Above photo: The Christmas Island detention centre where Chinese-Australians who had recently been in Wuhan are being held.

MIXED MESSAGES & RACIST TRAVEL BANS
FROM THE CAPITALIST AUSTRALIAN REGIME

WHILE RED CHINA RESPONDS TO THE COVID-19 THREAT
WITH SOCIALIST PLANNING AND BY BUILDING
TWO LARGE NEW HOSPITALS IN TWO WEEKS

Resist the New Strain of Anti-Chinese Racism Sweeping Through Australia

5 February 2020 – People of Chinese ethnicity in Australia are once again under attack. The latest bout of anti-Asian racism is being masked as fear of the novel coronavirus. People of East Asian appearance have been abused on public transport, at shopping centres, in schools and even at hospital waiting rooms. In a typical incident in Sydney, a white person yelled at an Asian background mother travelling on a train with her baby in a pram. The despicable racist demanded that the Asian-Australian woman go to a corner of the train because she was “spreading viruses.” Meanwhile, last Friday in Port Hedland, a Woolworths staff member threateningly ordered customers of Asian appearance out of the store over supposed virus fears.

Anti-Chinese racism is hardly new in Australia. From the time of Captain Cook’s landing 250 years ago, the colonial regime’s murderous dispossessing of Aboriginal people has infected the culture of Australian society with virulent racism. Daily nourished by the capitalist ruling class’ ever present need to divert the anger of the masses whom they exploit away from they the exploiters and onto racial minorities, the virus of white supremacy has been able to mutate into many different strains. That is why the number one migrant-based target of racist attacks will swap from Chinese migrants, to the Vietnamese community, to South Asian students, to Muslims, to African (and especially Sudanese) youth and back again to people of Chinese background. Overall, the Chinese community have probably been second only to Australia’s brutally oppressed Aboriginal people in being hit with White Australia racism. Many of the diseased racists attacking the community today are hardly genuinely concerned about the coronavirus. Indeed, some of the people they are targeting are not even of Chinese origin – let alone recent arrivals from China. But the rednecks hardly care. For them anyone of East Asian appearance and indeed any person of colour is “fair” game.

The spread of anti-Asian bigotry is being encouraged by Australia’s capitalist elite. The newspapers in Australia owned by billionaire magnates Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have sought to spread prejudice against the Chinese community. Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph had a huge front page headline, deliberately written in bold text made to read as a command, that shouted, “China Kids Stay Home.” However, what has most spawned xenophobic fears are the actions of the right-wing Morrison government. On Saturday, they announced an outright, temporary travel ban on Chinese nationals and other non-citizens who have arrived from China. As a result over a 100,000 international students from China are not able to return for the start of classes. Many are furious at the Australian regime. And because the government’s ban was implemented without any notice, a large number of people were left stranded when they arrived in Australia only to find that a ban on them had been decreed while they were mid-flight. In Sydney airport alone, some 80 Chinese people were detained, many of whom were interrogated for hours while being denied access to food. Many of these people were either then placed into detention or were immediately deported back to China regardless of their health. The Chinese embassy has rightly condemned this outrage and called for compensation for the victims of this draconian policy.

The Australian regime’s travel ban goes directly against the recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO) warning against such actions. Yesterday, the WHO head emphatically stated that:

“We reiterate our call to all countries not to impose restrictions inconsistent with the International Health Regulations.

“Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”

Very few other countries have applied the same blanket ban on arrivals of non-citizens from China as Australia has done. Those countries that have are Trump’s United States, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Narendra Modi’s India – all countries administered by vicious, right-wing regimes – as well as the Ardern government in New Zealand, which is a coalition between the social-democratic Labour Party, the Greens and the xenophobic NZ First Party. Russia and Singapore have also imposed harsh restrictions on the entry of Chinese nationals but have not gone as far as the likes of Australia and the U.S.

