Spy left out in the cold
Claims of secret documents on offer from parts of a giant Chinese spy network within Australia have put pressure on both governments, writes Tom Allard.

Chen Yonglin had made the decision. It wasn't easy but it had to be done. While once he had been enthusiastic about his job of monitoring Chinese dissidents in his post in the Sydney consulate, he says he had become sickened by what he learnt about their treatment here and at home.

He had formed friendships with Falun Gong members, helping them to renew their visas here. His failure to report back on their activities would soon be uncovered by his successor at the mission. It was time to go. Except the nervous, 40-minute heart-thumping walk from the Chinese consulate in Camperdown to the glassy building in the middle of Sydney did not end anything like the way he had expected it to.

With his wife and six-year-old daughter, he walked into the Immigration Department building, telling officials he was a Chinese diplomat who had an important letter to give to the department's state director. He wanted to defect to Australia.

The officials wanted to call the Chinese consulate. Chen protested. "I told them they could check my ID with the Australian Government because they issued it. They didn't have to call them."

Chen's mobile rang. On the other end was the consulate. Chen didn't wait for small talk. He bolted, with family in tow, to Central Station, heading to Gosford.

Chen's dramatic, desperate decision to go public with his defection bid last weekend was astonishing. Who was this man, with his halting English and his amazing claims that China had 1000 agents here and conducted state-sponsored abductions?

According to the Chinese ambassador, Fu Ying, the 37-year-old first secretary at Sydney's Chinese consulate was a man looking for a lifestyle change, opportunistically leaving at the end of his posting in Australia.

His wife, Jin Ping, had lost her job in China, she explained in a round of media appearances. Their daughter, Chen Fangrong, spoke better English than Chinese.

As for those claims of Chinese espionage, the urbane ambassador deflected them with humor."It has become a very interesting point and a joke," she said. "If I can't attend a dinner with one of my colleagues in the diplomatic corps, if I say, 'I am busy, I'm sorry, I can't come,' they say, 'Oh, it's OK, you are busy with your spy network."'

A week later, the Chinese spy affair is no joke. The incredulity has been tempered by news of two other Chinese security officials backing Chen and promising supporting documents. Now the Australian and Chinese governments are facing questions.

Potentially, it could be China's worst nightmare, the beginning of new global scrutiny of its human rights abuses before the crowning ceremony of the nation's economic and political emergence, the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

For the Howard Government, there is concern about why - at a time of close relations between Australia and China - it rebuffed Chen, and shunned a rich seam of information about China's spy network in Australia, China and other countries.

>From the mundane to the dramatic, from petty vandalism to high-tech eavesdropping and abductions, Chinese dissidents have a wealth of tales of Chinese harassment and surveillance.

It has always been assumed that China had an active spy network in Australia; every nation uses espionage and some intelligence officials are even formally revealed to foreign governments. But intelligence experts say the Chinese spy differently, relying heavily on informants in the Chinese diaspora. And what is emerging is a spy network far more extensive and more active than many thought. Just as damaging for China is new evidence of horrific and systematic abuses against dissidents back in their homeland.

Chen made the initial claims but, as he has gone back into hiding, Hao Fengjun, a member of China's state security bureau who sought asylum in February, has filled out the picture of a sophisticated and widespread network of intelligence gathering.

A member of the notorious "610" unit that prosecuted Falun Gong in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, he came to Australia with a file of highly sensitive information downloaded from his work computer. "It is not a question of 1000 spies in Australia, it is a network of informants, recruited and directed from outside the Chinese diplomatic missions in Australia. These persons report directly to the state security bureau in China," he says.

Along with Hao, another senior Chinese security official has sought asylum. But, unlike Chen and Hao, he has promptly been granted protection here.

But, like them, he has a "treasure trove" of information on Chinese espionage, says his lawyer, Bernard Collaery. The former ACT attorney-general, who is working for the Falun Gong, but is not a practitioner, says he has traveled to Asia to collect evidence of abuse. "There is astounding proof of [the 610 unit]," he told ABC's Dateline."They've provided us with the order of battle. They provided us with evidence of the full connection all the way into Beijing, and they've provided us, indeed, with insights into the reporting of persons in Australia. It's very, very clear … there is a highly sophisticated apparatus at work surveilling Chinese Australians, Chinese and Australians in this country."

China has long denied such allegations, including in the United Nations. Conceding the existence of the 610 unit would be a humiliating backdown for Beijing.

The claims of the Chinese defectors have not been tested but, equally, they could offer a cache of documents that would vastly outstrip anything provided by Vladimir Petrov and his wife, Evdokia, in 1954.

Yet the contrast between those Cold War times - when the prime minister, Robert Menzies, revved up a red-menace scare to win an election - and now could not be more stark. Either through indifference, incompetence or complicity, information on Chinese spying has been spurned as a network of espionage has flourished.

