Kevin Rudd, once a firm China sceptic, has become Australia’s first (former) prime minister to openly consort with the ruling Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).
The UFWD is responsible for spreading Chinese government interests in offshore nations — including Australia.
UFWD groups are disguised with dull and prosaic names, but their real purpose is to infiltrate nations across the world to influence business, politics, policy and education, and report directly back to Beijing.
Rudd, who was PM from 2007-2009 and again in 2012, spoke in the Communist Party’s UFWD’s Central Institute of Socialism in November 2017. In October 2018, he was greeted as a “rock star” according to a report in the AFR at the United Front-sponsored Australia-China Future Forum.
But it was his appearance this year with the leadership of the UFWD body Australia China Economics, Trade and Culture Association (ACETCA) that set China watchers abuzz. At an ACETCA event in Fujian, China, in June he was seen with Lin Yi, chair of Shenglong (Aqualand) and permanent honorary chair of ACETCA.
The connection with ACETCA is now very much a Rudd family business. Rudd’s youngest son Marcus is a principal at advisory firm Tam and Rudd Consulting. His business partner Ian Tam is a prominent United Front identity in Australia and vice-chairman of ACETCA.
Crikey understands Tam is the driving force behind the group. At the First International Grasslands Spring Festival Evening on Sydney Harbour, Tam was noted as the “representative of former Australian PM Kevin Rudd“.
Rudd himself is the head of New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute, which has a laser focus on China. His daughter Jessica, an author, is a lifestyle ambassador for Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group, a conglomerate closely connected to the CPP.
She sells Australian products into China via her Jessica’s Suitcase website, which is on the Alibaba platform. Her husband Albert Tse, who was working at Macquarie Group in Beijing less than a decade ago as an investment banker, now has his own own private equity firm, Wattle Hill Capital, that has the backing of several wealthy Chinese families.
Rudd was also made chair of the Chinese North International University Alliance international advisory board in March 2019, and last month was elected chairman of the China-backed Global Sharing Economy Forum.
In light of this, it’s worth noting that on November 25, Kevin Rudd launched Peter Hartcher’s Quarterly Essay, “Red Flag”, about Chinese influence and how Australia should deal with it, now the dominant narrative of China-Australia relations.
What happened to the feisty Rudd of yesteryear, who took on China over Tibet, and branded the Communist Party as “trying to rat-fuck us” after they sank the Copenhagen Climate Conference? What happened to the Rudd who described the country as a potential military threat in a 2009 defence white paper?
Now he’s downplaying concerns over Chinese influence in Australia.
Rudd said it was “kind of crazy to overreact and to get into reds under the bed land, to get into yellow peril land” regarding warnings from Australian security chiefs about Chinese influence. It’s hard to fathom a former prime minister describing credible information about the Chinese government trying install operatives in Australian Parliament as an “overreaction.”
Sure, Labor supported the foreign interference legislation, Rudd admits, but adds quickly that “should not result in some sort of anti-Chinese domestic political witch-hunt”.
But he failed to tell the gathered throng about his connections with UFWD organisations, that he has assiduously rebuilt his ties with Beijing and worked his way back into its good graces.
By 2017, Rudd was in deep. He started repeating a party propaganda line, claiming that under President Xi Jinping there had been more freedom of religion in China. In fact, under Xi, religious diversity is being repressed with an aggression not seen since the time of Mao Zedong. As well, Rudd has barely issued a murmur of the incarceration of 1.2 million Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang gulags.
There is, of course, another path for former political leaders — one that people like former US president Jimmy Carter have taken. And that is to use cachet and influence to work for the rights and freedoms of people trapped in authoritarian systems.
One person who could use Rudd’s help right now is writer Yang Hengjun who, it was revealed last week, has had his interrogation regime ratcheted up as Chinese authorities strive to force a “confession”, quite possibly through torture.
But that isn’t the sort of thing Rudd would want to chat about over a bottle of Moutai with his mates at the United Front.
As a Crikey subscriber and someone who began working as a journalist in 1957, I am passionate about the importance of independent media like Crikey. I met a lot of Australians from many walks of life during my career and did my best to share their stories honestly and fairly with their fellow citizens.
And I never forgot how important it is to hold politicians to account. Crikey does that – something that is more important now than ever before in Australia.
Join us and save up to 50%
Subscribe before June 30 and choose what you pay for a year of Crikey. Save up to 50% or, chip in extra and get one of our limited edition Crikey merch packs.
Join Now
Leave a comment
In the era of Trump and Morrison, Australia needs people like Kevin Rudd to bring balance to the mud-slinging and hyperbole ‘Henny-Penny’ policy propagated by the LNP and shameless people such as yourself.
You seem to forget that people who are of an age with myself have gone through all this type of propaganda back in the days of the former USSR. Rudd is quite correct in his behaviour towards and ties to, China.
Good heavens all of the frontbench and half the back bench of the LNP could be considered ‘agents of foreign influence’ in their promotion of United States values and mores!
Try harder, laddie, you haven’t convinced me of your probity and neutrality.
