Mr Sogavare, the pro-China PM. is standing aside after the election result in the Solomons Islands. Read about it here. His governing coalition may still regain power, I suspect this move is try to sway a few more MP's to alight with the government. Mr Sogavare would stay in the background.
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Asia China's growing influence
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Another example of how horrible the Chinese are.
ferball
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Never thought I'd see this song mentioned here.Despite the recent meeting of the PM and President Xi, we clearly are not close to being 'besties'. For some reason after reading the article the words - 'Beware of sonic attack' keep repeating in my head. 11 out of 10 to the PLAN for novelty.
Australian navy divers injured after sonar pulses detected from Chinese warship
Defence Minister Richard Marles says there was an “unsafe” interaction between the HMAS Toowoomba and a People’s Liberation Army-Navy destroyer.www.smh.com.au
LOL.
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The reason I saw that post was cos I was wondering if anyone posted this and after a page or two i assume they didn't.
I lived next to the border and used Canada as a playground for many years so I have a soft spot for the poor Canucks. 
I've seen reports of similar activities in the US. Australia next for the Canadian treatment?
Article is pay-walled so copied a summary I found.
I've seen reports of similar activities in the US. Australia next for the Canadian treatment?
Article is pay-walled so copied a summary I found.
Jonathan Manthorpe: Beijing’s campaign of influence and intimidation in Canadian life goes beyond national elections
Opinion: The fantasy persists among Canada’s political, administrative, business and academic establishments that the CCP has a soft spot for Canada
Author of the article:
Jonathan Manthorpe
Vancouver Sun
Published May 03, 2024
Justice Marie-Josee Hogue listens during the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions in Ottawa. PHOTO BY SEAN KILPATRICK /The Canadian Press
What gets my goat is that after 50 years of willfully ignoring the Chinese Communist Party’s widespread campaign of influence and intimidation in Canada, it’s only after allegations of Beijing tampering in national elections that Parliament has roused itself and got excited.
The irony of this is that Parliament and the political parties have done far more in the last few decades than Beijing could ever hope to accomplish to infantilize themselves and make the Canadian democratic process increasingly irrelevant.
Public opinion polls show consistently and persistently that about 60 per cent of Canadians don’t trust politicians and around a third of Canadians thinks politicians are only in it for personal gain.
At any one time, around half of Canadians don’t trust government in all its forms.
But all that is in my next book, On Canadian Democracy, to be published in June.
Today, the real problem of Beijing’s campaign of influence and intimidation in Canadian life isn’t in Parliament and national elections. It’s among the communities of Canadians of ethnic Chinese heritage and the many minority people subjugated by Beijing. And it’s in the culture of self-delusion among our politicians, senior officials, business people and academics who continue to believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds a special affection for Canada.
But the mandate of the Foreign Interference Commission headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, whose first report was released on May 3, has been tightly drawn so that she is restricted to examining only foreign attempts to distort the outcome of Canadian elections. One must assume this is purposeful.
So what are the real problems of CCP interference in Canada?
As I set out in Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada, it started in China in the 1940s when the CCP came across Canadian missionaries and diplomats. The party quickly realized that many of them were influential back home, but were naïve in the extreme. They could be cultivated and give the People’s Republic of China (PRC) access to the industrialized world and to Canada’s neighbour, the U.S.
And so it was. In the 1960s and onwards the PRC gained almost unfettered access to Canadian industrial and military technology through universities and academic institutes, to the country’s natural and agricultural resources, and an almost iron-cast guarantee of Canadian diplomatic support for Beijing on the international stage.
Ever the opportunist, the CCP used the Canadian establishment’s self-inflicted befuddlement to establish a threatening presence among the ethnic Chinese-Canadian communities here. The message was and is: So far as the CCP is concerned you will always be Chinese. You may think you are Canadian, but blood is thicker than water. The CCP remains your master and will take revenge on you and your family if you defy us.
The era of self-delusion for the Canadian establishment should have come to a screeching halt in December 2018 when the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, Meng Wanzhou, was detained at the Vancouver airport on a U.S. extradition warrant.
Beijing immediately kidnapped, detained and later brought spurious espionage charges against two Canadians in China, Michael Kovrig, the representative of the International Crisis Group, and businessman Michael Spavor.
