Disclaimer. The following viewpoints are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of AIMN, its staff or contributors.
It really doesn’t matter how many different ways we look at it, as members of the developed countries of the human race, China does not rate a position on the register of members of that organisation.
It doesn’t matter how many different ways our governments excuse the behaviour of the Chinese in terms of their human rights violations, their lack of respect for various religions or very much else, as a country, irrespective of our appalling government, we should not recognise China as a member of the human race.
Rather, we should see them as an observer community, trying to work out how they can possibly fit in to the organisations of developed countries, and countries which at least have some idea of the value of a human life.
For many years now, Australia has seen the Chinese as a source of income, and very little else.
The natural racism of the Australian, under normal circumstances, writes off Chinese people as those funny little yellow fellows with very few brains, no capacity to invent, but a lot of money in their pocket to spend.
This has been particularly true of the real estate industry, to the point where it was rather good to see the Foreign Investment Review Board, recently decide under the tutelage of Joe Hockey, to tell an Australian real estate company that a Point Piper property had to be resold within 90 days simply because the Australian real estate company had taken upon itself to counsel the Chinese buyer/investor to form a company to buy a property for $39 million, because the Australian government was too stupid to pick up on the fact that some wealthy Chinese had taken it upon himself to decide to invest in the established property market in Sydney.
At last, Joe Hockey appeared, even if only for one moment, to have grown himself a pair of balls.
I am conscious of the capacity for what I write to appear blatantly racist, but at the end of the day the nature of the Chinese is in fact much more racist than that of Australians.
Australians are told that when we hold Asian people to account for the disregard of human rights and civil liberties, those of us who comment upon the nature of the difference are held up not so much as racists, as much as being portrayed as “anti-Asian”, which, ladies and gentlemen, I can assure you I am not.
At some point in the discussion about the nature of the Chinese – Australian relationship on an international level, it needs to be taken into account what we give the Chinese, and in fact most Asians, compared to what they give us in terms of Australians living overseas.
Unhappily-we bend over backwards to make them feel comfortable and at home, whilst in China and the rest of Asia, we are treated as a source of income and absolutely nothing else.
On occasion I’ve taken it upon myself to invite people when commenting about Chinese investors buying property in Australia, to pop over to China or Vietnam or Thailand or damn near any other place in Asia and buy one square metre of that foreign soil. With the only exception I am aware of, being able to buy a piece of land 6’ x 2’ and 6 feet deep, in Thailand, in which one can be buried, there is no capacity at all for Australian to go anywhere in Asia and buy land.
I am at a complete loss as to why an Australian government, of any shade or hue, feels the need to reach out to the Chinese and invite them to Australia to buy whatever land they wish and in so doing, school up our real estate market and send cities like Brisbane and Sydney into an absolute spin in terms of property values.
It is folly to invite the Chinese to come to our country to speculate on land/housing based simply on their ability to produce a $1.99 item whose design is usually stolen from the West, while being supported in their endeavors by successive Australian governments including that funny little Mandarin speaking Labor chap, Kevin Rudd.
As a country, we really are our own worst enemies.
