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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3036 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

This will be the 26th sister city relationship Beijing has entered into. It is interesting to consider the cities with which Beijing has entered into sister city relationships. We are talking here about repression and repressive regimes. We are also talking here about a fair bit of history in terms of repression and repressive regimes. I understand that the first city with which Beijing entered into a sister city relationship was Tokyo, although for over a thousand years the Chinese and Japanese had been bashing the hell out of each other in various conflicts.

I think that that is significant because it was not all that long ago, 1931, that Japan invaded China, Manchuria, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1933, followed in 1937 by an all-out invasion of China. There were atrocities such as the rape of Nanjing, where over 200,000 Chinese were massacred in six weeks and where Japanese soldiers had competitions to see how many heads they could chop off. I remember reading a book recently in which sublieutenant X and sublieutenant Y got up to about 103 and 105, respectively-quite horrific stuff.

Forty million Chinese lost their lives in that struggle. Per head of population, that has been matched only by the Soviet Union and exceeded only by Poland in horrible conflicts. Despite that, a sister city relationship has been entered into there. I do not think either country has forgotten what occurred in World War II.

Mrs Carnell has referred to the cities with which we have a sister city relationship and the attempts by various other cities to become a sister city. We do not have sister city relationships with cities of some countries that you might think would be logical. Australia is an English-speaking country. The two great Western democracies, the United States and Britain, would be logical contenders, yet we do not have one with them. We have a sister city relationship with Nara in Japan. We are proposing today to have a sister city relationship with China.

Neither Japan nor China is in any formal alliance with Australia. They were not countries which came forth to offer assistance to us when Australia embarked on a great humanitarian mission in East Timor last year. The countries that came to our aid there were the traditional allies of this country-the United States, Great Britain, France, New Zealand and several others in our immediate region, about 16 countries in all. That is a salient point.

What exactly is a sister city relationship? It is certainly a way in which good things can occur for both cities in terms of economic benefits and people exchanges, as the Chief Minister has cited, but it is a very different thing in terms of some other forms of more formal contact between nations.

A lot has been said about China's civil rights record being appalling. I do not know how much people in this Assembly know about Chinese history. Despite the fact that there are arbitrary detentions, there is torture, there are executions and there are other things which many people in Australia would regard as awful occurring in China, significant advances have been made, certainly in the 22 years since the reforms started in 1978.

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