Rogue Nation

The Saga of a Sydney Academic Stuck in China Spotlights the Limits of Beijing’s Soft Power
By Charlie Campbell / Beijing

Feng Chongyi
Last week, Li Keqiang visited Australia. 

There he announced plans for joint mine, rail and port projects and removed the last restrictions on imports of Australian beef to China, an industry already worth $300 million annually to local ranchers. 

“It is time for China and Australia to enter into an era of free trade across the board, which means that we need to have free trade between our two countries in wider areas,” Li told reporters in the Australian capital, Canberra.
Li’s visit was the latest salvo in a concerted Chinese charm offensive in Australia, one that has taken on new impetus since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. 

In one of his first acts, Trump nixed U.S. involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade bloc, which the Australian government had lauded as bringing “tremendous” benefits for local exporters. 

When Trump spoke with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Jan. 28, the U.S. President said it was “the worst call by far” he’d made. 

The two leaders clashed over an agreement forged by the Obama Administration to accept 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center, which Trump deemed “the worst deal ever.”
The spat threatened to derail a strategic alliance that stretches back decades — including American-led wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — and push Canberra closer to Beijing. 

Already, China is Australia’s largest trading partner — two-way trade was $115 billion in 2014. Chinese students flock en masse to Australian universities, while Chinese consumers supped $400 million of Australian wine last year.
Still, fears of an Australian defection to China’s corner are misplaced for now, as illustrated by an incident that unfolded 4,600 miles away just hours after Li addressed reporters in Canberra. 

Feng Chongyi, a China-studies academic at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), was halted at Guangzhou International Airport attempting to board a flight back to Australia. 

He remains in Guangzhou in a "special situation," his lawyer Liu Hao tells TIME. 

No reason for the travel ban has been given.
Feng, who was born in China, is an Australian permanent resident though not a citizen, and reportedly entered China on a Chinese passport. 

Yet he was far from a dissident: he worked for UTS’s Australia-China Relations Institute, headed by former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, which has a reputation for unashamedly propagating a positive spin on the Australia-China relationship. 

Critics have even branded it the local “propaganda arm” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Feng's quasi detention stirred enough public alarm to prompt the shelving on Tuesday of a joint extradition treaty that had been on the books for 10 years and was finally due to be ratified by the Australian parliament. 

Most embarrassingly, the nixing came just hours after Li departed following his five-day visit. 

The incident stood to demonstrate that however closely entwined the two nations become economically, China’s poor human-rights record and repressive legal system will bridle how deep any alliance could ever be.
“Since the Trump election, China has gone on a bit of a charm offensive with Australia,” says Professor Nick Bisley, an Asia expert at Australia’s La Trobe University. 

“But it's far too early days to mark Australia out as a country that’s turning or even ripe for the turning.”
Australia’s wariness is partly prompted by China’s ham-fisted attempts of gaining domestic political leverage. 

In 2013, Chinese hackers stole the blueprints for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO) new $480 million headquarters. 

The building remained empty until very recently. 

In October, Labor Party Senator Sam Dastyari was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet after it emerged that a Chinese government-linked company had paid a private travel bill. 

The 33-year-old is known for being sympathetic to Beijing’s expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The Dastyari case prompted Australian intelligence services to map the flow of Chinese money and businessmen into Australia, augmenting demands for an end to foreign donations to political parties. There are also calls to ban Confucius Institutes from Australian universities. 

The Chinese government-funded cultural-promotion bodies have been accused of espionage and brazenly advancing Beijing’s political agenda.
“The China soft-power thing is taken very seriously by Australian security agencies,” says Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy. 

“And the realists in defense are very concerned about the South China Sea.”
The ideological gulf is good news for Washington. 

Speaking in Singapore earlier this month, Australian Minister Julie Bishop said that the "United States must play an even greater role as the indispensable strategic power in the Indo-Pacific ... While nondemocracies such as China can thrive when participating in the present system an essential pillar of our preferred order is democratic community." 

