Tag Archives: Confucius Institutes

Resist Racist Violence and Strengthen Our Workers Movement!

A 25-year-old worker at a medical equipment company, Alex Zhang after being beaten on 14 May 2025 by two racist men who approached him when he was waiting at a bus stop in the Sydney suburb of Kingsford. One of them shouted at him, ” I’m a racist. Go back to China to study!” and then punched him in the face. When a passer-by intervened, the attackers fled but shouted to the person intervening, “But he is Asian!”(ABC News online, 28 May 2025). Such violent racist attacks on people of Chinese and other Asian backgrounds are becoming ever more frequent in Australia.
Photo: Alex Zhang

27 June 2025 – Last month’s racist bashing of a Chinese couple in Sydney’s Eastgardens by a dozen attackers has caused much anguish amongst Chinese Australians. Attacks on people of Asian background have become ever more frequent. In one high-profile case in 2017, a Chinese woman was left bloodied in the face after being punched by a racist white man screaming “Get out of my country!” Shockingly, the attack took place in broad daylight in Sydney’s, heavily Asian, Burwood. During the pandemic, large numbers of people of Chinese appearance were bashed after the then Liberal government and the ALP and other opposition parties deceitfully blamed China for COVID. Now, anti-Asian violence is again surging. After the Eastgardens attack footage went viral, Chinese migrants shared a shocking number of accounts of the violence that they are suffering.

Violence against all non-white people is increasing. Today, the murderers of 15 year-old Aboriginal teenager, Cassius Turvey, were sentenced. Screaming racist epithets against black people, they had heinously beat him with a metal pole. Aboriginal people suffer not only the worst of such redneck terror but incessant racist state violence too. One month ago, police killed 24 year-old Aboriginal man, Kumanjayi White, after they brutalised him in an Alice Springs Coles after accusing him of merely “shoplifting” … even though he was still inside the supermarket! Since 1991, nearly 600 Aboriginal people have been either killed by racist police and prison guards or have otherwise died in custody. Meanwhile, in addition to East Asian people, people from African, Muslim, South Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds are also being attacked.

Above photo: February 2017, a Chinese Australian woman named Lina who was bashed by a white racist man in broad daylight near the main shopping mall in the Sydney suburb of Burwood. The attacker, who is completely unknown to Lina, started screaming racist abuse at her, yelling at Lina to ‘Get out of my country’ before punching her in the face.
Photo: Sydney Today

Race hate is incited by the rich capitalists who run Australia. Worried that the masses they exploit will unite against them, they – and the media they own and the politicians who serve them – divert the masses’ righteous anger away from the exploiters who are truly to blame and direct it toward easy-to-target though completely innocent scapegoats. For all of society’s ills they blame Aboriginal people, Chinese and other people of Asian background, Africans, Muslims, refugees, migrants and international students. The mine owners and big rural landowners who dominate Australia’s capitalist class have an added reason for specifically attacking Aboriginal people as their fabulous but ill-gotten wealth comes from stolen Aboriginal land. They fear that Aboriginal people will one day manage to reclaim some of it back. Thus, they are determined to crush Aboriginal rights.  

Inevitably, some of those that the capitalists have infused with bigotry unleash racist attacks. To be sure, inflaming racism hurts the rulers’ reputation, harming trade and making it harder to justify their meddling abroad. So they issue platitudes “opposing racism”. Yet, aware that the masses are increasingly dissatisfied, such concerns are outweighed by their need to divert and distract the masses. Thus, like their U.S. and European counterparts, more and more capitalists are funding Far Right outfits to poison the masses with racism. Even their usual tools are echoing Far Right narratives. Thus, the Liberals, the ALP, the hard-right Murdoch media and the centrist ABC all dishonestly blame the influx of migrants and international students for the rental affordability crisis. Additionally, Australian rulers’ support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and their associated demonisation of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance forces is generating particular hostility against Arabs and Muslims. The hate fostered by the capitalist rulers’ scapegoating of migrants combines with the renewed, bigoted, yellow peril fears fostered by their anti-China Cold War drive to create an especially intense hostility to ethnic Chinese. That Cold War is awful for the vast majority of this country’s people but it is essential for capitalist interests. The exploiting class knows that Red China’s cooperation with Australia’s neighbours is undermining its ability to superexploit this region, while the success of China’s socialistic system threatens to encourage the masses to demand socialism here. That is why Australia’s rulers are joining other imperialist rulers in a quest to suffocate China’s socialistic state. To justify this, they deviously paint China and anything associated with her as a military “threat”. Appealing to – and thus encouraging – racist fears of big Asian populations to the north, the rulers slander Chinese companies, teaching institutes, Apps and local Chinese societies and their officers as “security threats” engaged in “foreign interference”. No wonder Chinese migrants are being attacked!

Ruling class lies even induce some in targeted groups to join in racist attacks on other victimised groups. But any hostility to one community intensifies race hate against all victimised groups. This was embodied in the 2008 murder of Melbourne researcher Zhongjun Cao. The racist gang that killed him initially intended to bash an Indian person. But when they came across the ethnic Chinese man, they beat him up instead. All targeted races must unite and join with the workers movement to oppose racist attacks. Our workers unions must repudiate racist lies – racial divisions make it harder to unite to fight for workers’ rights. We must point out that high rents are not caused by migrants but by government sell-off of public housing and pro-speculator housing policies. We must explain that far from being a “threat”, China is the only world power that has not fought a war in the 21st century. We must point out that it is in the working class’s interests to strongly defend socialistic China because the existence of China’s socialistic pro-masses policies – like widespread public housing and public ownership of her power sector and major banks – helps us fight for these, so desperately needed, measures here.

