Drew Pavlou Address to the Oxford Union: Xi Jinping And The CCP Threaten Humanity
Full text of my speech to the Oxford Union and transcript from Q&A session!
Here’s a full clip of my speech with the text below for those who might prefer to read it! Watch Now.
Why Xi Jinping And The CCP Threaten Humanity
I’m a young guy from the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. I never set out to become an activist, much less an activist against the Chinese Communist Party.
I have no family relation to China - my Dad runs a humble fruit shop.
And yet the Chinese Communist Party have somehow convinced themselves that I am a threat to the regime, to the extent that I have been personally denounced by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a stooge of the Taiwanese and the CIA.
Indeed, I know a number of CCP supporters even wrote to the Chancellor of Oxford to demand that this speech be cancelled. I know because they forwarded their emails to me, I think as a failed attempt to play mind games. Some of it is truly bizarre, denouncing me as a ‘‘pedophile terrorist.’’ Fascinating prose, I congratulate them on their efforts. What this reflects is a truly deranged hatred of dissent on the part of the CCP. The harrassment I’ve receieved, even just as an Australian, shows their furious contempt for freedom of speech and expression. And this is the absolute core to my story.
It started out with one small campus protest, a fifteen-person sit-in against our campus Confucius Institute at the University of Queensland. I had never organized a protest before in my life - I accidentally rocked up late to my own rally because I slept in.
What was the response to this tiny, routine campus rally? They sent hundreds of Chinese government supporters to surround us and physically attack us. Men in masks, wearing earpieces, coordinating physical assaults on students, on Hong Kong democracy activists on campus. And rather than protect us, the University of Queensland responded by bringing in Australia’s top flight law firms to hunt, haunt and expel me so as to protect their crucial business ties with China.
I won’t bore you with my entire biography, our time here on this Earth is sparse and we have a long Question and Answer session ahead. But they have escalated their campaign against me in recent months, framing me for a fake bomb threat while I was peacefully protesting outside the Chinese Embassy in London.
I was arrested and detained incommunicado by the Metropolitan Police, refused access to lawyers, interrogated at 4 AM after just two hours sleep. Police showed me the fake email during my interrogation - thankfully, they signed off the bomb threat with a nice ‘’regards, Drew Pavlou.’’ Very nice, very polite. Thank you Metropolitan Police for keeping the world safe.
Absurdly and pitifully for the incompentent officers at Met Police, I am still under investigation, facing charges that can carry a seven year prison sentence. The situation only got more farcical when they extended the fake bomb threat email campaign to target my family members. They targeted my younger brother Billy, a college athlete in America. They saw him on my social media and sent in threats against American airlines using a fake ProtonMail account in his name. Something about ‘‘freeing his older brother from the clutches of the Chinese Communist Party.’’ Obviously, my family were terrified, and we spent long hours in contact with police over this. And yet the Met Police still won’t drop the possibility of charging me despite all the overwhelming evidence showing I am being targeted as retribution for my criticism of the Chinese government. It is lunacy, the abuse of the British legal system against critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
And it is important to emphasize here: What I face is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to what Chinese, Uyghur, Tibetan and Hong Konger dissidents face across the world. You heard how they targeted my family. These are gangster tactics, Mafia tactics they use against dissidents all the time.
I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have a Uyghur-Australian friend we will call Michael. Chinese police in Xinjiang called Michael in the dead of the night. Over a video call, they showed Michael his Uyghur mother in a police station. The instructions were simple: if Michael wanted his Mum to remain safe, Michael was to tell Chinese police where he studied, where he worked, where his Uyghur-Australian wife worked, where his toddler went to pre-school.
They wanted his passport, address, and car registration details. Michael recorded this and showed it to me and I have the footage. He went to the Australian police but what can they do? He goes to work every day terrified that he will come home to see his family gone. This is happening right now in Australia, to countless innocents.
Some of the stories involving Australian families are similarly heartbreaking. I recently spoke to a young 27 year old Melbourne born nurse by the name of Mehray Mezensof. Five years ago, she married a handsome young man by the name of Mirzat Taher. It was love at first sight - ‘‘From that moment when I first spoke to him, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him,’’ she told the ABC. They were two days away from booking a flight home to Australia, where Mirzat is a permanent resident, when Chinese police took him away. They sentenced him to 25 years in prison for alleged "separatism.’’
"I remember just sitting and crying and shaking my head," Mehray said. A young couple ripped apart at the very beginning of their marriage, despite having committed no crime.
This is the type of intimidation and terror the Chinese regime wields against ordinary people every day. They respect no borders, no boundaries. Their reach is global and their reach is strong. Their tentacles reach everywhere.
