Over the past decade or so, something disturbing has been happening in the Chinese community media in this country. The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda bureau has been buying up radio stations and newspapers across the country and channelling the voice of Beijing into them from editorial offices in China. Increasingly, topics on which press discussion is forbidden in China have vanished also from the Chinese language media in our own country.

What used to be a highly diverse set of platforms for community news and commentary is now characterised by a strange and disquieting conformity to the worldview dictated by censors and editors in a foreign country. All this has been happening quietly under the noses of media regulators, with the wider Australian public being entirely oblivious to it. The implications are disquieting and it's time the matter was more thoroughly looked into.

This question of Beijing’s systematic intrusion into the community media of Australia’s Chinese citizens is, of course, a sensitive matter in more ways than one. It’s important, therefore, to emphasise that this has nothing to do with race and should in no way be seen as a reflection on the loyalties of the overwhelming majority of Chinese Australians to this country. The questions at issue are liberal values and sovereignty. My sources include well-informed members of the Chinese community who, in the nature of the case, do not wish to be named.

What Beijing is doing is of a piece with its more general drive to extend its sway in the region in terms of both hard and soft power. But this particular initiative is blatant interference in Australia’s internal affairs of a kind that would never be tolerated on the receiving end by China and is, in fact, rendered impossible there by the Party’s tight monopoly of news media. It is a strategic move on Beijing’s part to create what can only be described as a fifth column inside our borders. It should be scouted out and the Party sent packing.

The problem we have in this matter needs to be understood in both historical and strategic perspective. There has been a Chinese community in Australia since the 1850s. Until recently, its community media were diverse and free of any co-ordinated control from Beijing. Only recently has that changed. For over a hundred years, Chinese language newspapers have been providing forums for unfettered discussion of all kinds of subjects, from white Australian racism to prospects for political and social change in China.