It is not enough to oppose racist narratives. We must oppose the regime measures that underpin them. If we fail to do so, slimy politicians can give empty “anti-racism” speeches while continuing to back policies that incite race hate. Let us demand: Reverse the ALP government’s cut to international student places that was based on falsely blaming migration for high rents! No to the “terror” listing of pro-Palestine resistance groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah (the “Houthis”)! No to the anti-China military build-up”! Down with the “Foreign Interference” laws that target the Chinese community! Stop the witch-hunt of Chinese social groups! Reverse the local bans on language teaching by the Chinese state’s Confucius Institutes! No to the “China threat”-hyped moves to force a Chinese firm to sell its lease of Darwin’s port!

The most backward among us will fall for racist and male-chauvinist demagoguery unless the masses see a path to addressing their growing hardships. The workers movement must unleash strikes and occupations to fight for wage rises, the conversion of casual jobs into secure ones and the forced transfer of the vacant homes of the ultra-rich into low-rent public housing. To mobilise these struggles, we must resist the domination of our unions by the ALP and its social-democratic program. As shown by ALP federal and state government attacks on the militant CFMEU union, their undermining of public housing and their promotion of the “China threat” lie, the ALP’s social-democratic program really means knifing the ALP’s base amongst workers and minorities. We must also resist any influence from the Greens. Although the Greens advocate some modest pro-poor reforms and rightly criticised Liberal and Labor for blaming migrants for high rents, their agenda is dominated by capitalism-accepting upper-middle class elements. Thus, the Greens have fed the racism-inciting, anti-communist hype about “Chinese interference”. They even demanded that Australian police arrest pro-China netizens who make social media posts critical of opponents of Red China. Not more of Labor and the Greens but a new, militant class struggle and anti-racist agenda!    

In desperation, some targeted groups are looking to state institutions to protect them. However, because all state organs – from the police to the courts to government commissions – are ultimately under the control of the super-rich capitalist class, these state bodies are themselves enforcers of racist oppression. Even if reforms are proposed to change this, the fundamentally pro-capitalist character of state institutions – and thus their need to promote the racist agenda that the exploiting class needs – would never change. Any regime laws and measures nominally intended to oppose racist attacks do far more harm than good. The NSW Labor government’s new laws supposedly targeting hate speech and religious vilification are actually being used to stifle – and indeed violently attack – pro-Palestine protests and will be used against other anti-racist actions too.

Progressive Chinese migrants and students have responded to the Eastgardens attack with a brave intent to resist racism. However, conservative migrants have seized on the fact that Eastgardens was perpetrated by minors to push a “tough on youth crime” agenda. On June 21, they held a march … which did not even mention racism! Their earlier petition went further, pushing the Liberal Party’s vile agenda to lower the age of criminal responsibility for children. This agenda will do a lot of harm. For any strengthening of laws against “youth crime” will enable the racist state to further persecute the children of victimised groups – especially Aboriginal and African kids but economically deprived Chinese kids too. Any increase in the powers of the racist state will make it better able to persecute Chinese organisations and more able to repress struggles against racist attacks. But some Chinese turn to such “solutions” because they fear to speak out against racism when their community is being so vilified as a “threat”. Those originating from mainland China are also shaped by their upbringing in a workers state, where state organs really do (albeit imperfectly) serve the people. However, the reality that violent attacks by youth in China are rare, even while China’s much more liberal youth justice system has an age of criminal responsibility of 14 years – higher than in any Australian state – proves that “youth crime” laws are not the issue.

ANZAC Day 2023, Brisbane: A racist (wearing the light blue shirt) armed with a weapon violently attacks Asian Australians of Korean and Thai background while screaming racist insults against Chinese people. The racist attacker was 69 years-old. Although, with the physical energy that comes from youth, teenagers, shaped by bigoted adults around them and a racist society, have carried out several attacks, violent racist attacks have been perpetrated by bigots of all ages.

Reflecting healthy distrust of the Australian state, some Chinese people have established patrols to protect their community. Provided that these patrols operate on an anti-racist agenda and not a “stop youth crime”-one, this is positive. But if they become the latter and start, say, dobbing in people who don’t pay train fares, they will become appendages to a racist, anti-poor people’s state; and will inflame anti-Chinese hostility amongst dispossessed youth. Given the dominance of racist stereotypes in Australia, vigilante-type bodies would inevitably turn against other targeted groups. That is why it is crucial than any patrols remain completely independent from the police and other organs of the racist regime. Instead, Chinese people’s patrols must link up with other targeted racial groups to become patrols opposing all racist attacks. Crucially, our unions must join in, bringing their power and anatomically unifying character to the patrols.

Racist attacks in Australia are too widespread to be directly stopped in every case. However, by mobilising to crush public gatherings of open white supremacists, we can scare the far more numerous garden-variety racists into pulling their heads in. Such a mobilisation occurred in Brisbane on 2 May 2014 when over a hundred unionised construction workers formed the core of an anti-racist posse, including Trotskyist Platform supporters, which shut down a planned march by a violent racist outfit. Today, when the capitalists are ever more brazenly inciting race hate to fortify their decaying rule, the need for such actions is even more desperate. Let us build anti-racist actions uniting the workers movement, Aboriginal people, Chinese and other targeted communities! Oppose the witch-hunts of Chinese social groups! Drive violent racist groups off the streets!  Resist all of the racist regime’s policies and associated measures and narratives that are fuelling racist attacks!

2 May 2014, Brisbane: Over a hundred construction workers from the CFMEU, BLF and ETU trade unions formed the core of a mobilisation of 200 anti-racists that successfully shut down an attempted march by a violent racist group. This mobilisation showed the great potential of action uniting union contingents, people of colour and leftists to resist racist violence and racial oppression.