Prioritizing short-term trade at the expense of Australia's long-term democratic values, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is attempting to woo Beijing. While welcoming Albanese's efforts, however, China senses a problem.
The free speech rights of the Australian media.
On Thursday, the Chinese Communist Party's Global Times propaganda newspaper decried the "unfriendly and unpleasant buzz" of Sky News Australia. Australia's equivalent of Fox News, the outlet adopts a conservative editorial stance and is skeptical of China's foreign policy. Beijing's specific lament centers on a recent Sky News Australia program that considered the prospect of war with China. In the context of Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitions and threats toward Taiwan, it should be noted that this is a highly legitimate topic for consideration.
The Global Times warned that Sky News Australia might complicate Albanese's adoption of more China-friendly policies. It added, "Beijing and Canberra now urgently need a better public opinion environment to support the momentum of improving their bilateral relations." The newspaper concluded that "the Australian public should be more vigilant against those unscrupulous local presses that only care about creating sensations."
Note the hectoring tone. Note how Beijing quite unapologetically believes Australian free speech is an affront. Yet this latest screed does not exist in a vacuum. Last July, then-Chinese foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi demanded that Albanese's government spread pro-China propaganda to Australians. These two circumstances underline Beijing's ideological conception of the media as a tool of the government rather than of the people.
The Communist Party further encapsulated that viewpoint, commending its domestic censorship record on Thursday. The Central Propaganda Department praised how it had "punished … commercial websites, internet organizations and public accounts that illegally reported news, cleaned up fake media, and punished organizations and media personnel that published news for profit." Evincing just how ludicrous the Communist Party's definition of "fake media" actually is, a separate party press release saluted Xi's COVID-19 policy as having "created a miracle in human history," it said.
Considering the corrupt immorality that defined Xi's "Zero COVID" policy and his forced abandonment of it only under public pressure, this whitewashing of history is patently absurd. Indeed, it is the political equivalent of a sudden-death sports match in which one team adopts total-defensive tactics before suddenly rushing to the side of the pitch and allowing the opposition to score.
Put another way, Australian free speech might not be the real problem here.