Still, deep economic ties between Australia and the U.S aggrandize the bedrock of shared values. Although China ranks top in Australia for trade, American investment dwarfs all competitors, standing at $660 billion in 2015. 

Unease at China’s underhand tactics is partly responsible. 

In April, the Australian government blocked the $283 million sale of the Kidman beef ranch — the world’s largest, roughly the size of Ireland — to Chinese investors as it was deemed "contrary to the national interest." 

The same reason was given for preventing a Chinese firm from buying a controlling stake in Australia’s largest electricity network in August.
“It’s hard to overstate how strong and deeply rooted the [U.S.-Australia] relationship is on both sides of the Pacific,” says Bisley. 

With China, he adds, “it’s a high-value but not a deep relationship.”

Rogue Nation

China Bars Professor at Australian University From Leaving

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Feng Chongyi, associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney

BEIJING — A Chinese-born professor at an Australian university who has often criticized Beijing’s crackdown on political dissent has been barred from leaving China and is being questioned by state security officers as a suspected threat to national security, his lawyer said on Sunday.
The confinement of Feng Chongyi, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, or U.T.S., unfolded over the weekend while Li Keqiang visited Australia to promote deeper trade and diplomatic ties. 

Professor Feng’s case could cloud those ties.
The lawyer, Chen Jinxue, said Professor Feng had not been arrested or formally charged.
The professor has been staying in a hotel in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, and has been repeatedly questioned by national security officers after being stopped by entry-exit checkpoint officials on Friday and Saturday from taking flights back to Australia, Mr. Chen said from Guangzhou, where he was accompanying Professor Feng.
“He’s been told he’s suspected of involvement in a threat to national security,” Mr. Chen said by telephone, adding that Professor Feng declined to comment.

“His movements inside China aren’t officially restricted, but national security authorities have questioned him a number of times about who he’s met and that kind of thing,” the lawyer added. “They’ve told him that he’ll have to stay around for at least a couple more days to answer their questions.”
Professor Feng has been researching Chinese human rights lawyers, who have been subjected to a withering crackdown and detentions since 2015, and that work may have caught the attention of security investigators, Mr. Chen said.
Li Keqiang ended a five-day visit to Australia on Sunday, and it was unclear whether the professor came up during his talks with Australian politicians. 

But that nation’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it could not demand to see Professor Feng because he is not an Australian citizen.
“The Australian Government is aware that a U.T.S. professor, who is an Australian permanent resident, has been prevented from leaving China,” the department said in an email. 

Under an agreement with China, the department said, “the Australian government is able to provide consular assistance only to Australian citizens who have entered China on their Australian passport.”
Professor Feng, 56, was born in southern China. 

His lawyer confirmed he has permanent residence in Australia and was not a citizen. 

Even so, the case has ignited demands that the Australian government do more to secure his quick release.
“We are urging the Australian government to intervene,” John Hu, a spokesman in Sydney for the Embracing Australian Values Alliance, which has sought to promote free speech and counter the Chinese government’s influence over the ethnic Chinese community in Australia.
“Right now the excuse for their inaction is that Chongyi Feng is only a permanent resident but not a citizen,” said Mr. Hu, who is a friend of Mr. Feng’s. 

“Feng has not breached the Chinese law — his doings were not even in China’s jurisdiction, and the Chinese government has no right to persecute him.”
The university has been in contact with Professor Feng and was helping his family, Greg Walsh, a university spokesman, said by email.
The professor is probably better known in Chinese intellectual circles than in Australia. 

A historian, he has long been involved in debates about China’s future, advocating a path of political liberalization.
He has also criticized the Chinese government’s increasing efforts to exert influence over ethnic Chinese in Australia. 

Last year, he spoke out against plans for concerts honoring Mao Zedong in Sydney Town Hall and Melbourne Town Hall.
“Australia is proud of its commitment to free speech, tolerance and cultural diversity,” he wrote. “However, should intolerance be tolerated? Should lies about Mao and promotion of Maoism, which denies freedom of speech, be allowed as a legitimate part of free speech?”
With its growing ethnic Chinese population and growing economic ties to China, Australia has experienced a succession of cases of residents or citizens being detained in China, creating tensions over their legal rights and access to Australian diplomats. 

