Cinema advertisements espousing “Chinese propaganda’’ and socialism are airing in movie theatres across Sydney, including before children’s films such as the latest How To Train Your Dragon sequel. A bizarre advertisement promoting “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and aimed at increasing China’s “soft power’’ over Australia has appeared on the silver screen in a string of theatres.

So who pays for this?

Chinese film distribution company TangRen... is behind the advertisement. The Daily Telegraph yesterday asked TangRen owner Jiayin Yuan if the company was financially supported by the Chinese government and why it was promoting socialism in Australia. She directed the questions to company director Li Tongliang who did not respond. The company’s website states TangRen distributes two thirds of all the Chinese and Korean films shown in Australia and New Zealand. “TangRen promotes Chinese political philosophy and cultural concepts of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the advertisement states.

The propaganda is the carrot. Then there's the stick: a Chinese Australian critic of the regime gets arrested in China:

Yang Hengjun, the Australian-Chinese writer and democracy activist... was detained in China accused of spying.

He now has a friend release a letter:

In the letter, Mr Yang urges activists to "maintain belief in China's democratic future, and, when it doesn't put yourself or your family at risk, to use all your means to push China's democratic development to happen sooner... If I cannot come out or disappear again, remember my articles and let your children read them." The 53-year-old had been living in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, before leaving for Guangzhou on January 18.

Yang admits in that letter he was also arrested by China in 2011 and forced to lie about it:

On Monday, Australian professor Feng Chongyi published an apology that Yang wrote to his supporters on US-based ­Chinese alternative news website Boxun, detailing his regret over how he handled his previous detention in China in 2011... Back then, when Yang was ­released, he denied it occurred and said his phone was turned off and there had been a misunderstanding. Chinese dissidents and critics of the Chinese government abroad were suspicious of his ­explanation, and accused him of being a spy for the Communist Party... In the letter, Yang said he did not reveal that he was detained publicly in order to be able to ­return to China and continue his work writing about Chinese democracy... “I choose to ‘lie’ and let myself be insulted (in order to continue to be) able to do the things which I think right. Can you forgive me?”... Dr Feng, a University of Technology Sydney professor who is also a critic of the Chinese government and has been detained in China, said Yang asked him to release the letter if he was ever detained again.

Chinese Australians here get the message. Here's Jieh-Yung Lo in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Since the news about Chinese-Australian writer and blogger Yang Hengjun broke, I received a call from my mother urging me to stop writing and commentating on issues relating to China. She pointed out it doesn’t matter what I write or how I write it, it will cause “unnecessary complications” and make myself and my immediate family a target.

But it's not just Chinese Australia critics who should worry:

After a quarter-century of researching China, Anne-Marie Brady is a veteran of Chinese government spying and harassment. "I was prepared for pressure in China," says the 52-year-old New Zealander, a well-regarded professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. "But I always felt safe in New Zealand. So that changed." ... First came the pressure on her university. Chinese officials demanded that her immediate superior stop her research... Next, her office was broken into in December 2017.... If she had any doubt that she'd been targeted, she got a detailed warning letter from a concerned friend in the Chinese community to let her know that an official campaign of intimidation against her – and others – was under way.

Brady's home was next... The only things missing were laptops, phones and an encrypted memory stick from her last trip to China... Brady went to her office the next morning to discover that it had been broken into. Again. It was February 15 last year. Brady was scheduled to give testimony to Australia's Parliament that afternoon... to two committees keen to know about, among other things, her groundbreaking research into the Chinese Communist Party's activities in Antarctica... Her work uncovered, for instance, that the Chinese People's Liberation Army had built three military facilities on Australian Antarctic territory... The harassment in her own country seems to have been in angry response to her 2017 report in NZ, titled Magic Weapons: China's Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping.The title is a reference to the fact that President Xi named three "magic weapons" of Chinese Communist Party power – the People's Liberation Army, the party's program to strengthen and build itself, and the party's United Front Work Department that covertly spreads party influence through the overseas Chinese diaspora and elements of Chinese culture and business.

Given this growing Chinese authoritarianism, this seems very unwise: