Filmmaker Warns Australia Against Importing ‘Communist Culture’ Amid Push for More China Trade

‘We’re importing dollars that have political ties and expectations to reciprocate back with China,’ says filmmaker Kay Rubacek.

Two Chinese police officers arrest a Falun Dafa adherent at Tiananmen Sqaure in Beijing on Jan. 10, 2000. Chien-Min Chung/AP Photo

An award-winning filmmaker once jailed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has warned Australia against pushing hard for more trade opportunities with China without considering the negative consequences.

Kay Rubacek is an Australian expat and author based in the New York area, and has spoken extensively on the human rights situation in China.

On the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, an interview between Rubacek and ABC Radio Brisbane was released where she urged policymakers to consider the Australia-China trade relationship more holistically.

“We should look at not only importing goods. We’re importing students. We’re importing dollars that have political ties and expectations to reciprocate back with China. We are also importing a communist culture that we don’t understand.”

Rubacek said China was a “very complex society.”

“It has 5,000 years of history, and it has this imposed ruling party that has taken over the entire nation, a one party state, and that is what’s controlling the system,” she said.

“It is not a rule of law, because everything falls under the Chinese Communist Party. There is a Constitution for the nation of China, but it is subject to the CCP.”

(From right to left) Kay Rubacek, Chris Chappell, Sean Lin, and moderator Jenny Chang at the Wake Up to CCP Threat seminar in Middletown, N.Y. on Dec. 8, 2022. Cara Ding/The Epoch Times

Australia Grapples With China Debate

Her comments come after the recent Australian election saw substantial swings to the centre-left Labor Party in electorates with major Chinese-Australian populations.

One narrative that has circled for years is that Chinese-Australian voters will vote based on whichever party is more favourable towards ties with Beijing. In response, politicians from both sides of the aisle have limited their own rhetoric, despite well-publicised CCP infiltration efforts.

The situation has led defence analyst Michael Shoebridge to warn Australia’s public discourse has now effectively been hemmed in by Beijing’s propaganda strategy.

“The issue of foreign interference became politicised for domestic reasons here in Australia, and lost its actual significance as a threat to our democracy,” the director of Strategic Analysis Australia told The Epoch Times.

“Without focusing clearly on the Chinese government in this area of policy, Australian politicians play straight into CCP propagandists’ hands, by allowing them to claim anyone who talks about Beijing’s foreign interference activities as somehow biased against 1.2 million [ethnic Chinese] Australians.”

Former Hong Kong politician and pro-democracy activist, Ted Hui, holds a placard reading "Human Rights over Pandas" at Adelaide Zoo in Adelaide, Australia, on June 16, 2024. Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Rubacek’s comments about “communist culture” also align with deeper issues with CCP indoctrination.

“Under the influence of party culture, people’s minds, thoughts, and behaviours have undergone profound distortions. In many areas—such as society, family, education, work, and interpersonal relationships—they have deviated from the normal state of humanity,” according to 2006 Epoch Times editorial series, “Disintegrating the Culture of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Some of the methods deployed by the CCP include removing content on traditional faiths like Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, and instead, implanting pro-CCP narratives into text books and media, even replacing everyday words with newly coined phrases that reflect communist ideology (akin to 1984’s Newspeak).

For example, mainland Chinese today will use the phrase “working unit,” instead of “company” or “organisation.”

A Life Impacted by Communism

Rubacek’s great-grandparents escaped Soviet Russia to China in the early 1920s. Her father then escaped communist China to Australia at the age of 14, right before the Cultural Revolution started.

Born and raised in Sydney, Rubacek became active in human rights work related to China.

In 2001, in her early 20s, she went to China to join a human rights appeal by 36 Westerners against the CCP’s crackdown on the spiritual practice Falun Gong. Rubacek was arrested simply because she held a banner that had the word “compassion,” one of Falun Gong’s three core principles.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation practice rooted in the Buddhist tradition, with moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

Alarmed by its widespread popularity and independence from the communist regime’s control, former CCP leader Jiang Zemin launched a nationwide persecution of the practice in 1999.

Since then, Falun Gong practitioners in China have faced mass arrests, torture, forced labor, sexual abuse, and even forced organ harvesting, while globally the CCP leveraged its influence to silence debate on the topic.

In a still image from a video released by NTD, host Kay Rubacek, describes her excitement to see and touch a piece of the real Berlin Wall after learning that pieces of it are on display in public places in New York City on Oct. 12 2021 Oliver Trey/NTD

“I just could not believe that a young woman would be thrown into a basement prison cell for holding the word ‘compassion’ in a public place, Tiananmen Square,” Rubacek said.

The CCP authorities detained Rubacek for 23 hours before expelling her from China to avoid involving the Australian embassy.

Having seen what was happening in China, Rubacek felt that she needed to try and bridge the gap between the cultures.

“What’s happened in China, how it’s changed under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, what my father lived through, how it’s coming to modern day times, and how to help people in Australia and around the world understand that because it is so different to our experience,” she said.

Since then, she has continued to work on the cause, producing multiple works, including the documentary Finding Courage, the book Nowhere Left to Run: 10 Steps to Survive Tyranny Today, and Who Are China’s Walking Dead?

Falun Gong practitioners from 12 countries peacefully appeal on Tiananmen Square in 2001 for an end to the persecution and torture of their Chinese counterparts. Minghui.org

Rubacek said the U.S. government was now much firmer on the CCP.

“America is waking up to that, and I’m very pleased to see how they are bravely cutting ties, and they are no longer being bullied,” she said.

“It is vitally important that we understand who we are dealing with and what they expect from us and how they use us,” she concluded.