[illustriousbear]

Australia is riddled with this kind of Chinese pressure, particularly at universities.

My university went as far as to install an ugly out of place confucious statue. This was followed by being pressured to cancel a talk from the Dalai Llama. Then more recently PRC supporting students engaged in suppression of pro Hong Kong students with no consequences.

[stjohnswarts]

Just like Confucius centers that spread propaganda like in the USA? I have no problem if they want to set up a private NGO but they shouldn't be on public university grounds or be connected to them or contributing money to public universities.

[throwawaysea]

It's remarkable how much soft power China has. I've seen some Australian news videos on YouTube that highlight the issues you're referring to. In America, I've been seeing the same, although in a quieter way:

China is seemingly the only power that can quiet the American far left, who have for the past several years been obsessed with "justice" and "equity", EXCEPT when it comes to China. As a recent example, LeBron James took to Twitter to speak against new voting laws in Georgia (https://thepostmillennial.com/lebron-james-boycott-georgia-m...), and drew much criticism in Twitter replies because of his hypocrisy on more clear cut issues of human rights. He's been mostly quiet on the NBA's ties to China, and has even made comments in the past that have been described as repackaged Chinese government propaganda (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/what-did-lebron-james-...). Similarly, Apple is known for being "woke", and has a history of left-leaning political activism like curating app store content or enacting changes like replacing the pistol emoji with a squirt gun emoji (https://www.newsweek.com/apple-replaces-gun-emoji-water-pist...). But Apple and others reportedly lobbied against bills that would ban the use of forced labor (https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/30/apple-nike-coca-cola-lo...). Tim Cook has also sat quietly as over 150 Asian activist groups asked him for more concrete action (https://www.imore.com/coalition-activist-groups-pen-open-let...).

I guess in the end everyone only cares about issues to the extent it does not affect their own finances, and to the extent they can continue feeling membership in their political tribe even if they're being unprincipled.

[brendyn]

I went to UTAS and they also have a random out of place Confucius statue, are you from a different University? I heard some rumour that it was donated kinda randomly, and they didn't realise how big it was going to be.

[meowface]

>PRC supporting students engaged in suppression of pro Hong Kong students with no consequences.

Could you give more details, here? What were the PRC-supported students doing against the pro-Hong Kong students, and how did the university respond? That sounds pretty insane.