The open letter to Wagga Wagga council

Dear Mayor and Councillors,

We are the Australian Values Alliance and most of our members are of Chinese origin with a mainland China background. We unanimously and strongly support Wagga Wagga City Council’s April 14 resolution to rescind the “sister city” relationship with the Chinese Communist regime which is contrary to Australian values, as communist China has been persecuting its own people, trampling democracy, freedom and human rights.

Concerns of the Australian Chinese community

Please be reminded that the interest of the CCP(Chinese communist party) contradicts the interest of Chinese people.

The CCP has brutally persecuted Chinese people in the mainland, with at least 70 million Chinese having perished from the tyrannical oppression by the CCP over the past 71 years, including Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, underground Christians,  Uighurs, Hongkongers, causing China to become one of the largest refugee-exporting countries.

The "sister city” relation is one of the tools of CCP’s Infiltration   As a matter of fact, the CCP has been engaging vigorously in its United Front and outreach campaigns overseas by establishing Confucius Institutes and so-called “sister cities”, which are part of its soft propaganda strategies. The CCP has extensive control of overseas Chinese media and associations. Those who play the "racism" card at all times are precisely the spokespersons of the United Front and the outreach campaigns of the CCP, or those who are kidnapped by economic interests and serve the interests of the CCP. In fact, their actions really sabotage the interests and reputation of Chinese people in Australia, and really provoke racial conflicts and opposition, tearing apart the Chinese community.

For a long time, the authoritarian regime of the CCP has been using "sister city” relations as a tool for its "United Front" to intervene, infiltrate and even export its human rights persecution, rather than a genuinely friendly relationship among the peoples based on freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of cultural exchanges and civic contacts. So far, Australian mainstream media cannot be freely distributed in Kunming or any other cities in mainland China. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, WhatsApp, etc., which are widely used by Australian people, have always been completely blocked or restricted in mainland China. When using WeChat, Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms, of which the monopoly positions in mainland China are created by the CCP through the Great Fire Wall barrier, Australian users are often arbitrarily banned, with their posts deleted or hidden and even their accounts blocked. These sometimes happen when they are just introducing factual situation in Australia.

Facing the reality of such a rogue regime, are there any "sister cities” or "friendliness" to speak of at all?  Please find attached a brief translation of the CCP’s own document, illustrating its policy on the “sister city” relationship with western countries for your reference. 

Dealing with a regime that is untrustworthy

On 25 February this year, the CCP announced that Minhai Gui, a Chinese writer and publisher with Swedish citizenship who was illegally kidnapped from Thailand in 2015, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and claimed that Minhai Gui, who lost his freedom long ago, had “voluntarily” relinquished his Swedish citizenship and applied for Chinese citizenship. His case has set a precedent. Since then, no one in the world, including any Australian citizen or any Wagga Wagga resident, has any personal safety or protection before the Chinese communist regime. Anyone of us could be made to show up and “confess” and declare on CCP television that we have given up our existing foreign citizenship to become a Chinese citizen in order to be jailed in China, after being kidnapped and “disappeared”.

The current pandemic has damaged the whole world, purely because the CCP regime covered up the epidemic at its outset, suppressed any talk of an epidemic, blocked any genuine information transparency by the officials and persecuted medical personnel who disclosed the epidemic. Now, the Chinese Communist Party has closed its ports and banned entry to Chinese citizens returning to China from Russia and other countries who are trying to avoid the pandemic. However, in early February when Australia imposed entry restrictions on foreigners who had been in China within 14 days in order to limit the pandemic’s spread, the spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the deputy head of the Chinese embassy in Australia strongly criticized Australia’s reasonable measures as “excessive and over the top”. Moreover, it is precisely because the World Health Organization, under advice of CCP, expressed its opposition to the implementation of travel restrictions on China that led to the explosive spread of the epidemic around the world.

How can one speak of "sister cities” and "friendliness" to a regime that despises the health and safety of people in Australia and around the world?

Of course, the economic and trade transactions between Australia and China are very important, but for a long time, the CCP has used economic benefits and bilateral trade as a leverage to intimidate, and has arbitrarily interfered with Australia's freedom of speech, democracy and the rule of law. Such an economic and trade relation now needs to be reviewed and adjusted. At the beginning of this coronavirus outbreak, medical protective materials in Australia were snapped up and the following shortage caused has endangered the health of Australians. To control the spread of the pandemic, the economy and trade have largely stagnated, which also signifies Australia’s excessive dependence on Chinese markets, leading to the weak manufacturing sector in Australia’s imbalanced economy. Too many eggs have been placed in one basket – China – which already posed a serious threat to a healthy economy and trade, as well as national security in Australia. This situation must change, and now is the time for such a change!

Here, we once again reiterate our support for Wagga Wagga Council’s decision to sever its tie with Kunming as a “sister city” and express our appreciation for the thrust of the resolution that “there should not be any relationship with the communist regime of China”. We hope that Wagga Wagga City Council will retain this resolution and stick to this theme.

Best regards,

Australian Values Alliance（AVA）

Contact persons:

Associate Professor Chong-Yi Feng (Mobile: 0417 676 389)
John Huge (Mobile: 0414 816 751)