Goodness, what an uninteresting diatribe about an entirely unsurprising number of connections between Kevin Rudd and the China’s United Front body, which unsurprisingly seeks to promote China’s interests overseas. This body seems strikingly like the AmericanAustralian Association, which has exactly the same suite of activities aimed at promoting ties between Australia and America. Are we to see connections between all post war Australian PMs and this Association as a reason to declare all our PMs agents of American influence in Australia? If not, might we give Kevin Rudd a break, despite the word being out that the US wants to confront China and that US agents of US influence in our media want to write nasty things about people who urge that we not go as far overboard in hostility to China as some in the US want?
The man can’t help himself! He must have been frightened by a plate of fried rice or a dimsim as a child!
I quite like the idea of declaring all Australian PMs since WW2 as agents of American influence (except Gough of course – and you know what happened to him). However there probably needs to be a new category – agents of Murdock influence.
Thank you Peter for your concise and balanced response and jolting our memories of what Gough stood for.
A vision of an Australia for ALL Australians.
Yes the great Gough who was never shy of standing up for OUR interests and pursuing them on the world stage, his recognition of China, for example, ahead of the US was a great boost to our international standing.
It is well documented how his criticism of the US, in not only ending our slavish commitment by the LNP to the Vietnam War, but also his concern over the role of US bases on our soil like Pine Gap & questioning their roles, played a big part in his demise with CIA involvement.
Murdoch’s role in the making and breaking of Gough and his government is also well documented.
No doubt he would be turning in his grave to see the unfathomable depths that not only the Labor Party, but the country has descended to in poor governance and the trashing of his vision.
One interesting little item about Gough’s overthrow is that there I clear evidence of its being at least a bit of a CIA thing. Khemlani, who conveniently flew into Australia to trigger blocking supply in the Senate, was later in life convicted of a criminal offence in the US and then received an immediate US government pardon. That was a privilege for people who had acted as agents of the US government.
I love the use of terms “openly consort” and “infiltrate” I guess OK as long as these terms are used to characterise American influence and monitoring.
I still am intrigued that the following receives no press or even a reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-peril.html?hp
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-spied-on-chinese-government-and-networking-firm-huawei-a-960199.html
Has the treasonous Andrew Robb? Think Darwin.
agreed
Oh come on old greybearded one I was hoping for a bit more enlightenment !
Certainly its a travesty that Landbridge / China was allowed to purchase (99 yr lease) the port of Darwin and the manner in which it was transacted. No worse surely than the US operation and control over Pine Gap ?
It defies comprehension how both these impingement’s on our sovereignty were waved through and I have failed to hear or see the obvious question asked –
Who are the main beneficiaries from the ownership/ lease of these facilities & what is their purpose?
Surely blind freddy can see that in the event of an escalation in hostilities between the US and China, that these countries will be protecting these respective assets, thus making ourselves a prime target !
I’m afraid China is Crikey’s real blind spot. Ok, you don’t like it, for good reasons. You might want to counter its influence. But China seeking to ‘influence and report back to Beijing’ is perfectly acceptable and normal. As long as it is above board (the Rudd involvement is all in the open) and declared if it is about political donations. Why not? What’s the Fulbright scholarship, or the hundreds of US-Australia trade, academic, research, whatever associations. China should try and influence Australia in its favour; Australia should do the same, in fact it does. It is one thing to hold Rudd up and say: do you support China, that authoritarian power. Fine. But to somehow say that neither he nor anyone else should do this because this is ‘foreign influence’ – ie. working against the core interests of Australia through subterfuge, espionage and other nefarious ways – and thus Rudd is some sort of unAustralian traitor. That, dear Crikey, is McCarthyism.
Spot on – not sure why Crikey are choosing to see things through such a tired old paradigm.
Yes!!!!!
After looking at his page you can see a theme – worthy of News corp!
https://www.crikey.com.au/author/e4bee55e-7ee3-4e00-8f7f-fa437c985eae/
Commenting on one of his China-bashing piffle, I did state he must be working at Crikey because he couldn’t get a gig at Newscorp.
They already have enough xenophobic ratbags!
Commenting on one of his China-bashing piffle, I did state he must be working at Crikey because he couldn’t get a gig at Newscorp.
They already have enough xenophobic ratbags!
Yes, Crikey does seem to want to fan hostility to China, after Pompeo said that Australia should not let a bag of beans deter it from supporting the US. They began with a so-called “inquiry” that revealed that some people who are hostile to China “feel” they are being followed. This was so in-depth that i was stunned. How good is that inquiry, I asked myself. Crikey continued to show the caption for this “inquiry”. If it were me, I would be too embarrassed to show it ever again. Various Crikey writers have chipped in too, with articles that suggest China is a “hostile power” and another that suggested Australia should confront China because we, quite justifiably in some cases, have deep disagreements with them. I cannot see myself why Australia cannot keep on doing what we have done for years and just simply ignore, politely of course, the US attempt to confront China. Perhaps some members of the LNP will talk to Crikey more if they do “the right thing” on China.