(Image: Private Media)

This is the second in a two-part series about Mandarin-speaking voters in this election by Wanning Sun, a specialist in Chinese media and cultural studies from University of Technology Sydney. Read part one here.

Mention the Mandarin-speaking, first-generation migrants from the People’s Republic of China and WeChat in relation to the election and many will conjure up either fears about misinformation and fake news on WeChat or the likelihood of the Chinese government using WeChat to influence the outcome.

However, despite these common (but sometimes sorely misunderstood) angles, I have seen some promising signs that WeChat can be an effective tool for this community to become more engaged in Australia’s political process.

WeChat continues to feature prominently in the election for this community. At the last election in 2019, Bill Shorten and a few key Labor figures engaged with the Mandarin-speaking community by holding live WeChat forums. Nobody seems to be offering this sort of live forum this time. Carina Garland, Labor’s candidate for Chisholm, does maintain a WeChat feed that is regularly updated, and Jennifer Yang, who lost to Gladys Liu by a narrow margin last time, actively uses WeChat to help Garland communicate with Mandarin-speaking voters.

I have not seen any evidence of the Chinese government trying to persuade people to vote one way or another from what I see on my WeChat account, although Liberal supporters seem to regularly accuse Labor supporters of doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party. Even Chisholm’s independent candidate, Wayne Tseng, has made such insinuations, despite that when confronted he could not produce evidence or proof and had to delete his offending tweet.

And in terms of using WeChat to run a “smear-and-scare” campaign, Liberal supporters seem to have a strong track record judging from the last election as well as this one.

The most effective use of WeChat seems to be through WeChat Channels, a video app within WeChat. Zuwen Yuan, a Sydney migration agent and vocal advocate on behalf of the Mandarin-speaking community, runs a WeChat Channel called Yuanfluencers. Last week he uploaded a video featuring former Liberal politician Helen Sham-Ho, Australia’s first Chinese-born parliamentarian. In it Sham-Ho criticises the Coalition and the Liberal Party for running a strident anti-China agenda. Within three days, it had attracted 33,000 viewers. Similarly, another video on the same channel promoting Kingsley Liu, a candidate for the Australian Citizens Party, attracted almost 10,000 viewers within a day.

For those who exist on a regular diet of media narratives about the China threat and Chinese influence, the idea of WeChat functioning as a platform promoting democratic practices may be counter-intuitive. In reality, however, WeChat has proved to be hugely effective as a space to educate new migrants about Australia’s political process.

Based on the sorts of questions and comments that frequently arise, many new migrants from the PRC have joined these politically oriented WeChat groups to find out how the voting system works, the correct way to mark one’s preferences on the ballot paper, what the major political parties’ policies are — and to participate in fierce debate during campaigns.

In the absence of effective citizenship education resources from the government, WeChat has played a role in helping new migrants gain the political literacy they need. There has been a fair bit of “teaching” about the pros and cons of voting strategies. First-time voters can ask for help on how to vote and party faithfuls can advise like-minded voters about making effective voting choices.

For instance, in marginal seats such as Chisholm in Victoria and Reid in NSW, Labor supporters are advised to vote for Labor just to be safe, whereas in safe Labor seats, some individuals have said they would consider giving the Greens their first preference and putting Labor second, given that their vote would pass to Labor if the Greens did not garner enough first-preference votes to put them ahead of Labor.

Also, it is clear that both Liberal and Labor supporters have actively used WeChat to recruit and mobilise volunteers, organise community forums, and coordinate activities during this campaign.

Thanks to the efforts of some new-style leaders who are fluent in both Mandarin and English and who use Western social media platforms as well as WeChat, some content that was originally circulated on Twitter makes it into the WeChat space in no time. It only took an hour or so for the video of the debate on 2GB between Reid’s Liberal candidate Fiona Martin and Labor’s Sally Sitou — where Martin made a spectacular blunder by mistaking Sitou for the Vietnamese-born Tu Le — to appear on WeChat.

Similarly, issues that arise on WeChat concerning this cohort find their way into English-language media soon enough when they become controversial issues on WeChat.

Last month many WeChat users in Australia woke up to see an anonymous message in their feeds. It was written in Chinese and listed the names of a number of Labor supporters and Chinese-language news sites, claiming they had received foreign money to influence the outcome of the election, and that these people and news sites were under investigation by ASIO. This caught the attention of ABC journalists, whose investigation revealed that although no one had admitted to being the author of the message, Liberal Party supporters were the most prolific distributors of it.

WeChat remains a key battlefield, despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s trouble with it a few months ago. Interestingly, Liu seems to have shot herself in the foot by first announcing a boycott of WeChat in support of Morrison, but then in a community forum in Chisholm a few weeks ago denying she had ever boycotted WeChat and her decision not to use WeChat anymore was not for political reasons.

This is despite her declaration of a WeChat boycott remaining on her website. Liu was quizzed about it at the forum, and those attending largely found her answer unconvincing. She seemed to have come out of the event looking a bit worse for the experience.

Political scientists often tell us that people whose first language is not English, who were born overseas, and who come from a non-democratic background tend to have lower political knowledge and skills — apparently three strikes against the PRC cohort’s prospects for political engagement.

But this election seems to be providing some preliminary evidence that the digital era may be ameliorating some of these concerns given the level of engagement, information sharing and increasing political literacy I have witnessed across the WeChat groups in question.

And it is interesting that WeChat is playing such an important role, despite being a Chinese-owned platform that is regulated by the Chinese government.