As well as direct information about abuses and spying, the three security officers could also have valuable insights into the tactical doctrine of Chinese spies, their targets and technology.

But Hao, with his dossier of Chinese secrets, has not been interviewed by Australian intelligence services in the four months he has been waiting to see if his asylum application succeeds. And Australia actively discouraged Chen from defecting, urging him to contact his consulate.

Chen's account of his treatment at the hands of immigration and foreign affairs officials is almost comedic.

His application letter says he was a senior diplomat who monitored Chinese dissidents and had access to classified information. But his bid for political asylum was rejected by the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, without an interview and within 24 hours.

An immigration official, Louise Lindsay, contacted Chen in hiding by phone but his pleas for protection went unheeded. A meeting was arranged and then cancelled when Chen arrived in the car park after a long, clandestine journey into Sydney's centre. It took five days on the run before a meeting was finally held with immigration and foreign affairs officials. Chen says he walked out of that meeting utterly confused and depressed, with forms for a tourist visa and an onshore protection visa. He says he was told he could apply for either, although success with the protection visa would be "extremely impossible".

After this meeting, Chen, using intermediaries, approached the US consulate in Sydney for protection. When that bid failed before shocked US diplomats, Chen went public.

Reagan Lee, a democracy advocate and student at Wollongong University, says the influence of the Chinese Government extends deeply into Chinese community groups in Australia. "For many Chinese here, it is like we have two governments. The Australian Government, who we pay taxes to, and the Chinese Government that watches us."

It is infuriating and often frightening, and David Liang says it was almost deadly for him. He drives a Sydney taxi with a Falun Gong sticker on the back and one inside proclaiming the spiritual group's credo of truth, compassion and tolerance.

The 43-year-old father of two is an Australian citizen and has been a resident since 1987. He is an activist and says he has long been harassed. "My four tires have been slashed at least 10 times. The windows have been smashed something like more than five times and I get threatening phone calls at night."

The Chinese took more interest when he traveled overseas last year. After arriving in South Africa to meet fellow Falun Gong members and organize protests against the visiting Chinese Vice-President, Zeng Qinghong, Liang's hire car was attacked as he left the airport. "It is night-time and they started firing at my car. They hit my feet and I stopped. They could have robbed us but they drove on. It was a murder attempt."

According to Collaery, the third, unnamed, Chinese official seeking asylum has also been in danger, notwithstanding his protection visa. The man's safe house was ransacked and photographic evidence of abuse presented to the Department of Immigration was somehow lost. "The Immigration [Department] may have acted with alacrity, but we had to compromise our man to do it."

Warren Reed, a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer and intelligence commentator, believes the incident "is either monumental bungling or there's something more sinister". He says: "The Government really has to give us an explanation, and it should be the Prime Minister who does it."

The Greens senator Bob Brown, a long-time and often lonely critic of China, helped Chen with legal advice. "The Government has failed to act because of its trade relations with China," he says. "But, as China's espionage has developed here, they are also spying on our corporate sector, resource businesses, technology economy - all to feed China's economic expansion at the expense of our trade balance."

The Prime Minister, John Howard, says this is just "nonsense talk", promising that trade considerations with China will not influence Chen's case. He has also downplayed the revelations of more potential Chinese defectors by noting there are 1000 applications every year from Chinese people seeking Australian protection and residential rights.

Chen might be only one of 20 or so Chinese who approached Australia for asylum last week, but his case is unique - the first senior diplomat to defect since Petrov. Moreover, he has been the catalyst for a campaign on human rights in China that may gather momentum.

The spate of high-ranking Chinese attempting to defect here suggests that Australia, as a Western democracy and media hub close to Asia, has been identified as not only a sanctuary, but a perfect location for agitating for reform in China.

China's communist regime has worked assiduously to soften its image as it emerges as a global power and seeks to engage economically and politically. Australia has been at the forefront of welcoming China back to the fold, signing big gas contracts, forging a path for uranium sales and staging joint military exercises.

As the economic relationship has blossomed, Australia has made political concessions, says Aldo Borgu, a program director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It has been quick to recognize China as a market economy, failed to back the US push for China to revalue its currency, and indicated it may not come to the aid of Taiwan if it's attacked.

As for China's crackdown on the Falun Gong and other dissidents in Australia, Downer, in a highly unusual move, signed an edict banning the Falun Gong from erecting banners and playing music outside China's embassy in Canberra.

"This Government has never pushed human rights and democracy in China," Borgu says. "This situation shows the Government's rhetoric about the spread of democracy around the world for what it is - just rhetoric."

Both Australia and China say Chen's defection will not jeopardize relations.

There is much left to unfold in this saga. But, of all the astonishing claims over the past week, it may be the Chinese ambassador's that China does not spy here or persecute its citizens that is most vulnerable to being exposed.