Where the Australian regime is completely unique is with its quarantining of those Australian citizens evacuated from the virus epicentre of Wuhan in an immigrant detention centre 2,600 kilometres from the mainland in Christmas Island. Even the proudly racist Trump regime has not gone that far! Already many newly arrived evacuees have expressed their outrage at the conditions that they face in the detention centre which is unclean and has poor food. One evacuee, Belinda Chen, who is at the centre with two of her children, told ABC News that “the hygiene issues make it worse than a prison” and that her children were “too scared to touch their beds.” Even the mayor of Christmas Island denounced the government’s policy as “regressive colonial era ideas” that “would create a convict colony.”

The only reason that the government has implemented such outrageously heartless measures is because most of the evacuees are of Chinese ethnicity. You can bet that if the evacuees had been wealthy white businessmen they would not have been dumped in a remote detention centre. And as an Asian-Australian activist, Erin Chew, aptly said of the travel ban:

“When previous viruses happened such as mad cow disease or the swine flu, Australia didn’t ban non-citizens from Britain and the US. Nor was the blame placed on the people in [those countries].”

The Morrison government knows that its policies are doing much to nurture hostility to the Chinese community. The aim of the Liberal-National government is to send a message that it is OK to exclude Chinese and other non-white people. They want to legitimise White Australia xenophobia. Yet the Coalition is hardly alone in doing this. After initially being critical of the Christmas Island detention plan, ALP leader Anthony Albanese has now fallen right in behind the government’s travel ban policies saying yesterday that: “Australia has got to make decisions in our own national interest.” Indeed, it was actually Queensland Labor premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, who egged on the Morrison government to place the travel ban on people coming from China in the first place. Just hours before the Morrison government announced the ban, Palaszczuk called to stop all incoming flights from China and apply in Australia the same ban implemented by the Trump government. We say: Lift the Morrison/Palaszczuk/Albanese ban on arrivals from China! Support Beijing’s demand for the Australian regime to compensate arrivals from China deported due to the travel ban! Bring everyone from the Christmas Island immigration detention centre to the mainland! Let them stay in their own homes! Free too all the refugees and other immigrants detained in Christmas Island, Nauru, Manus Island, Villawood and other Australian migrant detention centres!

IRRATIONAL FEAR-MONGERING, INADEQUATE PUBLIC HEALTH MOBILISATION, RACIST FAKE NEWS AND SOME MORE RATIONAL SPECULATION

The Australian government’s xenophobic policies under the guise of containing the new virus outbreak have no scientific basis. In creating an irrational panic about the coronavirus, Australian mainstream politicians and media are spreading a thinly veiled racist message: that people ought to be scared about the “evils” coming from China. At the same time, the Australian regime has failed to mobilise the health and production resources needed to provide sufficient testing of people with symptoms, adequate numbers of testing kits and enough protective masks for health workers. Moreover, they have been incapable of ensuring the creation of adequate public hospital beds and spare capacity in the health system to deal with a potential rapid virus spread in this country. For the coronavirus is indeed infectious and deadly. To date 492 people have died from it worldwide.

Thanks to the swift action of the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) authorities and their transparency in sharing information, the spread of coronavirus outside China is at the moment – at the start of February – limited. To be sure, if the virus were to spread widely into countries with less capable health and social systems than China, the effects could be devastating. And even though Australia is a wealthier country, you can’t rule out the possibility, given that everything in capitalist societies run for the sake of profits for the big end of town, combined with the Australian regime’s tendency to swap xenophobia for sound scientific practice, that the ruling class here and similar capitalist ruling classes abroad will botch their response to the new virus.

Encouraged by the xenophobia and anti-China bias of Australia’s mainstream media, conscious white supremacists here are spreading fake news stories in order to create hostility to the Chinese community. One social media post, that went viral, masquerading as if it was from Queensland Health, warned people to avoid suburbs in Brisbane with a certain proportion of Chinese background residents in order to avoid contracting the virus.

