In a year that has brought little besides crushed hopes, I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised to wake up on Tuesday to the news that former Legislative Council representative Ted Hui had been granted a visa to settle in Australia, where he plans to continue his advocacy work for Hong Kong.

One reason that I was excited to see Hui come to Australia is because he is a legislator for whom I have a great degree of respect.

Hui led the charge on opposing the passage of the idiotic National Anthem Law, as well as voicing his firm opposition to the extradition amendment disaster and of course the sad, sad, sad National Security Law that has turned Hong Kong’s political and legal systems into the laughingstock of the world.

And although we have never met nor spoken, Ted Hui and I have indeed shared a moment together: we were both stuck in the lobby of Lippo Plaza on the afternoon of June 12, 2019, having been chased off the streets by out-of-control police.

I remember still being in a bit of shock, having just witnessed the first steps in the Hong Kong Police Force’s baffling transformation into Carrie Lam’s junta, as well as having just experienced my first taste of tear gas: not the most pleasant experience, I must admit. Yet as my mind raced through the jarring events of the preceding hours, I glanced to my side and saw Ted Hui standing in silence at the windows of Lippo Plaza watching the police fire round upon round of tear gas on the crowds outside. Seeing the look of concern and pain in his eyes, I remember thinking that Hui is precisely the type of legislator that Hong Kong needs.

Yet Hui is more than the type of legislator Hong Kong needs, especially because he is no longer the type of legislator that Hong Kong can have. Hui is, more broadly, the type of legislator that the democratic world needs, and this is the second reason that I am excited to see him come to Australia.

People might have the impression that Ted Hui needs Australia, and this is of course true in a sense: considering the rapidly deteriorating political environment in Hong Kong today, it was clearly no longer possible for him to continue his work there, and Australia provides a safe space for him to settle down and continue his advocacy.

Yet far more than Ted Hui needing Australia, I would argue that Australia needs Ted Hui: Australia needs his insights, courage, and guidance to develop effective policy for Hong Kong and for China more generally.

As we all know, the Australian government has made significant and laudable progress in recent years in coming to see the Chinese Communist Party more clearly for what it is: an imperialist power openly engaged in genocide that poses an unprecedented threat to freedoms and rights on a global scale. Yet despite these promising developments, there remain considerable segments of Australian society, including much of the business and academic worlds, who will go to any lengths possible in order to resuscitate their imaginary nostalgic vision of China.

To do so, they tell us that Australia has been unnecessarily provocative in recent years and unwisely angered China. They tell us that no matter what anyone says, Australia’s future is to be found in China, and that we need to make a few compromises to return to a healthy dialogue. And they tell us that all of this talk about PRC influence and interference is simply Yellow Peril talk.

Ted Hui’s story, and indeed the story of Hong Kong as a whole, show us what absolute nonsense all of these assertions are.

Hong Kong’s experience shows that the Peking lobby’s self-flagellating obsession with Australia’s “provocations” denies all agency to the real driver of the worsening relationship: China. There is no “provocation” that can justify what the CCP is doing to Hong Kong today: breaking all of its legally guaranteed promises and destroying the city’s democratic and rule of law-based institutions. The CCP does not do these things because it was provoked: it does these things because it is obsessed with control and was always already going to do this.

Hong Kong’s experience also reminds us that despite the eager admonitions of our local dictatorship whisperers, no compromise with the Chinese Communist Party will ever be enough for it to back down and accept basic rights and freedoms, whether in Hong Kong or in Australia. In Hong Kong, one compromise after another was made as the people of this city worked peacefully within the law for their legally guaranteed outcome of an open and fair vote and the maintenance of their rights and freedoms.

The only problem was that the entire system was rigged against them and China never had any interest in acknowledging those legally guaranteed rights: one cannot “talk reason” with a power that places itself above and beyond all reason and restraint. Granting Peking the power to determine the conditions and nature of dialogue is a losing approach for Hong Kong and Australia: the sole difference being that Australia still has a choice in these matters.

Finally, Hong Kong’s experience demolishes the Peking lobby’s favorite mantra: that concerns about PRC influence and interference are the product of Sinophobia. Thinking in terms of ethnicity, Hong Kong is an extremely unlikely site for widespread Sinophobia. At the same time, thinking in terms of an understanding of China’s threat to accountable democratic institutions, Hong Kong is also a place where the majority of the population fully understands the evil that we are dealing with when we deal with Peking. Concerns about China, its threat to global freedoms, and its accelerating expansion abroad emerge not from racial animosities but rather from the deeply troubling and increasingly obvious realities of the PRC’s political system: they are not racial imaginaries, but rather the product of deep understanding of this horrid system.

Australia will thus, I believe, be good for Ted Hui, and I am happy to see him move here and continue his advocacy work for Hong Kong and its people. At the same time, having Ted Hui here will in turn be good for Australia, as the ongoing public discussion of the country’s relationship with China will be enriched by his insights into the destruction that the Chinese Communist Party can unleash upon a free society.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University and the author of the forthcoming book Two Systems Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong)

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