There couldn’t have been a clearer lesson. Canada can’t have a normal relationship with a regime whose first instinct when there is a problem is to take hostages. Canada and the CCP regime in Beijing don’t share enough civic values to sustain a relationship beyond simple transactional trade in goods.
But that message, even though it knocked the rats off the rafters for most Canadians, doesn’t seem to have got through to our mesmerized elites.
As I set out in the new edition of Claws of the Panda, which examines all that has happened in the five years since the start of the Huawei affair, the fantasy persists among Canada’s political, administrative, business and academic establishments that the CCP has a soft spot for Canada.
It is too much to ask a public inquiry to examine an ephemeral character flaw like terminal self-delusion? But there are several other more tangible problems that must be confronted.
Top of the list must be overturning the influence and intimidation Beijing exerts over some Canadians of Chinese heritage.
Using its political warfare organization, the United Front Works Department, Beijing has taken control of many established Chinese-Canadian community organizations, and now dictates their political activities. These groups have become a fifth column to promote Beijing’s political aims on the streets of Canada, even engaging in setting up Chinese police stations in Vancouver and Toronto, according to Canadian police.
There is an argument to be made that the United Front’s activities are such an affront to Canadian sovereignty that it should be outlawed, and its agents in Beijing’s embassy and consulates expelled.
Another venomous CCP activity is its control of almost all Chinese-language media in Canada. The result of this is most contemptible among new Canadians from Mainland China. This stranglehold blocks their exposure to Canadian society and values, and sustains CCP control over their lives.
The other major area of activity by the CCP in Canada in urgent need of exposure is in our universities, colleges and research institutes.
From the start of diplomatic relations in 1970, students from the PRC came to harvest Canada’s technological expertise. Initially, Canada gave willingly to aid the PRC’s economic development, but it has become a campaign by Beijing to pillage Canada’s intellectual property.
On Monday, Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief David Vigneault told a House of Commons committee that the PRC’s assault on this country’s government institutions, private sector and academia to steal technology is “mind-boggling.”
Most concerning now is the People’s Liberation Army sending military scientists masquerading as graduate students to vacuum up every bit of weapons technology available. Canada has become an inadvertent agent of weapons proliferation.
We don’t need a public inquiry. We have mountains of evidence of the CCP’s campaign to turn Canada into a vassal state.
What we need is political will, and that, unforgivably, is absent.
Jonathan Manthorpe is an author and international affairs commentator.
Another unsafe encounter by the PLAAF, this time off South Korea.
www.abc.net.au
They really are d*cks.
Australian helicopter forced to take evasive action after Chinese fighter detonates flares
A Chinese military jet has detonated flares near an Australian Navy helicopter which was operating in international waters, forcing the pilot to take evasive action to avoid an accident.
www.abc.net.au
Last edited:
China is changing it story, it now says it fired flares at our helicopter because it was spying.
www.abc.net.au
They don't really behave like a superpower, more like a school yard bully.
China changes story on military confrontation, accuses Australia of spying
Beijing shifts its story on the latest confrontation between Chinese and Australian forces, claiming that one of its fighter jets intercepted an Australian helicopter because it was trying to spy on naval exercises in the Yellow Sea.
www.abc.net.au
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Like i have said on many occasions, China can't be trusted on any level.China is changing it story, it now says it fired flares at our helicopter because it was spying.
They don't really behave like a superpower, more like a school yard bully.China changes story on military confrontation, accuses Australia of spying
Beijing shifts its story on the latest confrontation between Chinese and Australian forces, claiming that one of its fighter jets intercepted an Australian helicopter because it was trying to spy on naval exercises in the Yellow Sea.
I think they feel they’re not doing as well in the brinkmanship game as they’d like. So they’re upping the edginess a bit without provoking retaliation. Remember that plane they forced to HK, something like that maybe. Those water cannons and sonic attacks under the new policy as well. Puffing their chests up like a footy pest knowing they won’t get smacked.
Difficult to suggest a helicopter is doing much about upholding UN sanctions against NK in China's EEZ......in the yellow seaChina is changing it story, it now says it fired flares at our helicopter because it was spying.
