The Chinese are aggressively pursuing soft power via the media, movies, influence at Universities and political donations. All sure signs they are hell bent on destroying Western institutions and changing them to reflect Chinese values, which seek to portray China in a positive light, and the West in an anti-White bad light.

Australian universities the latest battleground in Chinese soft power offensive

n an exclusive interview, Australia's first ambassador to China has raised the alarm about China's influence in the higher education sector.

Stephen Fitzgerald singled out Bob Carr's Australia China Relations Institute for particular criticism, saying universities need clear firewalls between donations and research.

ACRI, part of the University of Technology Sydney, was established with a large donation from the Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo.

Mr Huang was the donor at the centre of the controversy surrounding Labor senator Sam Dastyari.

"I wouldn't have taken the funding," Mr Fitzgerald told Background Briefing.

"This is one of the really difficult issues about what is happening at the moment, because you don't want to say no to all Chinese money.

"That would be ridiculous, self defeating, but you have to put firewalls between the donation and the way it is spent, and you have to be certain about the origins of that money."

The director of ACRI, former foreign minister Bob Carr, said he disagreed.

"[This criticism] is coming from people on the cold warrior fringe of the Australian politics, people who are resentful of any hint of Australia running a pragmatic national interest-based China policy," he said.

"There are two standards being applied here."

'No place' for Confucius institutes

As well as ACRI, hundreds of other language and culture centres have been established on campuses worldwide through confidential agreements between universities and the Chinese education ministry.

Mr Fitzgerald said he believed these centres, known as Confucius institutes, had no place in Australian higher education institutions.

"I just don't think they should be in universities," he said.

"Have them in Australia by all means; have them all over the country. I'd welcome them, but I don't think they should be in universities."

"There will be people who have been involved with these institutes who will say there has never been one instance of any attempt to influence what we teach and what we say.

"There will be others who might admit that there has been such an attempt."

Controversy over Sydney Uni plan

Background Briefing has revealed that at the University of Sydney, a confidential 2007 plan included a clause that would have seen the university's existing Chinese language program incorporated into a Confucius institute.

This draft agreement ended up in the hands of Professor Jocelyn Chey, the former Australian consul-general in Hong Kong and a visiting professor at the university's Department of Chinese Studies.

"I wasn't sure that the university authorities knew what they were letting themselves in for," she said.

"There's the question of academic freedom and the right of academics not just to teach but to research and publish in areas where they are not under the guidance or direction of anybody."

Professor Chey wrote a strongly worded letter to the vice chancellor outlining her concerns and saying the Confucius institute should be rejected, or the arrangement should be significantly modified to protect the integrity of the university.

"People who accept donations should be aware of the expectations and obligations that they're taking on with the finance," she said.

The university senate voted in favour of the Confucius Institute, but adopted some of the changes to the arrangement that were recommended by Professor Chey.

A University of Sydney spokesperson confirmed a proposal to establish a Confucius Institute at the University of Sydney was circulated to the senate in 2007.

Feedback from staff was considered, and it was confirmed that the university did not intend for existing university programs to be delivered by the Confucius Institute.

The spokesperson said these programs continue to be delivered by the Department of Chinese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-14/universities-latest-battleground-in-chinese-soft-power-offensive/7931958

Donations, Dastyari and Chinese soft power

With his long, sticky fingers Senator Sam Dastyari, hotshot of the NSW Labor right machine, this week managed to conflate two of the Australian electorate's chief concerns, fabricate them into a political weapon and turn it on himself.

The first is growing anger at the propensity of Australian politicians and parties to pocket money from special interests in the form of gifts or donations. The second is the general and growing anxiety about the role of China in the region and its influence on Australian domestic affairs.

Dastyari's undoing began last week when Fairfax Media revealed that having blown his travel allowance by $1670.82, the young senator contacted a Labor donor to foot his bill: Top Education Institute, a Chinese private higher education provider based in Sydney and run by Australian-Chinese businessman Minshen Zhu.

Dastyari had form. He had previously accepted payment for a legal bill from another prolific political donor, Huang Xiangmo. Worse still, it would surface that back in June he had appeared beside the Chinese property developer pledging support for China's stance on the South China Sea.

It is worth noting Dastyari had broken no law, no regulation, nor even a norm in Australian politics. Technically he had not even taken a donation, but a gift. He had even properly declared the gift. He was determined to ride out the scandal.

Last Friday though, the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, piled on, pointing to quotes in Chinese media suggesting that Dastyari had advocated China's position on the South China Sea dispute, a position contrary not only to Australia's stance, but that of our key ally, the United States.

Cash for comment, said the PM.

Still Dastyari was determined to stick it out, hence the disastrous press conference he held on Tuesday this week, the performance that finally undid him.

Asked time and again why he had asked a company to pay his bill, he was unable to give an answer. To anyone watching, the reasonable conclusion was that Dastyari did not pay his bill because he did not want to, because he was greedy, and because Australian politicians simply don't have to pay bills if there is someone else around willing to - even if that person happens to be a friend of a foreign government.

The following day Dastyari resigned from his frontbench positions.

Australia's political parties are addicted to cash, particularly donations. Over the past five financial years, the major parties - Labor, Liberal, the Nationals and the Greens - have taken in about $887 million, according to Australian Electoral Commission returns, in public funding, donations, membership fees and fundraising efforts. Donations form a significant portion of this pie, but the exact size is obscured by loose disclosure laws and associated fundraising vehicles.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/donations-dastyari-and-chinese-soft-power-20160909-grcfyk.html

Australian media playing into China's grand strategy

China's leadership clearly has a desire to extend its soft power in the West through co-operation deals with local media organisations. And Australia is right in the thick of it, writes Bill Birtles.

