China

In the dead of night one of the most prominent memorials to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Pillar of Shame, was removed from Hong Kong University this week. The eight-metre high statue – commemorating the thousands killed in Beijing’s brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in June 1989 – was filmed being loaded into a container late on Wednesday night. It is not the only piece of public art to have been targeted. At dawn on Christmas Eve a bronze ‘Goddess of Democracy’ – a replica of a statue built by students on Tiananmen square – was dismantled by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. And at Lingnan University a wall relief featuring the ‘Tank man’ was removed during the night.

Did a senior Chinese politician rape one of the country's leading tennis stars? That certainly seemed to be the allegation from Peng Shuai, the former women's world doubles champion. In a social media post in November, she wrote about her three-year affair with former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli: ‘You took me into your bedroom, wanting to have sex with me. That afternoon I cried and originally didn’t agree.’ Now Ms Peng seems to have retracted her statement, telling a Singaporean newspaper that she had 'never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me'. But scepticism remains; perhaps because of the Chinese state's response to her November essay.

Signs of the enervating weakness of the west’s governing elites aren’t that hard to find but the case of the Winter Olympics may be the most demeaning. The UK and Canada have followed the US and Australia in announcing a diplomatic boycott of February’s games in Beijing over China’s human rights record. It’s a crushing blow to the communist dictatorship: Xi Jinping has been unable to sleep or dress himself since learning that the deputy head of the British mission will be skipping the mixed doubles luge final.

On Monday in the city of Bridgetown, Prince Charles will be forced to witness the spectacle of Barbados officially becoming a republic as it removes the Queen as its head of state. The former British colony became independent in 1966, but last year the country’s Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced that the country would have its own president, though it will remain a member of the Commonwealth. The decision appears to have been influenced to some degree by China’s activities. Barbados has signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while an office to facilitate investment in Barbados has opened in Beijing. Prime Minister Mia Mottley calls President Xi ‘very engaging’.

The Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai sits in a crowded restaurant surrounded by friends and her coach, who is going through next year’s training plan with her. ‘Tomorrow is November 20th’, he says, in a seeming non-sequitur. ‘No, tomorrow is the 21st’, one of her friends corrects him. ‘Oh yes, oh yes, the 21st’.  This bizarre scene takes place in a new video released by several state-sources in China this afternoon, with one source even tagging the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic, Marin Cillic and others on Twitter. https://twitter.com/li_ding1/status/1462083212402835459?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw This is hysterical amateurism – but all the more sinister for it The message of the video is clear.

‘The end of coal is in sight’ declared Alok Sharma, president of this year’s climate summit, to delegates in Glasgow attending COP26. Sharma was heralding the fact that more than 40 countries had agreed at the conference to phase coal out in the coming decades. But (and it is a very big but) along with the US and Australia, two of the world’s largest producers and consumers of coal declined to sign: India and China. COP26 came to an end this week. But in the media coverage of the conference, there has been zero effort made to understand why two of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels have pushed back at attempts to reduce coal use. It is much more comfortable to run stories about how poor countries around the world are suffering instead.

Normally, if the response to a speech of mine was that it had been a ‘despicable and insane performance’ from a ‘failed and pitiful politician’, I’d question what went wrong. But since the comments came from Chinese communists about an address I’d made in Taiwan, it’s hard not to feel some pride. Two years ago, I’d been asked to speak at the Yushan Forum, the Taiwanese government’s annual showcase for their international links. Then, I was worried about the optics of calling out Beijing’s behaviour from Taipei so I pleaded diary difficulties. I didn’t want to be accused of complicating Australia’s relations with our prickly largest customer.