The Sydney church of Anglican pastor Reverend Bill Crews is a long way from the banks of the Yangtze River and the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, home to no fewer than eight million people at any one time.
Here at Reverend Crews’ Ashfield home for the forgotten and adrift, a constant hubbub of friendly interaction is underwritten by quiet desperation.
An exhausted but graceful Maori woman waits her turn at the church’s administrative section, where a receptionist listens patiently to the troubles of an older Anglo man who clearly hasn’t eaten in days. Out front in the church courtyard, two dozen people in an assemblage of second-hand clothes wait for the midday lunch truck, still several hours away. And behind them, looking uncertain, is a well-dressed and diminutive woman who has come looking for sanctuary of her own.
Her name is Jun Mei Wu, but she asks people to call her Rebecca. She is seeking political asylum in Australia after leaving behind a life working for a central pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine, the People’s Daily.
Barely conversant in English, she listens faithfully nonetheless as the church service begins.
“People like Jun Mei need our help,” Reverend Crews tells his congregation after prayers. “They need shelter. They need shelter from a dictatorship.”
A member of the congregation puts an arm around Jun Mei’s small frame as Crews speaks.
“It’s a savage dictatorship – one that wants to put people like her in jail, simply because she wants to tell the truth.”
Watch the TV version tonight at 7:30pm - The Feed on SBS 2.
The truth, Jun Mei later tells SBS, is no simple thing in the Orwellian calculus of China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP), which uses the People’s Daily both as a government gazette and as an essential state organ for the gathering, analysis and control of information. Her flight from China – a propagandist’s defection – offers a rare glimpse inside Beijing’s relentless campaign to control what the Chinese public reads, watches and hears in the digital age.
Source: Supplied by Wu junmei
Source: SBS