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Meanwhile, within Chinese communities, there is widespread speculation that the new virus was spread by the U.S. regime as a New Cold War attack on Red China and to help Trump get the advantage in his trade protectionist campaign against the PRC. Unlike the racist fake news stories, this speculation is more plausible. This is because U.S. intelligence agencies have actually used such biological warfare methods in the past – namely, against socialistic Cuba. To damage the Cuban economy, the CIA once spread swine fever in Cuba causing Cuba to have to slaughter 500,000 pigs. Most seriously, in 1981, the CIA spread dengue fever in the island causing the death of 158 Cubans. What has heightened speculation about the virus outbreak were findings by Chinese scientists reported by China’s official state media seven days ago. The scientists found that contrary to interim findings that the virus had spread entirely from Wuhan’s Seafood Wholesale Market, the virus appeared to have spread from multiple locations (see: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/29/c_138741063.htm). In the rare case that a virus jumps from an animal to a human, it is likely that this will occur at one location and then the virus will spread from one human carrier to the next. Should multiple animal to human transmissions occur, the probability that they will take place almost simultaneously at multiple locations is tiny. So if initial transmissions to humans did, in fact, occur almost simultaneously at multiple locations, this opens up the possibility that the virus was deliberately spread. One of the telling things about the 1981 dengue fever “outbreak” in Cuba is that it started simultaneously in three different parts of the country. Nevertheless, to date, there is no direct evidence that the coronavirus was started by U.S. intelligence agencies. What there is evidence of is that while the coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, the human form of the virus may not have initially started in Wuhan or even in China but rather was accidentally brought there from abroad by carriers with mild symptoms and then spread rapidly once it got into the Wuhan’s Seafood Wholesale Market. Experts in Japan have suggested that a few of the 14,000 people who died of influenzalike symptoms during the last U.S. flu season may have actually died of the coronavirus rather than influenza but the U.S. health system at the time had not picked up that they were victims of a new virus.

ANTI-CHINESE BIGOTRY WAS ALREADY RAMPANT
BEFORE THE NEW CORONAVIRUS EMERGED

The new strain of anti-Chinese racism spreading through Australia in recent weeks is hitting a Chinese community already under attack. From racist assaults against Chinese high-school and university students in Canberra bus stops and class rooms to violent attacks on Asian-background residents in busy Sydney suburban streets in Randwick and Burwood, the last three years have seen a wave of violence and abuse directed at people of Chinese heritage. There are three factors spawning this outbreak. First is the racist scapegoating that the capitalist rulers engage in against all people of colour in order to blame others for the social decay, lack of secure jobs for young people and lack of affordable rental accommodation caused by their system. Second is the growing economic nationalism in Australia. Those who claim to stand for workers interests (like the ALP and Greens) but who have no program for militant struggle against the real cause of unemployment, casualisation and low wages – that is, the capitalist bosses and their greed – seek to improve conditions for the masses by setting them up to support protectionist schemes against foreign guest workers and imported goods. Such economic nationalist schemes do not protect the interests of local workers. Overseas producers simply respond with their own counter-measures and all that ends up happening is that workers of different countries are set against each other leaving the Aussie bosses as well as the overseas cohort of capitalists laughing all the way to the bank. Regardless of the intentions of those who promote it, such economic nationalist schemes inevitably rebound against local migrant communities who become targeted as a fifth column of the overseas producers supposedly “stealing Aussie jobs.” Given that China is by far Australia’s largest trading partner it is inevitable that the xenophobia spawned by protectionist agendas especially targets people of Chinese background.

The biggest factor that has germinated anti-Chinese racism in recent years is the Australian ruling class’ anti-communist campaign against socialistic China. Australian politicians and mainstream media are making increasingly hyped-up claims against China. They accuse the PRC of everything from cyber-hacking, to “threatening Australia’s sovereignty,” to supposed bullying behaviour in the South China Sea. The most ridiculous claim is the one that “China is imprisoning over one million Muslim Uighurs.” This assertion has about as much credibility as the fake news stories doing the rounds saying that eating certain Asian food like fortune cookies could spread the coronavirus! The outright lie about the detention of Uighurs is spread by some of the most openly Islamophobic regimes in the world, including the Trump regime, the Morrison regime and fascist-infested governments in Switzerland and Austria. However, the lie is so grotesque that it has been completely refuted by most Muslim majority countries, not only those friendly to China like Palestine, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan but even by many Muslim-majority governments thoroughly subservient to Washington like those in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The effect of all this anti-communist, anti-China propaganda is that backward parts of the Australian population come to see Chinese people as savage and as a “threat” to Australia’s people. This became heightened further last year during the anti-communist protests by pro-colonial, rich kids in China’s Hong Kong. While Australia’s establishment hailed students who held rallies in Australia supporting the anti-PRC rioters in Hong Kong as “expressing their right to free speech”, international students from China who expressed their right to free speech by bravely rallying in defence of Red China were pilloried for “interfering in Australia’s internal affairs.” Most sinisterly, early last spring, the Australian government announced the creation of a new Federal Government taskforce to look into “foreign interference” on Australian campuses – a move clearly aimed at intimidating pro-PRC Chinese students studying in Australia.

