passports of many Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China’s northwest, as part of a massive repression campaign.
Exit bans violate United Nations human rights precepts. 

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” 

The State Department declined to say whether or not China’s actions violated U.S. or international law; the Justice Department did not respond to request for comment.
“A lot of people simply don’t know that they can be stopped for leaving China,” said Kamm.
It’s well-known that China blacklists people from entering, denying visas to academics and journalists who are critical of Beijing.
But, Kamm said, “even worse is if you get into the country and they won’t let you out.”

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 Peril

China’s meddling in Australia — and what the U.S. should learn from it
By John Pomfret

While American attention remains focused on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, Australia — perhaps the United States’ closest ally — is debating the designs that a different country altogether has on its political system, economy and public opinion. 

That country is China.
Starting last week, Fairfax Media (led by the Age in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald) and the “Four Corners” program of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. launched an investigation into Chinese attempts to buy influence in Australia. 

The reports, which are continuing, indicated that Chinese agents were monitoring Chinese students in Australia and applying pressure on their relatives back in China if they participated in demonstrations against China. 

Scholars of China were being spied on, too. 

When one Australian academic, Feng Chongyi, was detained by Chinese secret police during a trip to China in March, Chinese agents made it clear that they were watching not just him but also his wife and daughter in Sydney.
Donations from pro-Beijing businessmen and businesses to the political campaigns of Australian senators were also documented in the reports. 

Readers and viewers also learned that state-owned Chinese media companies or businessmen loyal to Beijing have taken over Australia’s once vibrant Chinese-language media. 

Chinese-owned businesses were instructed by the Chinese government to stop advertising in one of the few remaining independent Chinese-language newspapers. 

Pro-Chinese media outlets in Australia were also involved in organizing pro-Chinese demonstrations.
As Australia’s domestic spy chief Duncan Lewis warned Parliament, Chinese interference in Australia is occurring on “an unprecedented scale.” 

Lewis noted that if it continued unchecked, it had “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.”
Should Americans be concerned, too?
China’s influence in Australia is far more significant than it is in the United States. 

China is Australia’s most important trading partner, and Australia’s exports of iron ore and other commodities to China were a key reason that Australia dodged the global recession of 2008. 

About 1 out of 10 university students in Australia comes from China while in the United States it’s about 1 in 60. 

Australian campaign financing rules allow foreigners to donate to political campaigns, whereas foreigners are technically banned from donating in the United States. 

Today, China is the largest overseas birthplace for Australians after the United Kingdom and New Zealand. 

There are more than 900,000 Australian residents claiming Chinese origin; as a percentage of the population, that’s more than four times the number of Chinese in the United States.
Nonetheless, Australia’s challenge today is going to be America’s tomorrow. 

And how Australia manages its relationship with China could provide lessons for the United States as it, too, grapples with an increasingly complex relationship with a rising China.
Like Australia, the United States faces nettlesome questions when it comes to China. 

How does an open society manage its relationship with an authoritarian state of China’s reach that has no compunction about dispatching its police officers on tourist visas to harass, monitor and even arrest Chinese overseas? 

How does a nation founded on the free flow of ideas and capital deal with another nation intent on leveraging those freedoms for geopolitical, military and economic gain? 

How can the principle of reciprocity be introduced into a relationship with a state such as China that has gamed the international system for so long and with such success? 

We can debate whether China’s challenge to the United States is more serious than that of Russia. What is clear, however, is that Xi Jinping is only too happy to watch Americans fret over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives and not his.

James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, was in Australia last week as reports of China’s influence-peddling campaign emerged. 

In a speech on June 7, Clapper recited a list of concerns about Chinese espionage and foreign meddling, which made the challenge from Beijing seem anything but benign. 

“We, and you, I think, need to be very wary,” he said.

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.