When I represented universities, I often appeared at parliamentary inquiries. All were instructive, but there was one in late 2020 that taught me how entrenched anti-China prejudice is in Australia.
The occasion was a Senate inquiry into China and universities. It came amidst the swirling anti-China sentiment of the COVID-19 period and a campaign by The Australian. For months, the Murdoch broadsheet had been running article after article implying that China was stealing Australian intellectual property, infiltrating uni campuses, and that ‘foreign interference’ was being facilitated by lefty universities and lax laws.
Parliamentary inquiries are often a genuine discussion of legislative detail. I suspected this one might be more political blood sport.
Appearing before such inquiries was routine for me in those days, and I did the usual preparation, reminding myself of the two cardinal rules: keep your cool no matter what, and always tell the truth (you are under oath).
The senators asking most of the questions, from both the L-NP and ALP, were well-known anti-China hawks, and the questioning was unrelenting.
Towards the end, one senator, clearly frustrated that I was not supplying the details she wanted, grabbed one of the front-page ‘exposés’, and, shaking it at me, demanded to know how it had come to this? She went on to refer to the group of respected Chinese Australians pictured on the front page, as ‘these people’.
The disrespect for the scholars sat me back in my chair. I had never seen a parliamentarian so worked up, literally spitting with anger.
The next day it got worse. In another committee, a different senator demanded three witnesses, of Chinese heritage, “unequivocally condemn” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It made no sense, not least because they were already CCP critics. One of them, Osmond Chiu, later wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald: “It felt like a gotcha loyalty test, an attempt to goad me, reducing me to a foreigner who needed to show which side I was on.”
Both incidents revealed something I hadn’t fully appreciated: being of Chinese heritage made you guilty in some people’s eyes.
I now know that this kind of panic comes in peaks and waves in Australia, and these are but two examples. The China panic never disappears altogether: it just dies down, only to flare up again.
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Catriona Jackson is the Chief Executive and Editor of Pearls and Irritations.