Former Australian State Trade Minister Tom Kenyon has urged Canberra to sever its economic ties with Beijing, drawing parallels between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong.
In an interview with the news outlet Weekend Australian on Saturday, Kenyon, who earlier backed a Chinese Consulate in suburban Adelaide, said that Australia "needs to begin disengaging economically from China or, at the very least, limiting" its "exposure to the Chinese economy".
According to him, relations between Australia and China have "fundamentally changed" since he served as trade minister in the 2010s.
Kenyon recalled that when he took the ministerial portfolio at the time, those were the final days of Chinese President Hu Jintao's term "and Australia, along with the rest of the world, had been engaging with China", expecting Beijing "to become more open and more collegiate".
The ex-trade minister argued that all this changed "within a few months when current and now-permanent President Xi Jinping took over, as well as continuing his role heading the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]".
"Since that time, the CCP has become more aggressive, more hostile, and more likely to interfere in events in foreign countries. President Xi seems to be a genuine communist more in the mould of Mao Zedong than [former Chinese President] Jiang Zemin. This does not augur well for us", Kenyon asserted.
The founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong ruled as the CCP chairman from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. He is notoriously known for launching the so-called Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s to reassert his authority over the Chinese government, something that resulted in tens of millions of deaths from starvation, mass execution, and prison labour.
Australia-China Trade Row
As for Kenyon's remarks, they come amid strained ties between China and Australia, which deteriorated in May 2020, when Beijing imposed 80 percent tariffs on barley imports from Australia in retaliation for Prime Minister Scott Morrison's demand for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus.
China was Australia's largest trading partner in 2019, accounting for 27.4 percent of Canberra's overall trade, according to the Pacific nation's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).