The Chinese Communist Party is exporting repression abroad, plain and simple. Just last week, Chinese Consulate officials in Manchester dragged Hong Konger protesters onto the grounds of the Chinese Consulate and bashed them up. They were rescued only thanks to the quick intervention of police. What would have happened had the police not been there?
Under Xi Jinping’s Operation Fox Hunt, thousands of Chinese dissidents and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party have been pressured and coerced into returning to China to face arbitrary detention and torture. FBI director Christopher Wray described a typical tactic: targets are offered a choice between suicide and returning to China. If one refuses, family members are arrested and held as leverage. This is the terror the Chinese Communist Party exports abroad every day.
There will be people in this crowd here at Oxford University fearful of being photographed attending this speech. Back home in Australia, we’ve seen the family members of dozens of Chinese university students targeted because of the thoughts and opinions their children express on campus half a world away. I personally know two Chinese students studying in Australia who saw their parents visited by Chinese security officials within 24 hours of them expressing criticism of the Chinese Communist Party in class.
I note that Oxford University has asked students with family members in China to submit their scholarly work anonymously to avoid retribution and retaliation from state officials. This is happening right here, at one of the great universities of the world. Students fear for their safety and it is little wonder why when you look to Jesus College in Cambridge accepting huge donations from Chinese state backed companies and agencies tied to the Chinese state. Professor Peter Nolan CBE, Director of Jesus College Cambridge’s China Centre, told the world that China’s ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims was unsuitable for debate on campus as criticising an ongoing genocide would not ‘’foster mutual understanding.’’
It should go without saying, but China is a totalitarian, fascist state. They will not rest until every inch of the Earth is safe for their brutal regime, until each and every last one of us is silenced. This is the nature of their rule.
Sadly too many compromised academics like Peter Nolan refuse to recognise this basic fact because their careers and livelihoods depend on obfuscating it. Why is it that the young protesters of Hong Kong could see the truth back in 2019? These young protestors warned the world and they paid the price. They were crushed ruthlessly. The repression was brutal and touched young and old, radical and moderate alike. Take the case of terminally ill 75-year old activist, Koo Sze-yiu, sentenced under sedition laws to die in prison for planning a protest in Hong Kong.
Tell the Hong Kongers, Peter, about the importance of ‘‘fostering mutual understanding’’ with a regime that sentences terminally ill cancer patients to die in prison for daring to hold a protest that would have been legal just a few years ago. Better yet, tell the British barristers working for the political prisoner Jimmy Lai about the importance of fostering mutual understanding with the same regime that threatens to prosecute them for defending him.
Tell the Uyghurs about the importance of fostering mutual understanding as uncles and aunts and fathers and mothers are ripped away from their families and taken to concentration camps. The Chinese government has pushed to cut Uyghur birth rates through forced sterilizations and transferred orphaned Uyghur children to colonial style boarding schools in which their language and culture are criminalized. Brave survivors of the camps have talked of the Chinese government using rape as a weapon of war against Uyghur women.
So how dare Peter Nolan try and minimise these atrocities with facile talk of mutual understanding, as though the victims of ongoing genocide must empathise and understand the terrorist state persecuting them.
Tell the Tibetans about the importance of fostering mutual understanding, Peter. Some 160 Tibetan monks, nuns and ordinary people have burnt themselves alive in protest against Chinese Communist Party rule over the past decade. How soul crushing can things be to prompt hundreds of people to burn themselves alive in silent protest?
Does Peter Nolan know more about life under Chinese Communist Party rule than these Tibetans who feel so hopeless as to destroy their bodies in the most agonizing and painful ways imaginable?
The CCP is a uniquely paranoid, powerful, blood drenched organization. It is more akin to a transnational organized crime network than a political party. It is uniquely potent in its influence efforts across our democracy. And as a totalitarian state, even the slightest hint of criticism constitutes a direct threat to the state and the power of the ruling party. This is why criticism cannot be tolerated, at home or abroad.
I encourage people to read John Garnaut’s speech, ‘’Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China.’’ He simply takes Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party at their word. He listens to them when they speak. And Xi openly speaks of writers, thinkers and artists as ‘’engineers of the human soul.’’ For him, everything must be subordinated to political ends, ‘’the totalitarian project of creating unity of language, knowledge, thought and behavior in pursuit of a utopian destination.’’ Knowing this, is it any wonder why they export their repression abroad, why diplomats at the Manchester Chinese Consulate drag Hong Konger protesters onto their grounds to assault them?
