Former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s public pro-China’s PR campaign has proven one thing: he’s willing to save face for the CCP despite the obvious, he’s just a useful pawn in the CCP’s effort to achieve global dominance.
Keating is beginning to sound like the delusional uncle you’ve never wanted to hear at the dinner table. His remarks are yet another blow to Albo as the former Prime Minister is openly undermining his former party. While the Albanese government is in disarray when it comes to China, Keating is not the knight in shining armour he thinks he is.
On the 4th of March, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, in carefully crafted language, told the ASEAN Summit meeting that:
“We face the most confronting circumstances in decades. We face destabilising, provocative, and coercive actions, including unsafe conduct at sea and in the air and militarization of disputed features. We know that military power is expanding, but measures to constrain military conflict are not, and there are few concrete mechanisms for averting it.”
Wong’s words struck a nerve in Keating’s pro-Chinese mind. In a statement released the next day, Keating said, “The anti-China Australian strategic policy establishment was feeling some slippage in its mindless pro-American stance and decided some new China rattling was overdue.”
Keating took aim at ASIO boss Mike Burgess after it came to light that a former politician was working for a foreign state, which Australian newspapers claimed to reveal.
Of Burgess, he said, “The resident conjurer, Mike Burgess, who runs ASIO, gave us a week’s worth of spy mysteries—only for us to find via a leak to the [Sydney Morning] Herald and the Age that the mysterious state running the spying was, you guessed it, China.”
“It doesn’t take much to encourage Penny Wong, sporting her ‘deeply concerned’ frown, to rattle the China can—a can she gave a good shake to yesterday.”
The Albanese government should be criticized for its handling of China.
But the former Prime Minister is criticizing the Albanese government for criticizing China at all.
In reality, Albo’s been in tricky situations that made him look weak. For instance, a Chinese national was recently deported from Australia earlier this year after ASIO uncovered a plot to infiltrate Australian research institutions. Shortly after, Albanese met with Xin Ping in China when the two faced Ping remarked, ‘We are partners of mutual trust’. In public, it looked like a family reunion; in private, Albo must have been fuming. Xin Ping’s words came just after ASIO announced its deportation of a Chinese spy from Australia.
If that isn’t an erosion of Australian sovereignty, what is?
At the Five Eyes summit in October 2023, Burgess told reporters ,‘The Chinese government is engaged in the most sustained, scaled, and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history. It’s unacceptable. It’s unprecedented.”
On the 20th of this year, March In a meeting with Wan Yi, Foreign Minister Wong expressed her ‘shock’ reaction to the death penalty of Australian citizen Yang Hengjun. Hengjun was arrested by the Chinese government on ‘spying’ charges and sentenced to death.
Then, with open arms, the Chinese embraced Keating as the ‘face saving’ under lord. Keating heaped praise on the Chinese during his meeting with CCP Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the 21st of March. Keating was reported to have said, “China’s development and revitalization are unstoppable, China’s huge economic volume and vast space for development do not pose a threat to other countries and are conducive to regional peace and stability.”
It all sounds nice, and in Paul’s world, it’s true. But he’s wrong.
China poses a very serious threat to regional peace and stability. Nevertheless, Paul’s right about one thing. ‘New China rattling’ is long overdue, and the former prime minister is in need of basic history lessons. China’s actions on the economic,military, technological, and trade fronts are consistent with its political manifesto released three decades ago. The book Unrestricted Warfare, compiled by Chinese Generals in the 1990s, states that it must adopt a ‘war on all fronts’
The war on all fronts is exactly what the CCP has been pursuing.
Let’s look at the TikTok controversy. In 2023, the Australian government banned the Chinese created application on all government device. If China’s hegemony is not to be feared, as Keating insists, why would the government impose this rule? The reason is this, TikTok poses a significant security risk to the commonwealth’ tik tok is a Chinese spy device. Would Keating argue that eroding Australia’s sovereignty by allowing it to operate freely is in our regional interests and security interests?
And what about the Chinese spy rings? The CCP has undertaken a coordinated effort to infiltrate Western governments. Back in the 1990’s, ex Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin defected to Australia in fear of his life. He claimed then that the CCP had over 1000 active spy agents operating within Australia. He later testified before the U.S. Congress that ‘Australia and the U.S. are considered the bases of the Falun Gong overseas.’
What about China’s expansionist desires? In a highly controversial move, China entered into an economic and policing pact with the Solomon Islands, and the policing pact has been a source of concern for the Australian government. If tensions were to rise, the CCP already has established bases in the Solomon Islands, just 3,280km from Australia.
We can’t forget Australia’s Huawei ban in 2018. Amidst pressure from Beijing, Australia moved to ban the Chinese owned telecommunications giant Huawei, citing ‘security concerns.’ Australia wasn’t the only country to ban the Chinese telecommunications giant, either. Britain, France, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, and many others also followed suit.
Is it really plausible to believe that it’s all just some irrational resentment towards China?
In his naively childish efforts to lionize the Chinese, Keating forgets the yolk of CCP morality. It’s not a Western view of the world where human rights, equality before the law, individualism, and democratic justice exist, it’s based on a collectivist culture enmeshed over the past 4,000 years with Communist leanings uploaded into it in the past 75 years. It’s a a one party ,authoritarian regime that violently silences dissension and unabashedly attempts to re shape the global order by subterfuge and clandestine operations around the globe.
The former Prime Minister is quick to sing praises of the CCP, but he’s slow to remember that China’s aggressive actions are aggressive actions. Perhaps Keating’s opinion of China tells us that the CCP’s propaganda campaign centered on China being a benevolent force has actually worked on some in the West. They are not the magnanimous peacemakers they appear to be, and unfortunately for PR Paul, he’s embarrassed himself, his former Labour Party, and the Australian people.