The anti-communist section of the Chinese community has also played an active part in the campaign against the PRC and her local Chinese and international student supporters. Even though anti-Chinese prejudice could rebound against them, they have nourished a movement that combines anti-communism with white supremacist racism. Thus, Hong Kong anti-PRC students distributed at a rally that they held in Sydney’s Martin Place last year a leaflet calling to keep out of Australia migrants from the PRC. Meanwhile, members of the far-right Chinese group Falun Dafa – that masquerades as a religious group but which has an agenda of racial segregation, the shunning of mixed race people as “subhuman,” extreme homophobia and hostility to women’s rights movements – has held joint meetings with violent Australian white supremacist forces.

CHINA’S RESPONSE TO THE VIRUS EMERGENCY SHOWS
THE GREAT ADVANTAGES OF THE SOCIALIST SYSTEM

China’s response to the new virus outbreak is a stunning refutation to all the propaganda spread against her. She has responded with humanity, speed and coordination. Fortunately, China has not gone down Morrison’s road of holding anyone who has been in Hubei in remote detention centres. Instead, people have been asked to self-quarantine at home and wear masks when outside. Those ill are moved into hospital and many people who are thought more likely to have been infected have been moved into hotels or newly furbished accommodation in public buildings. What has enabled China to respond so effectively is that, despite her wavering leadership having allowed too much capitalism into the economy, the PRC remains a socialistic society in which public ownership plays the dominant role. And it is the PRC’s socialistic state-owned enterprises that have been at the forefront of her response to the virus epidemic. State-owned energy companies are providing free electricity and gas supplies to makeshift new hospitals and state-owned pharmaceutical manufacturers are leading the drive to provide badly needed medical supplies. One state-owned developer even built a 1000-bed hospital in just 10 days in the virus epicentre of Wuhan. Try doing that in a capitalist country! A capitalist developer would demand a massive premium for mobilising that amount of labour and raw materials in such a short time. Here, reconstruction for most of those who lost homes in the bushfires has not even started, even for those who lost homes early in the fire season.

In capitalist countries, the system runs for the profit of the business owners. During the bushfires, many business owners and supermarkets here got away with cruelly jacking up their prices to take advantage of desperate bushfire victims. But in China, when some tried that – including outlets of French supermarket chain Carrefour – they were promptly stomped on by PRC state authorities. Meanwhile, even private business owners in China have been ordered to step up production of masks and medical kits to aid the medical emergency. This reflects the fact that the PRC – for all its bureaucratic deformations and its leaders’ concessions to world capitalism – is a workers state that was created by the 1949 revolution. One way that the PRC state has moved to limit the spread of the virus is by extending the Lunar New Year holiday. While we only get one day off for New Year, in China they already get one day off for January 1 plus five week days off for Lunar New Year (people in the PRC get a minimum of 18 workdays off for public holidays each year as opposed to 9 for most people here). Now the Lunar New Year is being extended across China by a few days and in some regions by much longer. If a government tried to do that here, the capitalists, whom the governments ultimately answer to, would have the measure stopped as they are not about to let their filthy profits plummet by giving workers longer holidays. Meanwhile, back in China, the empowerment that the masses feel in a workers state has led to a huge grassroots mobilisation to respond to the crisis. Teams of volunteers are being established to provide food for potentially infected people self-quarantining. Neighbourhood committees are organising people to go around with loudspeakers spreading scientific information about the virus. Celebrities and entertainers are providing free live streaming entertainment and exercise programs to liven up the moods of those stuck at home due to self-quarantining.

