By John Garnaut
ON FEBRUARY 19, a Chinese-language news portal, the American-registered Boxun, published an anonymous letter calling for protesters to gather in 12 Chinese cities to join the ''jasmine revolution'' protests sweeping the Middle East. That website has hardly functioned since.
''Two hours after we published that letter, we received a very serious 'denial of service' cyber attack,'' says the proprietor of Boxun, who goes by the pen name Wei Shi.
Unidentified men surround a foreign journalist in a Beijing shopping street in February in the aftermath of calls for a jasmine protest, organised through the internet.
''It's still happening,'' says Wei. ''We have no evidence on who is behind it, but I was told it was by the national security section of the Ministry of Public Security.''
It is well known that the Chinese Communist Party can go to extreme lengths to control the flow of information and the spread of ideas within China's borders.
The word ''jasmine'' has been expunged from the Chinese mainland media and internet since protests took root in Tunisia and Egypt, while dozens of people have been detained.
But it is less well known that the same word has been weeded out of hundreds of Chinese-language media publications abroad.
The Communist Party cannot stop any of the 40 million-strong Chinese diaspora from gaining access to information, but it spares no effort in channelling their information sources and ''guiding'' their opinions along patriotic lines.
Nowhere are its efforts more advanced than in Australia, where the ethnic Chinese population tripled to 670,000 in the 20 years to 2006, according to census figures. Most recent arrivals are from the People's Republic, and they are joined by 160,000 Chinese students.
Among recent arrivals, especially those with limited English and who feel adrift from mainstream Australian culture, Beijing has found a willing audience.
''Linguistically and culturally, they still identify with the 'motherland','' says Wanning Sun, professor of Chinese media and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). ''They are consuming mainland news and installing satellite dishes in their backyards to watch Chinese television. Their cultural needs are acutely felt - and met quite quickly.''
Australia is home to an astonishing array of locally run Chinese-language media, as well as a seemingly endless stream of content direct from China. Imported People's Republic of China (PRC) media is gaining penetration and the locally generated content is increasingly converging with it.
''The Chinese-language media in Australia and elsewhere is becoming more and more pro-PRC,'' says Jonathan Hassid, an expert in Chinese media, also at UTS.
Hassid cites changing demographics, the pull of stories about a rising China and also Beijing's indefatigable efforts to buy soft power. Beijing can sometimes strike with an iron fist, exemplified by the alleged cyber attacks on Boxun and the visa threats, physical intimidation and added layers of electronic interference meted out to foreign journalists in China since the jasmine revolution letter posted on February 19. However, it usually prefers the velvet glove.
Newspapers remain central to Chinese Australian life, as they have been since the gold rush days, but the big money from Beijing is going to the Communist Party's electronic media.
''Overseas Chinese are an important vehicle of 'public diplomacy','' says Li Hong, chief editor of overseas Chinese news at CRI, one of China's few English-language portals, in an essay published just after the first calls for jasmine protests in China on February 21. ''So there is a feasible and realistic urgency for strengthening propaganda targeting overseas Chinese.''
CRI doesn't have a licence to directly operate in Australia, but it has managed to insert its content into every Chinese-language radio station in the country. It has done so by teaming with an ambitious Melbourne entrepreneur called Tommy Jiang.
''We share some of our time and they train our staff,'' Jiang says. ''Sometimes we can send people there on exchange and they don't charge us for training with pronunciation, operating the equipment, editing and interviewing.''
Jiang's Austar International Media Group started with Chinese-language programming in Melbourne and now has stations in Perth, Canberra and Brisbane. It has also bought eight Chinese newspapers.
Jiang says he ''shares time'' with CRI and CRI says it is setting up branch offices. Either way, listeners to Chinese-language radio in Australia receive most of their news and current affairs programs direct from Beijing.
China's fourth-ranked leader Jia Qinglin toured Australia last week. One of his jobs is to encourage and entice Chinese media tycoons to bend their editorial standards in Beijing's favour.
Much of this work is done through the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an institution sometimes mistaken for a legislature.
''The CPPCC is a patriotic united front organisation of the Chinese people,'' as Jia once put it.
Jia's United Front Department also oversees the ministry-level Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. Both institutions have assisted the generous political donor and philanthropist Dr Chau Chak Wing, who is also the proprietor of the Australian New Express Daily.
Chau is a member of the Guangdong provincial CPPCC, while the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office appointed him to lead three Guangdong province business associations. Such status has given Chau connections and opportunities that may have helped him build his billion-dollar real estate empire and his controlling stake in a Chinese newspaper, Guangzhou's New Express Daily (a privilege usually denied to private Chinese citizens, let alone an Australian passport holder).
For his part, Chau claims to uphold higher censorship standards in China than many of the party's own media outlets.
''The Chinese government has found this newspaper very commendable because we never have any negative reporting,'' Chau told The Age, in his only media interview, in 2009. ''It doesn't deal much about politics, mainly about people's life.''
Chau's daughter, Winkie, edits the Sydney offshoot, Australian News Express Daily. She politely declined an interview but a former employee says she sticks to her father's cautious editorial line even in Australia.
''She told me she didn't want any trouble,'' says Ash Gao, a reporter who recently left the paper. ''She's very afraid of bringing trouble to her father.''
Over the past six weeks the Australian paper has managed to avoid publishing the word ''jasmine'' on its website or, it seems, in its pages, in contrast to China coverage in the non-Chinese language press. Nor, it seems, has the paper reported on the detention of the world-renowned artist Ai Weiwei, or the temporary disappearance of the Sydney writer Yang Hengjun, or the detention, beatings and disappearances of dozens of others in the continuing Chinese crackdown on civil society - which, human rights groups say, is the most ruthless in more than a decade.
''The Chinese consulate cannot control and cannot block, but it has ways to make newspapers pay for mistakes,'' says Gao. ''They won't introduce you to the state-owned companies that take the big ads and they'll block your website back in China.''
And Gao makes a point that is repeated by many overseas Chinese: readers of Chinese-language papers tend to be proud of the progress China has made and critical of the negative portrayals they see in Western media.
Chau's Australian New Express Daily is probably the third-largest Chinese-language newspaper by circulation. The paper's self-censorship appears more extreme than that of its Australian competitors, but is not unique.
The biggest-selling Chinese newspaper in Australia is the Sing Tao Daily, one of 16 global editions in 100 countries controlled by a Hong Kong newspaper stable of the same name. Sing Tao used to lean towards Taiwan until Beijing began to tug at its purse strings.
Beijing's United Front Department has long courted the paper's publisher, the cigarette tycoon Charles Ho, as he is possibly the single most important link in its overseas Chinese propaganda chain. It has appointed Ho not only to the national CPPCC but also to the standing committee of that body and it has opened doors for him that are usually reserved for mainland state-owned companies.
SING Tao was given a media distribution joint venture with the Communist Party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, which its website describes as ''the most authoritative news organisation in the PRC''.
Mak Yin-Ting, head of the Hong Kong journalists' association, says cozy deals between media tycoons and Beijing are now the norm in the reclaimed Chinese territory. She left her high-profile local radio job to join Radio France, she says, because ''I cannot stand the self-censorship''.
But Hong Kong, which has been in Chinese hands for 14 years, has kept a vibrant media, even if direct criticisms of Beijing are usually muted. That is because - as Chinese editors are finding on the mainland - independent journalism sells but bald propaganda does not.
The biggest-selling paper in Hong Kong is Apple Daily, known to be the most critical of Beijing. Similarly, in the US, Wei Shi has opened several websites to replicate the Boxun site that remains under cyber attack. He says he is receiving 500,000 hits a day.
Boxun only became the leading website for elite Chinese political intrigue last year when its main competitor, Duowei, turned lame. Duowei's founder, Ho Pin, sold his stake rather than accommodate his China-invested shareholders.
And even he is confident that there remains a place for independent news in the Chinese-language media. The money Ho Pin earned from selling his stake in Duowei has been reinvested into his publishing house, Mirror Books, and an associated news portal at its website.
''Mirror's exclusive reports will be forwarded like crazy to [more compliant] websites,'' he says. ''The reason is very simple. Anyone that doesn't post them will lose a lot of readers.''
The Chinese Australian media are also rapidly changing and new players are challenging the status quo. With some exceptions, even those beholden to mainland business interests sometimes have no choice but to run stories that Chinese embassy officials don't like so they will keep their readers.
Stan Chen, the recently arrived son of a Jiangxi province newspaper man, reckons he has found a way to bring news to Chinese students and recent migrants while bypassing propaganda central. He has set up a news website, Sydney Today, and a social network platform tied to the Sina micro-blogging service, which is phenomenally popular in China (although subject to direct Chinese censorship).
''It's all about repackaging mainstream news in a form that makes sense to recently arrived Chinese,'' he said.
One big breakthrough was his continuous coverage of the Queensland floods, when many of his Brisbane followers didn't know their homes were in danger until they read his posts. Later, they took particular interest in a picture of the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, carrying luggage for his constituents in the floodwater.
''That photo was shared 5000 times,'' Chen says. ''There were so many comments: 'That's what an Australian leader does; why can't a Chinese leader do this?'''
John Garnaut is China correspondent.