“He urged the local Chinese community to support Beijing’s official policy of One China, which officially claims Taiwan as part of the mainland, said the source. He also said Falun Gong was supported by Washington and asked the Chinese community not to support its activities in Australia.”

Peter Cai and John Garnaut, The Sidney Morning Herald
June 9, 2012

ONE of the rising stars of Chinese politics slipped away from his official itinerary this week to rally support for the Communist Party among Chinese-Australian business and community leaders.

Wang Yang, the party boss of Guangdong province, was spirited away to Sydney’s Shangri-La Hotel on Tuesday night to reassure select Chinese Australians that the party would overcome its recent divisions, following the purge of Politburo member Bo Xilai.

”Despite many challenges faced by the party, these issues will be resolved in the future,” he said, according to a source who was at the meeting.

He urged the local Chinese community to support Beijing’s official policy of One China, which officially claims Taiwan as part of the mainland, said the source. He also said Falun Gong was supported by Washington and asked the Chinese community not to support its activities in Australia.

The chosen business and community leaders included Chinese-Australian property billionaire Dr Chau Chak Wing, who secured the prized position at Mr Wang’s side.

Dr Chau is the 31st-richest person in Australia with a personal net worth of $1 billion, according to the BRW rich list. He is also one of Australia’s biggest philanthropists, handing $1.5 million to the main political parties in 2009 and $25 million for a Frank Gehry-designed building and a scholarship at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Another guest was Zhou Guangming, a well-connected Chinese-Australian businessman and philanthropist.

Mr Wang, who is widely tipped to earn a seat on the all-powerful standing committee of the Politburo this year, urged the Chinese-Australian business community to support the overseas expansion of Chinese companies.

He said China needed Australia’s resources to develop its economy and the Guangdong provincial government would launch a fund next year to help companies from his province invest abroad. The fund would also be spent on attracting multinationals to Guangdong, according to the source.

A meeting memo obtained by the The Saturday Age says Mr Wang wanted to take advantage of Guangdong’s position as home to many overseas Chinese to attract more investment.

He said he wanted to ”better use the Cantonese network abroad to attract talents and capitals and to build a more advanced social and economic development together”.

The overseas Chinese community was a bridge that would help companies from Guangdong to ”go abroad … and to make them internationally competitive”.

Mr Wang said Guangdong must change its economic development model, and the old obsession with GDP growth had brought many problems. He cited examples of labour shortages, lack of resources and environmental degradation. The purpose of his trip was to learn from Australian resources management, he said, and he didn’t want Guangdong just to be an assembly line for other countries.

Mr Wang met the Sydney Chinese community after meeting NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell and before meeting the Minister for Climate Change, Greg Combet.

To read this article on the Sydney Morning Herald website, click here.