OPPOSING ANTI-CHINESE RACISM MEANS
OPPOSING THE COLD WAR DRIVE AGAINST THE PRC

Everyone who is not blinded by either white supremacy, “First World” arrogance or anti-communist hostility can see that the PRC is doing an excellent job responding to a serious virus outbreak in a developing country with a population density fifty times greater than Australia’s. Following an inspection trip to China, WHO Director General, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus hailed China’s mobilisation:

“China identified the pathogen in record time and shared it immediately, which led to the rapid development of diagnostic tools. They are completely committed to transparency, both internally and externally….

“The fact that to date we have only seen 68 cases outside China, and no deaths, is due in no small part to the extraordinary steps the government has taken to prevent the export of cases. For that, China deserves our gratitude and respect. They’re doing that at the expense of their economy and other factors.”

Press briefing on WHO Mission to China and novel coronavirus outbreak, 29 January 2020, WHO website (see: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/press-briefing-on-who-mission-to-china-and-novel-coronavirus-outbreak)

Yet the capitalist-owned Western media are desperately thrashing around trying to find some angle that they can attack the PRC over. So are those sections of the Australian Left – unfortunately the majority right now – who are lined up behind the capitalist class’ Cold War drive against the PRC state. Thus, the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group, in an article published two days ago, claimed that: “When it comes to the political system, there’s no denying that local authorities in Hubei province tried to hush up the outbreak in December. Chinese people suffer from their corrupt political leaders.” Although SAlt do also criticise the U.S. and Australian rulers as well, their attacks on the PRC are even more extreme than the mainstream media which grudgingly has had to acknowledge positive aspects of the PRC’s response to the coronavirus.

At the same time as echoing the anti-China propaganda of the Australian ruling class, SAlt are emphatic in stating opposition to anti-Chinese racism. They are part of a left social democratic and left-liberal milieu who think that it is possible to both join the Cold War crusade against Red China and stand against anti-Chinese racism. Others in this trend include other left groups like Solidarity and Socialist Alliance. The main element, however, and the one who the social democratic “far left” groups pander to is the Greens. The problem is that it is not possible to walk on both sides of the streets in this way! Ever since China’s 1949 anticapitalist revolution created near hysteria amongst the Western capitalist establishment, anti-communist hostility to the PRC has gone hand in hand with anti-Chinese xenophobia. For example, the anti-PRC, “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong that these groups all rabidly support, are characterised by a nativist hostility to Chinese people from mainland China. It is hard to fathom but the yuppy rioters in Hong Kong, seeped as they are in the values of the British Empire, believe that, even though they are themselves ethnic Chinese, they are superior to Mainland Chinese because they are closer to being British! No wonder Western, extreme white supremacists have been flocking to join the anti-PRC protests in Hong Kong as have more mainstream hard right forces, like Liberal MP, Tim Wilson. Wilson, who visited Hong Kong to march with the anti-PRC forces, is notorious for having been a director of the extremely conservative, Institute of Public Affairs, as well as for speaking out for the “rights” of vile racist media commentator Andrew Bolt. Today, the pro-colonial opposition in Hong Kong is demanding the complete closure of Hong Kong’s border with mainland China to keep out mainland Chinese. The likes of the Greens, SAlt and Solidarity are in a united front with people in Hong Kong – and their Hong Kong student supporters in Australia – who have as a central plank of their platform a xenophobic measure to keep out people from mainland China that is even more severe than the ones that the Australian government has implemented. Meanwhile, progressive NSW Greens senator David Shoebridge has made common cause with the most hard-right politicians in Australia in his xenophobic opposition to the China-connected Chinese language institute, the Confucius Institutes program.

