In the midst of a federal election campaign, China is front and centre, with the major parties falling over themselves to look tough on national security.  The mainstream media is once again aiding and abetting the political narrative without any serious analysis; Albo and Dutton are going to swipe back the Port of Darwin from its CCP-linked owners, but the mainstream media is clueless as to how that will happen; Tony Abbott tells his former chief of staff we’re being bullied by China; and a heavily-promoted Four Corners program fails to scale the great wall of objectivity.

The power of the Xi Jinping narrative

In the week leading up to this Monday, 7 April, the ABC was heavily promoting a _Four Corners_ episode dissecting the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his global impact. In a typical ABC way, the promos painted Xi as a global threat and, by extension, a direct threat to Australia.

As the only global superpower to rival the US, under an increasingly authoritarian leadership, China and its leader should be subject to scrutiny. The ABC’s latest attempt to discredit China’s legitimacy does not qualify as proper scrutiny.

The timing of this program, in the midst of a federal election campaign, is not accidental. For the best part of a decade, the ABC has played into the China hysteria line. This Four Corners episode was the national broadcaster further injecting national security threats into the federal election narrative.

There are a number of questions that need to be answered about this program. The broadcaster’s 30-second promotion is overlaid with a dramatic Australian voiceover declaring, “The power of Xi Jinping [and] how he remade global politics.” It was tempting viewers to watch another hard-hitting Four Corners examination of major issues, in this case how our biggest trading partner is posing major geopolitical challenges in which Australia is caught up.

On its web page, the opening paragraph promoting the episode reads, “This week Four Corners unpacks the rise of Xi Jinping, China’s most dominant leader since Mao Zedong, and the global consequences of his rule.” The problem is, Four Corners unpacked nothing more than a program produced, in its entirety, by the PBS Frontline in America.

“The Power of Xi Jinping”, it was labelled by the ABC; “China, the US and the Rise of Xi Jinping” was the actual title of the program that aired on Monday night. When the episode rolled out on television screens around Australia, there was no studio introduction, no opening credits and (despite the nature of its promotion) no disclosure to viewers that they were about to watch a program produced by an American broadcaster.

Coming back to the issue of why this episode made such compelling viewing for Australians four weeks before they head off to the polls, there was also zero disclosure that the program first aired nearly five months ago – in November 2024.

In 44 minutes and 30 seconds, Four Corners delivered a comprehensive, and compelling, critique of the rise of Xi Jinping and why we should be worried about it.

More worrying is the fact that original program’s running time was an hour and 54 minutes. Not only had the ABC cut an hour and 10 minutes from the original production, it did so without disclosing to viewers this was a heavily edited version of a program produced by a foreign broadcaster.

The PBS video is blocked in Australia, so local viewers have no way of knowing exactly what was cut out of the original program. The ABC edit is heavily biased in its criticism of Xi and, by extension, China.

The Four Corners edit immediately launches into the issue of Taiwan, and Xi’s determination to reunify it with the mainland. Taiwan has become a tabloid headline, justifying much Western opposition to the rise of China. It is classic US propaganda, with a soundbite in the ABC edit declaring, “Taiwan is a vibrant democracy”.

For most of its existence, Taiwan has been a dysfunctional democracy. For the first four decades of its independence from the mainland, the island was under martial law. This period, known as the “White Terror”, is only second to Syria in continuous existence as a state under military rule. One issue Four Corners, and the legacy media as a whole, did not raise is that Taiwan does not consider itself to be an independent self-governing democracy. It’s referred to as Taiwan Republic of China, and the Taiwanese consider themselves to be the only legitimate China, while the People’s Republic of China — with its great land mass and 1.4 billion people — considers itself to be the only China.

Much was made of China’s military build-up, and the PBS correspondent, Martin Smith, visits Taiwan to observe military exercises at, what the Taiwan military proclaims are, the exact landing points for a Chinese invasion. Are viewers really to believe that the Taiwanese would disclose their exact battle plans to a foreign television network or is this just propaganda dressed up as serious analysis?