Six years ago, as a foreign editor working inside the belly of China's state-run media behemoth Xinhua, I was asked to attend a meeting.

On the upper floors of the company's distinctive pencil-shaped tower in south-west Beijing, I was greeted by a boardroom-style table and a group of middle-management types.

They noted that I had previously worked at the ABC, and that Aunty now had multiple digital television channels to fill with content.

So they asked me whether it might be possible for Xinhua's new television service to air in Australia on one of those channels.

Aside from the unlikeliness of the proposition, what struck me at the time was how amateur their approach was.

Getting a young foreign editor from the newsroom to be their intermediary to contact Australia's national broadcaster reflected how little experience these state-media managers had dealing with foreign companies.

Yet six years on, like so many things in China, the progress of the government's overseas media push is rapid.

In the past week, a senior Chinese propaganda official Liu Qibao capped off a successful two-day visit to Australia that included meeting the Governor-General and signing agreements or MOUs with several media organisations.

The most significant achievement was the announcement that Fairfax's main newspapers - The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review, would distribute China Watch - a fully paid monthly eight-page supplement straight from the China Daily, its state-PR machine.

Fairfax has defended the deal as a "commercial printing arrangement", and points out that papers around the world, such as the Washington Post, also distribute China Watch.

But China's colossal PR machine doesn't just have struggling newspapers in its sights.

The ABC's 2014 deal with provincial-level Shanghai Media Group (SMG) paved the way for a rare coup - the establishment of a China-based website for the ABC's international Australia Plus service.

The difficulty of obtaining a .cn portal underlines the significance of a Chinese-language service that potentially reaches tens, if not hundreds of millions of people.

But as Media Watch recently pointed out, the site had been caught self-censoring ABC news stories, and the ABC maintains it isn't supposed to carry news at all.

More questionable is that the Australia Plus Chinese portal replaced the online Radio Australia Chinese service, which routinely published stories that wouldn't make the cut under China's tight censorship regime.

These types of co-operation agreements are just a taste of what's to come.

Recently, Australian journalists in Beijing were asked to a meeting with officials from the State Council Information Office.

The meeting was off-the-record, but it was clear that finding further ways to push media co-operation with Australian outlets is a priority.

For China, there has long been a great insecurity about a deficiency of soft power on the global stage, and changing the "negative" tone of how China is covered in the Western media is a goal.

In the past, propaganda officials have suggested a UN-style body to regulate the world's media organisations so they promote "fairness" in their reporting.

And just this week, China's Premier Li Keqiang told an alliance of 30 news editors from across Asia to promote "an optimal environment for peace and prosperity", according to the China Daily.

For Australia, the way news organisations engage with state-run counterparts from a country with media values that are anathema to Australian notions of freedom of speech, is just one of the tricky aspects of the Australia-China relationship.

For China, the hope is that increasing co-operation deals will eventually lead to influence that can reshape the way Australian journalists report on China, in a way more agreeable to the leaders in Beijing.

The question Australian news companies must ask themselves is whether they are willing to play a part in that.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-03/birtles-australian-media-playing-into-china's-grand-strategy/7472870

For years, Hollywood and China have held mutual appeal, with Hollywood attracted to China’s enormous consumer market and China looking to Hollywood for its storytelling and post-production techniques, which can enhance Chinese films and by extension bolster the country’s global influence. Recently, though, with China’s continued failure to acquire Hollywood’s core resources, the formula for China has now become, “You want my market? I want it too – let’s make a deal.” In other words, China is investing in Hollywood so that in 2017 – when China will be lifting importation quotas on foreign films and thus squeezing local productions to the edge – Chinese investors can still take a share of their own market.

Tom Cruise’s new blockbuster, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, is the latest example of this new thinking. Alibaba Pictures’ and China Movie Channel’s logos are prominent in the film’s opening credits; China Movie Channel’s font is large and orange, as if promising Chinese thematic content. However, the only Chinese elements in the movie are a very brief appearance by Chinese actress Zhang Jingchu and a one-second frame in which a Chinese map blinks.

It’s no longer the content of Hollywood films that China wants to change. The partnership between Hollywood and China in this Paramount film focuses on online ticketing sales and derivative products. China Movie Channel, the trade name of China Movie Channel Program Center, which is an enterprise of China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, has made a 10 percent investment in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. It then sold most of these shares to three partners: Alibaba Pictures, a newcomer into China’s movie landscape; Wanda, whose parent company bought AMC; and Contemporary Eastern Investment. In doing so, the government-backed China Movie Channel is handing over opportunities to Chinese companies to explore the domestic market. The notion that China is buying Hollywood in order to expand its soft power – using Hollywood influence to propagate Chinese ideology and values – is receding from prominence. Instead, it has become a game of using capital to occupy the market.

One reason is the fear that as 2017 approaches and the government will no longer be able to protect Chinese enterprises from competitors by imposing quotas on imports, Chinese companies will no longer be able to compete. Chinese filmmakers and investors ominously refer to the approach of 2017 as “the wolf is coming,” and are doing everything they can to accelerate their growth and avoid oblivion. The solution of boosting investment in Hollywood is designed to bring the competition on board and allow the Chinese companies to keep a piece of their domestic market. As cooperation broadens, Chinese companies will be able to avoid going out of business.

http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/china-comes-to-hollywood/

China using cinema to boost soft power-video

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2016/s4580672.htm