Hon. Michael Danby, MP Canada

Michael Danby

Let me echo what was said in the previous session. This cause of Tibet among the population and even in parliaments around the world has not been stronger in the past. It has grown. But over the last 15 years no Australian Prime Minister of either political party, no foreign minister will now meet the Dalai Lama despite many people in their own party pushing very hard for them to do that. I traced the change in attitudes to two events.

The most important is the rise of Xi Jinping. Since he became the virtual dictator of China, Beijing’s power has grown all over the region. So we can have popular support in Chile, or Australia, or Canada or USA. But what we face now is not just vastly increased Chinese economic and military power but something Mr. Garches has referred to a sharp power. The Chinese don’t have the kind of soft power -British sense of humour or the French food that appeals to the rest of the world. They have old style Stalinist subversion which they call United Work Department. This is a mixture of propaganda and agitation.

In Australia, they use the 900,000 Chinese Australian communities to act as fronts for the Chinese embassy. Of course most of the Australian Chinese are very loyal to Australia. But a few years ago when the Beijing Olympics were on, tens of thousands of Chinese students with �lags supplied by the embassy picketed the poor Tibetan students who were protesting as the Beijing torch came to Australia. That was symbolically the point at which things got a lot worse. In my view you can’t distinguish the Tibetan issue from the most