The threat was unmistakable. It is just one of many stories too hard to tell in full because the journalist is terrified that the danger to her family is all too real. Who could blame her? The evidence that Beijing is prepared to punish external criticism is everywhere. Illustration: Andrew Dyson Credit: Just weeks ago Chinese-born Australian writer Yang Hengjun was arrested on a trip to his homeland. His crime is "endangering China's national security". He is being held in a secret prison without charge and denied access to lawyers and his family. Two Canadians have been detained in the wake of that country’s role in holding an executive from Chinese tech-giant Huawei, while she awaits extradition to the United States. Happily, Meng Wanzhou is staying at one of her two Vancouver mansions and has the money to pay Canada’s best silks to contest her case in a transparent legal system.

The Swedish ambassador to China, Anna Lindstedt, has been recalled because of her breathtaking intervention in the bizarre case of Swedish-Chinese bookseller, Gui Minhai, who was snatched from Thailand in 2015. The defrocked ambassador stands accused of conspiring with two Chinese businessmen to buy the silence of Gui’s daughter Angela, in return for a shorter sentence. Fear has become the Chinese Communist Party’s major export as it spreads the worldwide reach of its totalitarian regime. New Zealand is the latest nation to feel its wrath for daring to lock Huawei out of its 5G rollout. Yang Hengjun is being held in a secret prison without charge and denied access to lawyers and his family. Credit:Sanghee Liu Australia is enjoying a brief thaw after a year in the deep freeze. Here Beijing’s ire was driven in no small part by its belief that this country’s media, and some of its political and security class, alerted the world to a new reality, its exercise of “sharp power”. Over the last three years a group of journalists from almost all major Australian media organisations has worked to shine a light on the Chinese Communist Party’s use of sharp power inside our borders.

Intelligence officials can’t yet say which country is responsible but only a handful of nations are capable of launching such a sophisticated attack. The reason China is at the top of the list of suspects is partly due to methods and partly down to form. Beijing’s cyber warriors were behind the last attack on Parliament in 2011 and the one that forced a multimillion-dollar retooling of the Bureau of Meteorology in 2015. Last year the ANU’s computer system was utterly compromised. In a rare move the Five Eyes security alliance of Western nations united in December to name China as guilty of industrial-scale intellectual property theft. Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou is accused by the United States of both bank fraud and wire fraud. She is under house arrest and wears a GPS monitor. Credit:Darryl Dyck As the Australian government moved to plug some of the holes in its defences last year with foreign interference laws, the rest of the Western world watched. And when each nation looked inside its own borders they saw a similar pattern of behaviour by Beijing. Delegations from like-minded nations began turning up in Canberra to learn from our experience.

There is now a Washington consensus on China that transcends Donald Trump. The one idea that now unites Republicans and Democrats and all the agencies of defence, intelligence and state is that China is America’s main strategic threat. Loading A new great game is afoot as an old superpower fades and another rises on our doorstep. China has every right to shape the 21st century but Australia should understand that the values of the new power are very different from the old. Beijing’s opening demand for the price of its investment in our prosperity is our silence. That will include actively suppressing criticism inside our borders and allowing a foreign power to police a Chinese diaspora it sees as its own. Are we prepared to give them that?