THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINA

Australia is uniquely positioned between China and the West. Our geographical location means that in economic terms the country is highly dependent on trade with China, whilst culturally and politically aligned with the US (and to a lesser degree, with the UK and Europe). The government is walking a fine line, and recently Australia has increasingly been caught in the crosshairs between the power rivalry of China and the US. The Truth About China is a compelling and candid examination of China, one that takes a magnifying glass to recent events, and looks through a telescope at what is yet to come.

Beijing, August 2020. Cheng Lei, a Chinese-Australian state-media TV anchor working in China, has gone silent. After some days it becomes known that she is being held in 'residential surveillance at a designated location' - an Orwellian euphemism for enforced disappearance. This could only mean that she was being investigated for national security crimes. At this point in time relations between Australia and China had been worsening by the week. Politics were at play. Prompted by this Australian diplomats advised Bill Birtles, at the time ABC's China correspondent based in Beijing, to leave the country immediately. The same warning went to Mike Smith, correspondent of the Australian Financial Review in China. These two men were the last remaining journalists reporting for Australian media on Chinese ground. In less than a day, Bill and his pregnant partner Yinan packed up their life. On the night before their scheduled flight out there were knocks on Bill's apartment door. Two police officers in uniform and five in plain clothes were standing outside. The badge made revealed them to be from the Beijing National Security Bureau and their message was clear: While his freedom of movement was guaranteed, Bill was no longer allowed to leave the country. The next morning, he and Yinan left their apartment with nothing but a backpack, leaving all their belongings (including a tank of tropical fish and two cats) behind, and drove to the Australian embassy. Little did they know that they would not return. They were asked to stay at the embassy while diplomats delicately negotiated their departure in an unprecedented standoff with China's government. Five days later they were on a flight to Sydney, leaving China without any Australian foreign correspondents on the ground for the first time in decades. A journalist's perspective on this rising global power has never been more important, as Australia's relationship with China undergoes an extraordinary change that is seen the detention of journalist Cheng Lei, Canberra's criticism of Beijing's efforts to crush Hong Kong's freedoms, as well as China's military activity in the South China Sea and its human rights violations targeting the mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang province. Chronicling his five-year stint in China as he criss-crossed the country, Birtles reveals why the historic unravelling of China's relations with the West is perceived very differently inside the country. Bill Birtles was the ABC's China correspondent in Beijing from 2015 to 2020, his posting coming to a sudden end when he was rushed out of the country by Australian diplomats in an unprecedented diplomatic standoff. Reporting from both major cities and remote provinces throughout the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, he covered an era-defining period of change, upheaval and diplomatic tension as China asserted itself on the world stage. Originally from Sydney, Birtles first studied Mandarin in the Chinese capital and later worked inside the government's most important state media and propaganda organ, the Xinhua newsagency, before returning to Beijing for the ABC. He is now covering South-East Asia as the ABC's Indonesia Bureau Chief, based in Jakarta.