As early as 2013, Xi Jinping issued a now infamous list of political instructions to cadres - Document No. 9 called on officials to wage ‘‘intense struggle’’ against so-called ‘‘false trends’’ including the promotion of Western constitutional democracy, universal human rights, civil society and historical nihilism, which is defined as an effort to undermine party history by telling the truth of Mao’s brutal rule that killed tens of millions of innocent Chinese.
John Garnaut explains the Chinese Communist Party’s position succinctly: ‘‘The Western conspiracy to infiltrate, subvert and overthrow the People’s Party is not contingent on what any particular Western country thinks or does. It is an equation, a mathematical identity: the CCP exists and therefore it is under attack. No amount of accommodation and reassurance can ever be enough - it can only ever be a tactic, a ruse.’’
Heed those words: no amount of accomodation and reassurance can ever be enough.
The Party defines itself in existential struggle against the concept of democracy and human rights. It will never see itself as safe until these values are wiped clear from the face of the Earth.
This is the reality of the Chinese Communist Party. There can be no compromise or appeasement because the Chinese Communist Party has seen itself as at war with us since at least the brutal slaughter at Tiananmen in 1989.
We know that they want to control our media. The Chinese government levied trade sanctions on Australia and issued my country with demands to shut down independent think tanks and media outlets critical of the Chinese government if we wanted to restore business ties. They want to control our publishing. Top publishing houses in Australia pulled a book by Professor Clive Hamilton on CCP interference because they feared Chinese government retaliation.
They want to control our universities - Chinese state media instructed the University of Queensland to expel me as a student for protesting against the fact that our campus Confucius Institute funded courses that pushed Chinese government propaganda lines that Uyghurs are ‘’overrepresented in terror statistics.’’ This is real, this is happening on Australian university campuses.
We are talking about an extremely powerful totalitarian government wedded to hardline Stalinist ideology, a government open about its intentions for dominance. Their stock charge is that their human rights critics are ‘’anti-China’’ while they themselves brutalize the Chinese people and steal from them on a tremendous scale.
Heed the words of Chinese dissident intellectual Xu Zhangrun: ‘‘How can the Mountains and Rivers only be of one color—red? China belongs to all 1.4 billion of its inhabitants and no one political party or ruling clique can claim a monopoly.’’1 China belongs to the Chinese people, not to the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping and his corrupt underlings.
It is high time that those in the democratic world recognise this, and recognise that the Chinese Communist Party is not the legitimate ruler of China. What will it take for people to wake up? Xi Jinping is not an aberration or a deviation from the norm.
We hear that argument trotted out by the appeasers and apologists all the time. They say China was on the path to Reform and Opening, and China only changed because the man at the top changed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, Alex Joske’s recent book ‘‘Spies and Lies: How China's Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World’’ shows how Chinese intelligence officers deliberately set out to deceive Western politicians and businessmen with false talk of Reform and Opening Up.
The reality is this: the Chinese Communist Party’s elite families selected Xi as a consensus candidate. He was the Party’s backlash to the threat of decay and loss of control. He has now ripped away the veil of legality, progress and prosperity, he has now ripped off the mask to show us the frightful beast that lurks beneath the false shiny veneer they hope to present to the world: a brutal dictatorship that operates on the Führerprinzip. A brutal dictatorship with dreams of empire and total control.
Trade will not democratize China. We have tested that theory to destruction. It was a convenient lie to excuse Apple, Nike, all the major corporations and businessmen who wanted to make money in China, a country where independent trade unions are banned and labor organizers disappeared.
Every day, we have the Henry Kissinger’s of the world calling for rapprochement, men responsible for genocide, men with blood on their hands themselves. Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, had his firm Frontier Services Group, a private paramilitary company, open a training center in Xinjiang, ground zero for the Uyghur Genocide. His firm trained private anti-terrorism personnel in China.
My University, UQ, saw a Professor, Heng Tao Shen, use university resources and millions in Australian Research Council grants to develop AI surveillance technology that he then sold to the Chinese government for use against Uyghurs. He aided the Uyghur Genocide directly with Australian taxpayer funds. Did anybody think about intervening or stopping him at any point? No. The truth is that we are deeply enmeshed in these horrors, deeply enmeshed and complicit out of greed. There was a pact written in blood between Western economic elites and CCP power elites and this meant we helped strengthen the hand of the regime.
It also means we helped the Party-state loot China, bringing about mass immiseration. We must not forget that China remains one of the most unequal societies on Earth under the CCP, a country where forced labor remains rife while the children of Party officials drive Maseratis and Ferraris.
Dispel the false propaganda that the CCP lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. The Chinese people lifted themselves out of poverty when the Party briefly took the boot from their neck. Now the boot comes down again.
