There was a time when Australian writings on China were first-class._

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C.P. Fitzgerald’s classic, for example, ‘The Birth of Communist China’ gave us a unbiassed insight to the factors that propelled the Communist forces to their 1949 victory.

Postwar, the few who managed to get into China gave us a useful view of the various insanities that gripped the early Communist regime - the anti-sparrow campaign, the Great Leap Forward (or rather the great leap backwards and the resulting national famine), the madness of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and so on. They showed us the stupidity and cruelty indoctrinated Chinese can inflict on each other.

Today, just as we finally face a reformed China deserving serious attention, we are being hit with the childish nonsense spawned by our ’security agencies’ at public expense. Senior Fellow for East Asia in the right wing Lowy Institute, Richard McGregor, writing in the magazine Australian Foreign Affairs warns how China’s electric vehicles in Australia, the popular BYD for example, may be Trojan horses for China’s electronic penetration off our society.

The same issue of the magazine has an article warning darkly how China is using AI for persuasive purposes.

McGregor introduces his sources. ‘In Canberra,’ he writes, ‘where the markets are refracted through a national security lens, the rise of BYD is not just a story of a competitive car market. If you sit in our national security agencies, a car is not just a car. Nor are solar inverters, drones, wind turbines, TikTok videos and even the cranes that lift containers on our docks.’

‘They are, they are all, in different ways, either bundles of data or parts of industrial systems managed by software controlled by external actors.’

Controlled by external actors? Presumably China. So that car is not just a car. It, together with the crane that lifts it off the docks, are working for China’s spydom.

This information comes from our Canberra-based ‘national security experts’. These are the people whose salaries depend on finding, or inventing, threats to Australian security. They were wrong in the past, over Vietnam for example. Sit in their comfortable Canberra offices and you will discover more threats.

One wonders how our budding national security experts will be employed now that Tokyo is starting to turn nationalistic. For years Canberra seems to have had some arrangement whereby would-be ’experts’ would be channeled through Tokyo, presumably for anti-communist, anti-China briefings. While in Tokyo they would say they were Australian journalists but they seemed to write little. Back in Australia they would emerge as experts on the Chinese threat.

Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor and Peter Hartcher writing for Fairfax media both seem to be graduates of this scheme, though McGregor has some books to his credit and also claims Taiwan/China experience. Both spent time in Tokyo when I was there but at the Tokyo Press Club we were hardly aware of their existence. Where were they? What were they doing? Being briefed by Japan’s notorious anti-China hawks - Nanjing massacre deniers etc.- it seems.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.