By Alexander Joske and Philip Wen
The day before a gala celebration marking China's National Day was held in Canberra last week, organisers found dozens of posters they had put up at the Australian National University to promote the event defaced with fluorescent green paint.
In large Chinese characters, vandals had smeared the words "Tiananmen Students" along with the numbers "six" and "four", a reference to the Communist Party's darkest of stains: peaceful, student-led pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square suppressed in a hail of gunfire and bloodshed on June 4, 1989.
As a crowd of bemused onlookers gathered, the event's incensed organisers, from the university's Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), hastily tore down the defaced posters.
A Chinese student at ANU, Erica Zhao, said, "It's quite cowardly to vandalise the posters behind people's backs," adding, "Australia is a place for free speech. If they felt bad about the posters they could have just spoken out rather than play tricks.
The defaced China National Day posters at Australian National University
"It [the Tiananmen Square massacre] was not ANU Chinese students' fault."
The act of vandalism may appear innocuous in isolation, but campus spats of a political nature among Chinese students in Australia are exactly the type of incidents Beijing increasingly seeks to monitor.
As larger numbers of Chinese students study abroad, and are exposed to unrestricted and frequently critical media coverage of the Chinese government, greater efforts are being made to ensure they do not return with new-found opposition to the Communist Party.
A directive handed down in January by the Ministry of Education emphasised the importance of "patriotic education" in ensuring all university students – even those studying overseas – "always follow the party".
Cheng Jingye, China's new ambassador to Australia,with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in August. Credit: Chinese Embassy
"Assemble the broad numbers of students abroad as a positive patriotic energy," the document says. "Build a multidimensional contact network linking home and abroad — the motherland, embassies and consulates, overseas student groups, and the broad number of students abroad — so that they fully feel that the motherland cares."
Official CSSA chapters which maintain close links with Chinese embassies and consulates proliferate on university campuses worldwide, and are increasingly vocal in countries with large Chinese student populations such as Australia.
The Chinese embassy and consulates in Australia routinely help fund and provide venues for major CSSA student events. The CSSA at Sydney University, for example, says on its website that one of its key aims is to help the "Education Office of the Chinese embassy to organise all forms of activities relating to Chinese students".
One former CSSA executive at an Australian university told Fairfax Media that executives from universities all around the country are flown, at the embassy's cost, for regular conferences with Chinese officials on collaborating with the embassy and on the latest party doctrines.
The association's executives are prolific in their output of pro-government statements, with former president Zhu Runbang recently penning an article for state-owned media company China Radio International entitled, "Overseas Chinese and Chinese Students in Australia Support the Chinese Government's Legal Rights in the South China Sea."
Last year, the president of the ANU CSSA allegedly intimidated and yelled at staff in ANU's pharmacy for stocking the Epoch Times, a dissident newspaper with ties to the Falun Gong, until they let him throw the papers out.
Mention of the Tiananmen massacre is strictly censored online and in school textbooks in mainland China, and for many young Chinese students they only learn of the full extent of the events of 1989 when they move overseas for study.
The defaced posters incident at ANU appeared to result in a heightened security presence at the "I Love China 2.0" Chinese National Day gala, held at the Canberra Theatre on Thursday night with Chinese ambassador Cheng Jingye the keynote speaker.
A group of men in black suits, communicating via walkie talkies, appeared to be operating independently to uniformed security guards at the venue.
Focusing their attention on attendees they considered unwelcome, they repeatedly followed and harassed a student journalist for ANU's campus newspaper Woroni, even tailing him when he went to the toilet.
Both the CSSA and Canberra Theatre declined to comment on the security situation at the event.
The night's programme featured schoolchildren waving Chinese flags as they chorused "this is your birthday, my Motherland". Another patriotic song belted out the line "the black-eyed, black-haired, and yellow-skinned are forever the descendants of the dragon".
And in a video package aired that evening, an interview with a young ANU student was shown as a shining example for all those watching. Having immigrated at age five and holding Australian citizenship, she was asked whether she considered herself more Chinese or Australian.
"More Chinese," came her quick reply.
With Kelsey Munro