Stepping back a little, the basic reason why it is not possible, regardless of ones intentions, to consistently oppose anti-Chinese racism if one is supporting the Cold War drive against Red China is that both anti-Chinese racism and hostility to the PRC are policies undertaken by the capitalist rulers because it serves their interests. Racism serves the exploiting class because it divides and diverts the masses that they exploit. Propaganda against the PRC serves Australia’s capitalist rulers because it serves to “justify” their hostile actions against Red China. These actions include a military build up targeted at China, the deployment of Australian naval vessels and aircraft thousands of kilometres away from home in waters off China and Korea and the supporting of anti-PRC Chinese exile organisations. Those actions the Australian capitalists see as necessary because they know that supporting the U.S.-led drive to undermine socialistic rule in China is in their very own interests. Although the Australian capitalists make a fortune from exporting to China, they calculate that they could make even more if socialistic rule was destroyed there so that China could be turned into a giant sweatshop and market for unrestricted capitalist exploitation. Quite bizarrely, while the Australian ruling class opposes the PRC precisely because it remains a socialistic state, groups like SAlt and Solidarity oppose the PRC because they claim that it is actually “capitalist.”

But facts speak loudly. And the fact is that China has responded to the novel coronavirus threat with compassion and with a determined mobilisation that is only possible when the decisive sectors of the economy are in the hands of the people. In contrast, the response of the Australian capitalist regime has been shaped by xenophobia and cruelty. That gives us just one more reason why we need to eradicate capitalist rule in this country: along with the need to stop union-busting attacks on workers rights, to stop the degrading treatment of unemployed workers and to bring secure, permanent jobs for all, alongside the need to end homelessness and achieve a massive increase in public housing, the need to bring true equality for women, the need to stop racist state terror against Aboriginal people and the need to stop the Australian military’s role in imperialist wars abroad and to stop the Australian capitalists raping the people of the South Pacific.

However, capitalism does not fall by people simply saying a lot of times how bad it is. It comes through the masses being trained in struggle against all the particular atrocities of capitalism and against all the contagious ideologies that the capitalist rulers seek to infect the minds of the exploited masses with. That is why we in Trotskyist Platform are proud that we not only stand against anti-Chinese racism but stand against all the different components fuelling it. Today, we fully solidarise with the stand taken by those in the Chinese community who are bravely starting to respond to the epidemic of racism that has accompanied the coronavirus outbreak. We fight for actions to demand: Immediately lift the ban on arrivals from China! Bring everyone from the Christmas Island detention centre to the mainland. Let them stay in their own homes! We also say: Down with protectionism! Down with xenophobic campaigns against Chinese imported goods and investment! Say no to campaigns to keep out guest workers – fight for full rights of citizenship, local pay rates and full union coverage for all guest workers! Very crucially right now we also fight to mobilise struggles to demand: Down with the repressive attempts to silence the political voice of pro-PRC Chinese international students! Down with the Cold War witch-hunt against the Confucius Institutes, Huawei, Chinese international students and Chinese community social groups with links to the PRC! Defend socialistic China against the U.S./Australian capitalist rulers!

We have confidence in the future success of this program, even though xenophobia and Cold War anti-communism is running rampant right now. This is for one simple reason. While this program is against the interests of Australia’s capitalist ruling class it is very good for the vast majority of this country’s people. Working class people and all the oppressed need to fight against racism and xenophobia if they are going to be able to unite into a force capable of challenging their oppressors. Defending socialistic China is in the interests of the masses because having the world’s most populous country remain under at least some sort of socialistic rule enhances the struggle for liberation of the working class and oppressed the world over. Indeed, that is partly why the Australian ruling class has been so nervous about the presence of a large number of international students from China. On the one hand they need these students as a cash cow. On the other hand they are fearful that these students might start telling their Australian class mates and friends that all that they hear from the mainstream media about China is false; and having lived in both socialistic China and one of the more developed of the capitalist countries, Australia, that they still love the PRC and still support socialism. The Australian rulers are fearful that if these pro-PRC students become involved in political activity here, what the Australian regime sees as the virus of support for socialism could spread from China and infect people in Australia too. We say let it spread rampantly! Let as many people know the benefits of socialistic rule – even when it exists in as imperfect and unfinished a form as it currently does in China! The “right to free speech” must include the right to support socialistic countries like the Peoples Republic of China! Down with anti-Chinese racism! Long live socialistic rule in China!