The true statistics are horrible and prove that the Chinese people are the biggest victims of the Chinese Communist Party. Read the results of Scott Rozelle’s thirty years of fieldwork in the Chinese countryside as summarized in his book ‘’Invisible China.’’2 More than 70 percent of Chinese children have rural hukou status. Statistics found in Rozelle’s research are staggering and heartbreaking.
Rozzelle’s research team found that over half of rural babies are undernourished. This in a nation that boasts one of the highest numbers of billionaires in the world. More than half of rural toddlers faced permanent developmental delays that will unalterably scar them for life while 40 percent of schoolchildren in rural communities in southern China attend school every day with intestinal worms quietly sapping their energy.
China’s trade surplus is set to hit $1 trillion this year, so tell us, where is the money going, where is the wealth flowing? According to Rozelle’s book Invisible China, more than 30 percent of rural students have vision problems but do not have glasses. They can’t see the whiteboard in school. Can anybody tell me how many billions the Chinese government spends each year on surveillance and censorship and repression to buttress their rule while twenty million Chinese children in the rural countryside go without glasses at school? These innocent kids are just as deserving of education and a life of dignity as anybody else. But the Chinese regime robs them of their future.
Chinese economic development is artificially stunted by the inequality and neglect inherent to Chinese Communist Party rule. And Xi and the Party cultivate blood and soil Han race nationalism to try distract from their blatant corruption and thievery from the Chinese people. It is no coincidence that Xi’s in house philosopher Wang Huning, one of the most powerful men in Xi’s China, relies heavily upon the thought of Nazi crown jurist Carl Schmitt. We see a red-brown fascism emerging, just as we saw under Stalin in the USSR during the days of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Countless local minorities, cultures and languages are subsumed by the Han imperial project. N.S. Lyons cites Xi Jinping’s calls to imprint Chinese national identity ‘‘deep in the soul of minorities.’’3 This is a form of fascism. And it is the strategy of an empire in decay, total decay.
It is for this reason that Xi Jinping’s totalitarian project is fragile. So fragile that even a small banner denouncing Xi could recently send shockwaves across the entire world. People have begun to speak up in China and so Xi will not succeed in totally remaking Chinese society with his ‘‘engineers of the soul’’ and he will not succeed in terrorizing Taiwan into submission and subjecting millions of Taiwanese to re-education camps, as the Chinese Ambassadors to France and Australia recently suggested.
I know former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating and many members of the Great Appeasement Brigade, they don’t seem to care if Taiwan is subjugated and millions of Taiwanese civillians are subjected to concentration camps for ‘‘re-education.’’ The miserable ghoul Keating, this slithering snake, may have been captured by the Chinese Communist Party long ago, sitting as he does on the board of Chinese development banks. He spews out Chinese MFA approved talking points and character assessments every day of the week. But the democratic world has already begun to leave these dessicated fossils behind. We will stand beside Taiwan and if necessary we will fight alongside them to preserve their independence and freedom. Millions of us are ready. Xi has mobilised us.
Xi will not succeed in eradicating Catholicism, Christianity, Islam from China, nor will he succeed in eradicating Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan language and identity. He will not be successful in his genocidal attempts to eradicate Uyghurs from the face of the Earth. Pride inevitably goeth before the fall and Xi and the Party have locked themselves into a path of confrontation with almost the entire world. They will not succeed, we simply have no option but to oppose them.
The great scholar Leszek Kołakowski described totalitarianism very simply: ‘’Totalitarianism, in its perfect form, is an extraordinary form of slavery without masters. It converts all people into slaves and thereby bears certain egalitarian marks.’’ This is true even of Xi. I direct some of my final words to him.
Xi, you are at once all powerful and yet a slave to the very system that so brutalised you and your family. Kołakowski said that the ‘’unattainable ideal of the totalitarian system was a situation where all people were at the same time inmates of concentration camps and secret police agents.’’ Xi, you grew up under the shadow of labour camps and mass torture and you rose to impose these horrors on an even greater scale. The irony is that you grew up within the walls of this horrid system and now you are the prison warden and its fiercest guard.
You are an icy man, a man who would grow up to dedicate your entire life to the same Party that tortured you and your family as a boy. Born to a leading Party revolutionary, your family fell out of favor during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Red Guards subjected your father to public humiliation, hauling him onto platforms, shining lights in his eyes and shouting in his ears until he fainted. You say you feared for your life in this period. Red Guards captured you when you were just 14 and told you that you had just five minutes to live. They subjected you to Struggle Sessions and forced your own mother to participate, shouting slogans denouncing you as her son. They kidnapped and imprisoned you. Running away one night from a detention center, you showed up shivering at your own mother’s door. ‘’I’m hungry,’’ you told her. And your own mother turned you away and reported you to the authorities. You cried and ran out into the night before being recaptured.
The inhumanity and brutality of that is difficult to contemplate, even for your hardened opponents and implacable enemies, like me. They drove your own half-siser to suicide - you would say this was one of the few times in your life where you cried. These are horrors I would not wish on my worst enemy. But you grew up to embody them and inflict them on others. Power rotted away your soul and you are deluded to think you will not fall again. You will fail and fall, no matter how long it takes, you will fail and fall again. Perhaps to another Xi that lurks in the wings. Because this is simply the nature of the Party and regime.
I will leave you now with the simple cry of a fallen hero, a noble doctor your men tried to censor and silence, Dr Li Wenliang: ‘’A healthy society should not have just one voice!’’ And I will echo the cry of the heroic Beijing Banner Man, Peng Lifa: ‘’Dignity not lies; Reform not cultural revolution; Votes not leaders; Be citizens not slaves - Students, workers, strike and depose the despotic traitor Xi Jinping. Arise, Ye who refuse to be slaves! Against dictatorship! Save China!’’
I hope and pray that the Chinese people will soon rise up and take what is rightfully theirs: democracy, freedom, justice, dignity. Not the false pride and hollow dignity of empire and imperial rule, which we in the West once imposed on China and much of the world, unfairly, unjustly, to our lasting shame and discredit. Not the false pride promoted by the fascists and the reactionary scoundrels of our day who dream of a world reduced to a desert of hate, violence and lies.4 A world crushed beneath the jackboot and the tread of the tank. A world where one’s dignity depends solely on the knowledge that there are those who subsist on lower strata, their humanity abused and denied. No, I hope that the Chinese people and the world will know the pride and dignity of democratic self-rule, the pride and dignity that comes with the establishment of a just society that cares for the weak and shelters the vulnerable. A good and just society that protects, promotes and values the dignity of each and every person. This is my hope for China and for the world at large. This is the world we can create together.
Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic with the words: ‘Zhongguo renmin zhanqilai’ – the Chinese people have stood up.’’ It was a lie and he knew it was a lie. He said this knowing he and his regime would simply plunge the Chinese people into new forms of slavery. I look forward to a world in which the Chinese people throw off the shackles of tyranny and take back their freedom. Then well may we say, Zhongguo renmin zhangqilai - The Chinese people have stood up. May that day come soon, and may it also come in Iran and Russia, Belarus and Myanmar, everywhere humanity is crushed in the night. May that day come. Even here in the West where our democracies increasingly fray under the groan of plutocratic rule and authoritarianism. Let the cry ring out everywhere. Here, the people have stood up! Humanity will be all the better for it. Thank you.
Questions and Answers
Oxford Union VP: So the first question I wanted to ask you is that, at least in my inbox, I didn’t actually receive a bomb threat for this event, which is a surprise. Are we not important enough?
Drew: Look, I was actually quite concerned that there would be a bomb threat against this event because I’ve faced dozens of these fake bomb threats following my return to Australia after my ordeal in London. They’re still using ProtonMail and it’s a farce. We’ve had to go to the Australian Federal Police and ProtonMail has now suspended new account creations in my name as well as the names of my brother, father, mother and extended family members. And since then, there has finally been a stop to the fake bomb threats. There have been maybe ten or so since I got back to Australia. And shockingly, they even escalated to the point where they sent child exploitation material to the office of the Australian eSafety Commissioner using these fake ProtonMail accounts set up in my name. There have been maybe five or so of these fake Drew Pavlou ProtonMail accounts and it took a long time to get ProtonMail to finally shut down and suspend these accounts. As I said, we’ve gone to the Australian Federal Police and I hope there’s an investigation into this because they are committing horrible criminal offences here. And look, it’s just a shocking example of the fact that the Chinese Communist Party and their proxies will go after anyone at any time. It’s pretty crazy that they would go after me because when I started - I think I tried to touch on this in my speech - I was not a professional activist, and I never set out to be involved in this life at all. I was just a random 20 year old dude whose Dad ran a fruit shop. Suddenly they were going after me, I even had the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denouncing me. Why did they care about some little 20 year old student activist holding ten person protests half way across the world? Why would a ‘superpower’ concern itself with something so petty? They just cannot broach criticism from anywhere, ever. Something about it just drives them mad, drives them insane. To the point where they are now sending fake bomb threats in the name of my brother against airlines in America. We know how seriously American authorities take terrorism. I was worried that he was going to get the FBI knocking down his door. I wouldn’t wish this ordeal on my worst enemy. It reveals something about the nature of the CCP that they and their proxies would go to these lengths against young student activists overseas. It really does.
Oxford Union VP: Well, thank you for sharing that about your experiences and I believe it’s a good thing that we can offer a platform for these kinds of events at the Union so that we can hear perspectives that sometimes do get marginalised. I want to spend a little bit of time now thinking about the Chinese political system. Xi Jinping’s just been returned for, basically, an unprecedented third term. Do you think this is a significant moment in Chinese politics? Could this change their foreign policy, is this some sort of tipping point in that regard?
Drew: Oh, absolutely. I mean, Andreas Fulda, a German China expert at the University of Nottingham, he’s described this as the new era of Führer rule in China and I think he’s absolutely right. This will be an era of genocide, imperialism and foreign agression. This is what we’re going to be facing in the coming years ahead. I think they have locked themselves into this course and I don’t know whether there is anything we can do short of simply decoupling, boycotting, divesting, sanctioning, extricating ourselves from supply chains in China. Xi has now assumed the power of an emperor for life and it does not seem like he can be toppled internally - he’s purged all his main rivals. I think the public humiliation of Hu Jintao, the paramount leader of China for ten years prior to Xi - the public humiliation of him at the recent CCP summit in full view of foreign journalists and the world at large - it is very indicative of the fact that Xi now has absolute, total power.
For many years, people would speak of how the party elders would hopefully restrain Xi. All these experts claimed that party elders were ‘grumbling’ about Xi’s overturning of norms. Well now you have Hu Jintao led out, publicly humiliated before the entire world. The official line is simple: ‘‘Oh, he was sick.’’ Well there was a Spanish newspaper that took photos just prior to the incident and you can see Xi make an order to porters to have Hu Jintao dragged out after he tried to open from a folder of documents placed in front of him. He very clearly didn’t want to leave and he resisted all the way. I think the scariest part is this: You can see all these men on the Politburo, men who were mentored by Hu Jintao, promoted to positions of vast power and influence under him, they were his colleagues for years. And yet these men would not even dare to meet his eyes as Hu Jintao was dragged out. They all stared glassy eyed ahead. And something about that is very terrifying and menacing. Has Xi managed to terrify and cow even these men at the very top? Hu Jintao was no angel, he was referred to as the ‘‘Butcher of Lhasa’’ by the Tibetans. But to have this former paramount leader of China so publicly humilated before his colleagues and the entire world, it’s indicative of the fact that we’ve come to an era in China where vast power is once again concentrated in the hands of just one man - The Führerprinzip. Xi really is ruling China as a Führer.
And I truly believe this is a fascist government. You can just see it in the appeals to Han racial nationalism. I mentioned in my speech how Xi speaks of ‘‘implanting the Chinese national ideal directly into the hearts of the minority groups.’’ Think of Xi’s recent quote: ‘‘Anyone who dares try to split up China will have their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel.’’ He delivered this speech to a huge crowd of seventy thousand people and that line was met with this vast roar of approval. This is Hitler-esque, this is fascist language and imagery coming out of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. And anybody who thinks that we’re still in ordinary times here is just completely deluding themselves. Andrew ‘‘Twiggy’’ Forrest, one of Australia’s top mining billionaires, he gave an interview to the Australian Financial Review a few months ago where he said: ‘‘Look, I still trust the competence of Chinese economic planners.’’ But we have a Führer in power now in China. How can you delude yourself to such an extent? I cannot understand it, how Twiggy Forrest can say that he trusts the competence of Chinese economic planners when the entire system is visibly being driven into ruin under this reign of terror. Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, he did a doctorate on Xi Jinping’s world view and ideology here at Jesus College in Oxford. He describes Xi’s current rule as a ‘‘reign of terror.’’ So for Andrew Forrest to say that he still trusts the competence of Chinese economic planners, all I can say is, good luck to you mate. If you want to tie your business and your future wealth to the competence of economic planners in Xi Jinping’s era of Führer rule, good luck to you, because you’re going to need it. That’s all I would have to say.
Oxford Union VP: And just following up, going to what you think we should be doing against the Chinese government. I wanted to know how you think we should respond to this consolidation of power? I suppose one of the key debates is whether our activism should be channelled towards democratic governments to try and pressure the Chinese government directly? Or should our activism actually be more directed at the Chinese government itself? Where would you draw that line? Where should the pressure be aimed?
Drew: Look, I think you need to aim pressure at both. Clearly, the Chinese Communist Party does not like being publicly humiliated when we expose their crimes across the entire world. They try to hide evidence of the Uyghur Genocide as they don’t want their crimes to be brought to the forefront of world attention. They hate the fact that we can bring it to the forefront of world attention. That’s why they try bribe and bully developing countries at the United Nations. They try and twist their arms into voting with them to say that everything’s fine in Xinjiang. China simply hates when its crimes are exposed - and let me be clear, I’m referring to the Chinese Communist Party here, we always have to make a very clear distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people themselves who are often the primary victims of the Chinese Communist Party and their brutal rule. I just want to the dignity of ordinary Chinese people to be recognised because I believe in human rights for all people everywhere, regardless of where the border stops. I’m not going to stop believing that the value of a human life is precious just simply because a person is born overseas. So I think we have to put as much pressure as we can on the Chinese government and our governments and the businesses that make massive profits out of trade with this government. We need maximum diplomatic pressure.
The minimum should be protecting members of the diaspora communities here in Britain, Australia, the US, wherever they may be, because you heard in my speech how the Chinese government continues to target and attack ordinary Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers and Chinese citizens living abroad. We are still seeing some countries deport Uyghurs back to China to face certain persecution and torture. The minimum is protecting these extraordinarily vulnerable communities, we must do everything possible to protect them.
And as a minimum course of action we must also be protecting academic freedom at our universities. It’s a great initiative that Oxford University has introduced, allowing students vulnerable to government retaliation to anonymize their essays. Because I mentioned in my speech - I personally know many, many Chinese students at Australian universities who have seen their family members visited by Chinese state security officials within days of them protesting or expressing criticism of the Chinese government on campus and in class. This is something that is happening, ongoing in Australia. The Australian university system, the Group of Eight, it is a horror. It is a horror. They’ve completely sold out. I mean, if you ever wanted a picture of just total subservience, sycophancy, weakness, moral spinelessness in the face of state backed terror, look at the Group of Eight in Australia. I remember my experience at the University of Queensland, it was something that prompted me to try protest in the first place. They put out a statement condemning Trump’s Muslim travel ban. I supported the University of Queensland on this, good on them. It was a terrible thing that Trump did. But I remember waiting on the University of Queensland’s statement on the ongoing persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China and it never came. This is a government that basically provides one-fifth of the budget at the University of Queensland and it’s up to one-third of the university budget at the University of Sydney and University of Melbourne. At UQ, that’s more than $200 million a year in revenue, billions in the long term. Why do they say nothing about the fact that this government has rounded up more than one million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps in the largest incarceration of a people on religious grounds since the Holocaust? Why the hypocrisy, what is the different standard here? We all know why, we aren’t stupid. Sadly, the standard changes simply because of the money involved.
As I mentioned in my speech, the University of Queensland spent up to half a million dollars in taxpayer funds trying to permanently expel me as a student because the Chinese government began publishing state media articles calling for me to be expelled. When the Chinese Consulate in Brisbane says ‘jump,’ UQ asks, ‘how high?’ Peter Høj, the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Queensland, a man of many titles, was receiving a confidential $200,000 bonus every single year for meeting KPIs directly related to increasing engagement with China. He was on the board of Hanban, the Chinese government organisation that ran Confucius Institutes at the time. China’s Vice-Premier awarded Peter Høj a medallion in 2015 as the Hanban ‘‘Most Outstanding Individual of the Year’’ for his efforts promoting Confucius Institutes worldwide. ABC Four Corners in Australia found that the Confucius Institute at the University of Queensland directly funded four credit courses on campus. One of these courses told students that Uyghurs were ‘‘over-represented’’ in terror statistics in China - what facile bullshit, taking Chinese government propaganda at face value. One of these courses asked students to discuss whether Hong Konger democracy activists should be considered terrorists. An arm of the Chinese state was funding Chinese government propaganda on campus and Peter Høj was being paid handsome bonuses by the University of Queensland to allow this or at least look the other way. Let’s not kid ourselves, the Chinese government was giving him medals for promoting their propaganda. This is an Australian university Vice-Chancellor, smiling on stage at Chinese government ceremonies, accepting their awards. A regime that crushes academic freedom and ruthlessly represses all dissent. And when Chinese state media began calling for me to be expelled from campus, his administration did everything they could to try remove me as a student, to stifle dissent on campus. What was Høj thinking? He probably does not adhere to Maoism or Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. So either he wasn’t thinking at all, he was completely clueless to everything happening around him, or he was motivated out of pure cynicism, pure greed and sycophancy. Neither option is flattering for him, a man who still earns more than a million a year as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide.
I already mentioned in my speech how the University of Queensland ended up directly funding research that would be used by the Chinese government against Uyghurs. The youngest guy to ever be made a professor at UQ, Heng Tao Shen, used Australian Research Council grants and University of Queensland resources to develop AI surveillance technology that he then took to China. He created a business called Koala AI and started assisting the Chinese government carry out a genocide. Australian university resources were used here and they did nothing to stop it. The Australian universities are just so absolutely cowardly, so spineless. The Chinese government awards Høj for promoting their propaganda institutes while they teach Uyghur Genocide denialism on campus at the University of Queensland, Høj receives confidential $200,000 bonuses to deepen ties with China, then directs the University to expel me at the direction of frothing-at-the-mouth ultra-nationalists writing for Chinese state media. The public justification was a joke. They told the Australian public that they were spending hundreds of thousands in taxpayer funds to expel me because I used a pen in a campus art shop to take a note and then returned the pen to the shelf without paying for it. They’re telling the Australian public they spent half a million dollars going after me for stealing fifty cents worth of pen ink? No one can believe that, it’s insane. Total insanity. The surveillance, how did they even know about the pen?
This is what happened at the University of Queensland, just absolute cowardice. So if you’re asking, what can we do? At the very least, we cannot be complicit in these atrocities. And at the University of Queensland we were all complicit. I was a student there and I was just sick knowing that the university that I loved was complicit in atrocities and genocide. I remember reading about the Rwandan Genocide as a kid, reading about the Holocaust. That leaves a lasting impact on you. I remember promising myself that when something like this inevitably rears its ugly head again in history, I wanted to be one of the people that spoke out. I saw my university develop extremely close economic ties with the Chinese government while the Chinese government operated concentration camps for Uyghurs. When I tried to protest against it, they tried to expel me. At the very least, we must not be complicit in this.
Protect the diaspora, protect academic freedom, stop the violence on our streets. When diplomats at the Chinese Consulate in Manchester drag Hong Kongers onto the grounds of the Consulate to bash them, expel the Ambassador! I didn’t have time to mention this in my speech but here’s another travesty from the University of Queensland. Vice-Chancellor Peter Høj made the Brisbane Chinese Consul-General Xu Jie an Honorary Professor when I was a student there - just a few weeks prior to our first protest. Xu Jie put out a statement endorsing the violence of the thugs who attacked me and other protestors on campus, praising them as patriots. What did the university do? They went after me, not Xu Jie. And in the end, Xu Jie faced no consequences for endorsing violence against Australian citizens. It seems Xi Jinping rewarded him because Xu Jie now serves as the full Chinese Ambassador to Cape Verde. The Australian government should have declared Xu Jie persona non grata and expelled him from the country. You can’t endorse violence against Australian citizens and then claim diplomatic immunity - it is not a consular function to endorse violent attacks on Australian citizens. He should have been declared persona non grata but nobody wanted to rock the boat and he got away with it. My family suffered death threats for years after he made that statement. And no one seems to care. The Australian government refused to intervene to close the UQ Confucius Institute even after we proved it was funding Chinese government propaganda and genocide denialism on campus. At the very least, don’t be complicit in these crimes.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my mates Tim Page and Dilby for their years of friendship. To Simon Fenwick for his immense support. To my barrister Tony Morris KC who has been like a father figure to me. To my parents who have loved me despite being a difficult son. To Dave Robinson and Rob Potter who stepped in to help me when I was attacked. To Landeryou, Danby, Katter, every crazy, eccentric Aussie who has assisted me these past few years. To Edward Lucas and Bill Browder for supporting me in London when I was framed by the Chinese government. To Max Mok, Kyinzom, Adila and all my friends in the Hong Konger, Tibetan, Uyghur and Chinese diaspora communities. To dear departed friends like Kimberley Kitching and Wilson Gavin who we lost along the way. Your memory will live on forever.
Most importantly, to my Bapou and Yiayia, who came to Australia with just forty pounds in their pockets. They were forced out of school very young in Cyprus due to poverty. My family were simple farmers for a thousand years. It’s only because of my bapou and yiayia - extremely intelligent, hard working people who sacrificed years of their lives for their family - that I can deliver a speech like this. Thank you Bapou and Yiayia, I hope I can make you proud. To those I haven’t mentioned, I love you.
For Xu Zhangrun, see excellent translations by Geramie Barme.
Thank you to Alex Turnbull for introducing me to Scott Rozelle’s work. Read Alex’s book review here. The jaw-dropping statistic about 20 million Chinese children in need of glasses can be found on Page 135 of ‘‘Invisible China.’’
Highly recommend N. S. Lyons on China.
Must read: American political scientist Graham Gallagher, ‘‘I Come Not To Praise The Old World, But To Bury It.’’
Excellent and heartfelt speech. This is not an academic exercise, it is a movement ! Freedom is the only truly new political idea. Unite and Rise !
Excellent