In 2011, Yang Hengjun, a writer and former Chinese official who had migrated to Australia, was detained for days in Guangzhou by security officials.
Until the 1960s, Australia excluded Chinese migrants through the “White Australia” policy. 

In recent decades, the number of migrants from China has grown drastically, and by 2015, nearly 500,000 of Australia’s 24 million residents had been born in China.
The disappearance of those seen as acting against China’s interests has stirred concerns in other territories. 

A Taiwanese activist for human rights and democratic rights, Lee Ming-cheh, has been missing since last Sunday morning, when he boarded a flight from Taipei to Macau but never emerged from the arrivals gate. 

His friends and family fear he may have been detained by the Chinese authorities.
As Xi Jinping has clamped down on dissent, Professor Feng and other advocates of political relaxation have no longer been able to write for the domestic Chinese news media. 

But on overseas Chinese websites and in interviews with foreign journalists, he has sharply criticized Beijing’s clampdown.
“Since Xi Jinping came to office, he has not only failed to lead China forward in reform and opening up and constitutional government, he has made an historical U-turn,” he wrote last year.

Australia's Chinese Fifth Column

Australian universities the latest battleground in Chinese soft power offensive
By Hagar Cohen

Beijing collaborator Bob Carr of the Australia China Relations Institute.

In an exclusive interview, Australia's first ambassador to China has raised the alarm about China's influence in the higher education sector.
Stephen Fitzgerald singled out Bob Carr's Australia China Relations Institute for particular criticism, saying universities need clear firewalls between donations and research.
ACRI, part of the University of Technology Sydney, was established with a large donation from the Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo.
Mr Huang was the donor at the centre of the controversy surrounding Labor senator Sam Dastyari.
"I wouldn't have taken the funding," Mr Fitzgerald told Background Briefing.
"This is one of the really difficult issues about what is happening at the moment, because you don't want to say no to all Chinese money.
"That would be ridiculous, self defeating, but you have to put firewalls between the donation and the way it is spent, and you have to be certain about the origins of that money."

'No place' for Confucius institutes
As well as ACRI, hundreds of other language and culture centres have been established on campuses worldwide through confidential agreements between universities and the Chinese education ministry.
Mr Fitzgerald said he believed these centres, known as Confucius institutes, had no place in Australian higher education institutions.
"I just don't think they should be in universities," he said.
"Have them in Australia by all means; have them all over the country. I'd welcome them, but I don't think they should be in universities."
"There will be people who have been involved with these institutes who will say there has never been one instance of any attempt to influence what we teach and what we say.
"There will be others who might admit that there has been such an attempt."

Controversy over Sydney Uni plan
Background Briefing has revealed that at the University of Sydney, a confidential 2007 plan included a clause that would have seen the university's existing Chinese language program incorporated into a Confucius institute.
This draft agreement ended up in the hands of Professor Jocelyn Chey, the former Australian consul-general in Hong Kong and a visiting professor at the university's Department of Chinese Studies.
"I wasn't sure that the university authorities knew what they were letting themselves in for," she said.
"There's the question of academic freedom and the right of academics not just to teach but to research and publish in areas where they are not under the guidance or direction of anybody."
Professor Chey wrote a strongly worded letter to the vice chancellor outlining her concerns and saying the Confucius institute should be rejected, or the arrangement should be significantly modified to protect the integrity of the university.
"People who accept donations should be aware of the expectations and obligations that they're taking on with the finance," she said.
The university senate voted in favour of the Confucius Institute, but adopted some of the changes to the arrangement that were recommended by Professor Chey.
A University of Sydney spokesperson confirmed a proposal to establish a Confucius Institute at the University of Sydney was circulated to the senate in 2007.
Feedback from staff was considered, and it was confirmed that the university did not intend for existing university programs to be delivered by the Confucius Institute.
The spokesperson said these programs continue to be delivered by the Department of Chinese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures.