Alan Kohler
China's spin offensive
China’s demented behaviour over Stern Hu and Rebiya Kadeer is starting to become quite disturbing.
You wonder, in fact, whether China’s communist system involves any central planning at all. Certainly Kevin Rudd seems to have more control over what’s going on within his government than Hu Jintao has over the sprawling, sycophantic bureaucracies that infest China.
China’s new assertiveness, described very well by Brookings Institution’s Cheng Li in our interview with him last month is becoming disorderly and hysterical.
This morning, China-based journalists are reporting that the Chinese government is now backing away from yesterday’s ludicrous claims that Rio Tinto’s spying cost China $US102 billion over six years.
These “backing away” reports are based on paraphrased quotes from unnamed Chinese officials, and on the fact that the website on which the article appeared, www.baomi.org, has been taken down and now merely carries the word “forbidden”.
Meanwhile the author of the “essay”, as it’s called, a middle-ranking official with the State Secrets Bureau in the Jiangsu Province named Jiang Ruqin, has virtually admitted he made it all up.
He told Bloomberg: “The figures I used were all from CCTV and other media outlets. They represent my own opinion. I just wanted to write the article because this situation’s impact is really big, it affects the country’s economic security. We cadres who protect state secrets must speak up.” Can we imagine an official with ASIO doing this?
But the Peoples’ Daily, China Daily and the Xinhua news agency are all still carrying stories this morning that treat Jiang Ruqin’s fantasies as official fact.
The current lead story on the website of the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, says: “China's state-secret watchdog has accused mining multinational Rio Tinto of engaging in commercial spying over six years, saying data on the company's computers showed the espionage came at a ‘huge loss to China'.”
Xinhua is also still quoting the figure of 700 billion yuan ($123 billion) in losses suffered by Chinese steel makers as a result of Rio’s spying as if it’s true, when a moment’s thought reveals that it makes no sense whatsoever. As Stephen Bartholomeusz pointed out yesterday, Rio’s total iron ore sales worldwide over the past six years was worth $US40.75 billion, or less than half what was supposed to have been skimmed.
The Peoples’ Daily and China Daily websites are also still reporting the Jiang Ruqin fiction as an official “state secrets watchdog report”.
And now a Hong Kong-based newspaper, Wen Wei Po, described as “sympathetic to Beijing”, quotes an “investigation insider” this morning as saying that Stern Hu owns two villas worth 100 million yuan ($17 million) each, funded from the proceeds of bribery.
Is it even possible to own $17 million villas in China? I don’t know.
And anyway, I thought Mr Hu was supposed to have been doing the bribing, not the other way around.
And then yesterday we have a “political counsellor” from the Chinese embassy in Canberra turning up at the National Press Club trying to bully them into pulling today’s planned address by Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.
“You must withdraw the invitation to Ms Kadeer,” The Australian reports the embassy official as firmly telling the NPC directors.
This comes after hysterical protests – both official and unofficial – about the showing of a film about Kadeer at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the festival’s website being hacked and deliberately brought down. Before that the Chinese government had previously tried to stop her getting an Australian visa.
Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is trying to appear calm in the face of all this demented bullying by our most important trading partner, saying it won’t affect relations between the two countries. But it must.
How can Rio Tinto’s sales effort in China be unaffected? Can BHP Billiton really just keep its head down and hope it all blows over? The storm is escalating, not blowing over.
Indeed, how can anyone confidently do business in China with the threat hanging over them of summary imprisonment for breaching vague and capricious laws governing state secrets?
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