“Yellow Peril”? Australian Academic: “Branding the PRC as Our ‘Enemy’ is just Plain Crazy”

Will China turn Australia into a “puppet state”? Sensible people might scoff at such a notion. But late last year Clive Hamilton, a professor from Australia’s Charles Sturt University, wrote a book – Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State – detailing the infiltration of Chinese influence into Australia.

His hostile remarks on China do not represent the views of all Australians. An Australian scholar has rebutted the claims in Hamilton’s book.

On February 28th, Graham Richardson, an Australian academic, published an article in The Australian entitled Clive Hamilton is treating us as mugs, where he repudiated the author’s opinion and showed that the author was treating his fellow countrymen as “mugs and children”. “Branding the PRC as our ‘enemy’ is just plain crazy,” he said.

The following is a re-edited version of the article:

Clive Hamilton is treating us as mugs

Anyone who accuses the likes of Bob Carr and Paul Keating as being akin to Chinese agents of influence knows he is in for a fight. When he has form as an outrageous, outlandish and, worst of all, foolish attention seeker, he really should think better of it and keep his mouth shut and his pen in his desk drawer.

Keating’s sin is the fact that he chairs an Australian Chinese Business forum. Trying to facilitate more trade with our biggest trading partner seems to me to be in Australia’s best interest.

Carr’s attempts to urge Australia to have an independent foreign policy is also sensible. We do not have to slavishly follow the US on absolutely every aspect of foreign policy. When it comes to China any sensible Australian with an IQ above 50 knows that economically now and into the foreseeable future, Australia needs Chinese co-operation.

On page 22 of Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, Clive Hamilton writes that “China is using fake history to position itself to make a future claim over Australia”. The first time I heard that the yellow peril was sweeping down from China was when I was five. St Raphael’s primary school at South Hurstville in Sydney was run by the Sisters of Charity and Sister Annette warned the 2nd class that the Chinese were coming. I did not sleep for a week from fear at the forthcoming invasion. What the nuns could have me think when I was five does not stand up to a further 63 years’ experience. Australians can detect hysterical nonsense better than most. Hamilton treats us as mugs and children.

Eschewing all claims to empirical research, Hamilton’s Chinese/Australian “friends” have given him enough to assert that there are “more than 100,000 to 200,000 Chinese in Australia who are loyal to the PRC”.

When it comes to hypocrisy, Hamilton could give even our Prime Minister a run for his money. Let’s examine his views on democracy. He writes on page 213: “As I studied the views of the various ‘friends of China’ driving the debate in this country, one thing came as a shock to me — how little some value democracy”. This patriotic stance stirs the soul and frightens the appropriate forces. Its value, however is somewhat diminished by the fact that on his blog in 2007 he suggested that democracy might have to be suspended over climate change.

For the record I have not spoken to any Chinese government representative or diplomat in over a decade except for a lunch with the bloke running the Beijing Olympics.

The idea that we should run around like chooks with our heads cut off, branding the PRC as our “enemy” is just plain crazy. The good ship Australia should shove Hamilton out the back with the other irritating flotsam and jetsam which pollutes our thinking.

Source: The Australian

Editor: Cai Hairuo