Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The communist government in Beijing is one of the world’s most opaque. In recent months its inscrutable mask has cracked slightly to reveal a regime debating its future. The award of the first Nobel Prize to China, the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, led to the expected recriminations from the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the arrest of Mr Liu’s wife.

Far more important, however, than the reaction of the 10 per cent of the Chinese communist iceberg above the water is the 90 per cent below the water. There are growing and public calls at the highest echelons of China for political reform.. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, according to Fairfax’s well-informed correspondent John Garnaut, has spoken of political reform seven times in the last 50 days. China’s popular Southern Weekly newspaper features Mr Wen on its front page saying the will of the people for political reform is irresistible. ‘I will not fall in spite of a strong wind and harsh rain and I will not yield to the last day of my life,’ said Mr Wen. His strongest pro-reform remarks were made on CNN a fortnight ago but they have been blacked out by the mainstream Chinese media, suggesting they were made without full leadership consensus. According to Du Doazhen, interviewed in the reformist Yang Huang Chu Qui, Wen has the backing of Hu Jintao himself. The Communist Party cadre Du claimed that Wen and Hu say their aim is to beat down the tiger blocking the road to political reform and jointly open the grand curtain of China’s reform.

Liu’s award of the Nobel Prize and the perestroika-like stirrings that I have referred to in the leadership in China show how foolish and short term are the accommodationist arguments made by Professor Hugh White. In a controversy ranging across Australian Quarterly, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Australian and the Australian Financial Review, I have agreed with Professor White that Australia has yet to come to grips with China’s return, as it should, to great power status. Yet his thesis that Australia and the US should accommodate rising Chinese power by abandoning criticisms of China’s democratic and human rights failings is made almost instantly foolish by the Liu Xiaobo Nobel award and by the struggle for freedom at the top levels of the Chinese Communist Party. According to Professor White:

America will have to deal with China as an equal … That means no more lecturing China about dissidents, Tibet or religious freedom … no more lecturing China about its failure to meet US expectations on matters such as Iran, Sudan and North Korea.

As I argued in the Australian Financial Review, this is not treating China as an equal; this is a deliberate surrender of the values that have made the US and Australia both free and prosperous.

Many in China agree with me. Only last week another open letter was signed by more than 100 Chinese scholars, activists and lawyers, strongly applauding Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize and citing Mr Wen’s recent comments in support of reform. ‘China should join the mainstream of civilised humanity by embracing universal values,’ said the open letter. ‘Such is the only route to becoming a “great nation” that is capable of playing a positive and responsible role on the world stage.’

Liu Xiaobo’s Charter 08, endorsed by 350 leading Chinese intellectuals, is modelled on Charter 77, which we all remember was founded by the great President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, and played an important role in the downfall of the one-party state in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. Whether Liu Xiaobo’s Charter 08 will be followed by a similar wave of democratisation in China is yet to be seen, but unfortunately it looks like some Australian academics and their narrow-minded business colleagues see profit as their only aim in China and they are the only ones ignoring these great moves for China to democratise. I congratulate, as do most Australians, Liu Xiaobo on his wonderful award of the Nobel Peace Prize and I congratulate the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, and all of those Chinese intellectuals and academics who strive for the same human rights and freedoms we enjoy here in Australia.