How I got turned by China — at least according to the mainstream media

There are plenty of areas where our corporate media struggles to provide proper public interest journalism. It’s a kind of byproduct of large companies engaged in commercial activities unrelated to the public interest. One of the worst areas is national security and intelligence, where not merely an industry but an entire arm of government devotes considerable resources to peddling a self-serving narrative, backed by journalists who readily swallow its spin, and academics and thinktank “experts” who know there’s a good living to be had echoing and amplifying it.

The problem seems particularly acute when the nation’s best journalists fall into line with the security establishment. Nick McKenzie — in my mind, with Kate McClymont, the best journalist in the country — today offers a long recitation of the sinister activities of Chinese security services.

I found myself a bit player in this recitation because McKenzie, quoting a Canberra academic called Alex Joske, uses as an example of China’s “coercive powers and surveillance capabilities” a small Australian media delegation sent to China last year “as part of a long-standing exchange program where the group met with a Chinese journalist and foreign affairs analyst who Joske has identified as the most senior MSS officer in Canberra in the 1990s”.

I was part of that delegation, and I’m somewhat puzzled by McKenzie and Joske’s claim that we met only one security official while we were in China. I’d have thought the number of security officers, spies and assorted watchers and agents we encountered during our week-long visit would have run into the scores. I assumed our hotel rooms were bugged, whatever devices we had with us were targeted with spyware, that our movements when not accompanied by our hosts were carefully watched, that the genial and quite lovely people hosting us were providing detailed reports on us. Hell, I expected the cute hotel robot that brought medications to me when I was struck down with COVID-19 in Shanghai to be bristling with surveillance tech.

After all, we were the first group of Australian journalists allowed to come to China since before the pandemic and the collapse of Sino-Australian relations, and we were coming ahead of a visit by the prime minister, along with senior press gallery journalists.

What we’re supposed to be an example of in the eyes of McKenzie and this Joske character isn’t clear. Whether security agency official, Communist Party member, economic think-tanker or working journalist for a party newspaper, our interlocutors were invariably enlightening even when rigidly adhering to the government’s talking points. What line it pushed, how it responded to our questions, what it thought worth emphasis and what it preferred to move on from quickly — all were illuminating. Did it change our minds on China? I suspect not; certainly in my case I still think it’s a monstrous regime, albeit leavened now with some first-hand experience of China’s amazing infrastructure, its colossal electric vehicle program, how Xi Jinping thought is carefully instilled in party members and bureaucrats, and how disgusting the toilets are in the Beijing train terminal.

What’s missing from so much of the coverage of ASIO chief Mike Burgess’ lurid claims about the MP who sold out their country — coverage that has focused on who had been corrupted by China — is an awareness of how normalised it is that MPs work with foreign powers when those powers are deemed to be people like us: the United States, or Israel. But our interests do not always align with the interests of those countries, and corporations based in those countries are economic rivals to our own — corporations on behalf of which the intelligence services of those countries engage in espionage.

But a media too busy obsessing about the threat from China is happy to ignore a plainer and more obvious threat to our interests from a quite different direction.

Bernard Keane travelled to Beijing, Chongqing and Shanghai in 2023 as a guest of the All-China Journalists Association and the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre.