Aussie ‘think tank’ behind anti-China blitz
Print Edition
IN an inconspicuous yellow three-story building in Canberra dwells an institute behind plenty of anti-China campaigns in Australia.
It pumps out a “one-sided, pro-American view of the world,” said Bob Carr, former premier of the New South Wales.
“I see it as very much the architect of the China threat theory in Australia,” said ex-ambassador to China Geoff Raby.
The two men are referring to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said earlier this month that with such strong ideological bias, the institute is actually spearheading anti-China forces and its academic credibility has been seriously questioned.
About two weeks ago, Twitter removed thousands of pro-China accounts following a study by the ASPI. The institute has fabricated reports on policies in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
A member of the ASPI was a bylined contributor to the coverage of Wang Liqiang, who was reported by Australian media to have defected to Australia and confessed that he had worked as a secret agent in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but later proved to be a convicted fraud with a fake ID.
“The Wang Liqiang story is just the latest example of claims running ahead of an evidence base in Australia,” said James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.
ASPI executive director Peter Jennings is a frequent contributor to Australian media, producing articles like “A new cold war will force changes in Australian behavior,” “Party’s over for the bullies of Beijing,” and “China will be surprised how long it took us to act on foreign investment laws,” all of which embody a Cold War mentality.
Many believe that the ASPI’s stance against China is linked to its sources of funding, a lot of which reportedly come from defense contractors and foreign governments.
When the think tank was founded in 2001, it was funded by Australian government through the Department of Defense.
However, it “was taking nearly A$450,000 (US$311,000) from the US State Department to track Chinese research collaborations with Australian universities,” according to an article in the Australian Financial Review.
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