PBS interviews Chinese academic, Victor Gao, for its program to present the Chinese perspective. The vice-president of the Beijing-based Centre for China and Globalisation, he appears in numerous interviews in Western media. His China views are very hawkish, but no more so (in fact probably far less) than the China sceptics regularly interviewed by the ABC.

Among the interviewees advancing the China-threat proposition in the program were H.R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser; Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser; respected China commentator Orville Schell – without any disclosure that this fluent Chinese-speaking academic studied in Taiwan; and a number of mainland dissidents and opponents of the Chinese regime.

There is nothing inherently wrong with giving Chinese opponents of Xi a voice, but the program does not scrutinise their motives or their views. They are used, as ethnically Chinese people often are, to drive the Western media narrative that China is bad, and the West is good.

The one theme which was clearly dated in this 2024 program — and that the Four Corners producers conveniently ignored — was that China is the great protagonist in a trade war with the US. A program produced last year was aired by the ABC in the midst of the biggest global trade war in history, imposed by Trump’s indiscriminate tariff policy, and there was no pause for thought that a major thrust of this program was completely outdated.

Even though it was biased towards the US point of view, the PBS program had legitimacy. The way the ABC promoted, presented and edited it — not to mention the timing of its broadcast — smacked of China hysteria and a complete bias on the part of the national broadcaster.

Prying the Port of Darwin from Chinese hands

Chinese company Landbridge’s ownership of the Port of Darwin, or more precisely its 99-year lease to operate the port, is subject to so much misreporting it’s impossible to go into detail in this column. As splashed over the front page of the Weekend Australian, with the rest of the media in tow, Peter Dutton and (thanks to a Liberal leak) Anthony Albanese both announced they are going to next month’s election vowing to snatch back the port from Chinese-owned Landbridge. 

However, one mainstream journalist, the Australian Financial Review’s Anthony Macdonald (06 April) has done an excellent job in dissecting the commercial realities of getting the port back into Australian hands.

Macdonald rightly tells readers, “The Port of Darwin is not going to sell like hotcakes. It is small, bitsy, not on the map as far as the world’s big shippers are concerned, and it’s now so wrapped up in government red tape and ‘strategic’ asset-ness that it is hard to see anyone offering the sort of money China’s Landbridge paid in 2015.” He wryly mentions that the 2015 sale of the port attracted 33 interested parties (obviously not all of them serious) and that a 2025 sale was likely to attract just two parties: Landbridge and the Australian Government.

The rest of the coverage is typical legacy media dross, talking up the national security threat of a strategic asset owned by a Chinese company and glossing over the realities. The port’s operation, and ownership, has been cleared by three comprehensive government reviews, one in 2015 when it was sold, another ordered by the Morrison Government and delivered to then defence minister, Peter Dutton, in 2021, and an Albanese Government review in 2023.

With the exception of the AFR piece, the mainstream media has ignored that fact that port has been operating under Chinese ownership for a decade without a single incident.

In fairness to the ABC (07 April), defence correspondent Andrew Greene pressed the defence minister, Richard Marles, to answer a question whether the election policy to get rid of the port’s owners came at the behest of the US. Marles declined to respond.

Abbott on Credlin on China

Former prime minister, Tony Abbott, appeared on Sky “after dark” in an interview (01 April) with, his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, later covered by Murdoch tabloids under the headline, “Tony Abbott argues Australia has been ‘bullied’ and ‘pushed around’ by China under the Albanese Government”.

Speaking specifically about the Chinese research ship, Tan Suo Yi Hao, (claimed but not proven to be a spy ship) crewed by scientists from China, New Zealand, Malaysia, Denmark, Germany, France, Brazil and India, Abbott tells Credlin, “There’s got to be more of a tit-for-tat response to these acts of intimidation from Beijing. Why doesn’t our navy do live-fire exercises off the coast of China? Why don’t our oceanographic ships do these sorts of things in the South China Sea?”

Does our former prime minister really not know we constantly engage in military exercises off the coast of China? If so, then Credlin is the last person who’ll challenge him on that proposition.