They don't really behave like a superpower, more like a school yard bully.China changes story on military confrontation, accuses Australia of spying
Beijing shifts its story on the latest confrontation between Chinese and Australian forces, claiming that one of its fighter jets intercepted an Australian helicopter because it was trying to spy on naval exercises in the Yellow Sea.
https://johnmenadue.com/china-dropp...ssie-copter-in-its-eez-whats-wrong-with-that/
He noted that China had ratified the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, established its own EEZ and also recognised those of other states.
But, Keane added, the US has not ratified the convention, but says it will act in accordance with its provisions. “And it established its EEZ within 200 nautical miles of its coast and also recognises the EEZ of other states.”
However, Keane noted, “the US also says it has the right to conduct military and intelligence-collection activities within any country’s EEZ. China disagrees. It says it respects freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, but does not respect the right of foreign governments to conduct military and intelligence-collection activities within its EEZ.
“More to the point, the three major regional maritime powers friendly to Australia — India, Indonesia and the Philippines — agree with China.”
Not Chinas EEZ, it is an area claimed by both China and the Korea's with Korean claims having validity as it is closer to their territory (the problem being the gap is less than 400km so claims cross over so the fair and legally correct solution which as usual Xi opposes is the half way mark).
Even if Xis and those of his well paid tik tok infliluencers like Boreham lies were correct, wouldn't excuse the dangerous actions towards the helicopter.
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'Under international law, military activities by foreign defence forces are permitted passage within a country’s exclusive economic zone, which stretches 12 to 200 nautical miles out to sea. China has sent spy ships to Australia’s EEZ in recent years to observe military drills off the Queensland coast.'
You will note we did not drop flares, play chicken etc when the PLAN ships have been in our EEZ. Lot's of strawman arguments in that article. It makes a big deal of the distance from Oz the HMAS Hobart was, it's a similar distance from the Queensland waters where the PLAN spy ship was to China. Irrelevant.
Hobart was also part of a UN mandate enforcing sanctions on North Korea.
Last point, I can't actually find the exact location of the Hobart, whether it was in the PRC EEZ or 'international waters'. The defence department has described it as international waters, which most would regard as outside the EEZ and they are usually pretty careful with their wording. If you have any better information regarding the location I would like to see it.
John Menadue is known to be very pro China.
Do we have an exact location? Yes sea claims are always a bit dicey, but we're following America which hasn't even signed the convention
Dangerous? A little, if a Navy helicopter can't cope with a warning flare 300m in front of it you're looking like a glorified coast guard
This was the point of the article, free passage is allowed but not intelligence gathering etc, China agrees we do not so we get the PLAN in our waters as a rebuke
Yes, EEZ is international waters by most definitions, and exact location would be useful I don't know
Yep, nice to a have a viewpoint that isn't blatant evil china stuff though
They are both totally crap arguments. Do better.
Anyone who denies the terrible treatment of the Uyghurs by the PRC is a propagandist.
Not you, Menadue. He's always running articles denying it/minimising it. I haven't looked recently but there is nearly always a few, not a credit to him I'm afraid.
Helicopter moving at probably 100 knots closes 300m pretty quickly and getting a flare into its engine intakes means dead crew. Xis minions know that.
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Yep according to him based on quotes from a few Chinese approved research papers, HRW, UN, Amnesty International etc are all anti Chinese and the camps are just "residential factories" and schools to help the poor uighars and keep them safe from terrorists..
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I mean there is a long list of terror attacks, I would consider them resistance against empire like most 'terror' attacks. Is a brutal re-education camp better than Afghanistan/Burma? Take your pick tbh
ABC running an article 'Eric the Chinese Spy'
www.abc.net.au
Eric landed in Australia and walked into the ASIO headquarters. 'I'm a Chinese spy,' he declared
A Chinese spy who is now on Australian soil has revealed his incredible story to Four Corners.
www.abc.net.au
Yeah I just watched that, some very sordid stuff indeed, and the silence from the AFP is deafening.ABC running an article 'Eric the Chinese Spy'
Eric landed in Australia and walked into the ASIO headquarters. 'I'm a Chinese spy,' he declared
A Chinese spy who is now on Australian soil has revealed his incredible story to Four Corners.
