Did a Chinese national exact racist revenge upon a nine-month-old white baby because his visa was rejected?
That kind of depends on how much you trust various sources, but one thing is for certain: The viral story has highlighted how little the Chinese Communist Party can be trusted when dealing with dangerous criminals.
In August 2024, an infant child was apparently burned in Hanlon Park in Brisbane, Australia, after a random attack. CCTV cameras captured a man who threw a thermos of hot coffee on the child before running away, according to a Monday report in Australia’s News.com.
Authorities were unable to locate the man after the attack despite the CCTV footage.
“It soon became apparent to us that this person was aware of police methodologies, was certainly conducting counter surveillance activities, which made the investigation quite complex,” Queensland Police Detective Inspector Paul Dalton said at the time, according to CNN.
This is the low life scumbag mongrel who poured hot coffee on baby Luka. Last seen in Brisbane. Keep an eye out for him pic.twitter.com/aVBbI5Wrsq
— Prue MacSween (@macsween_prue) August 31, 2024
“Just days after, the suspect — who was identified as a 33-year-old Chinese national — drove to New South Wales and flew out of Sydney on August 31. It is believed he returned to China via New Zealand,” News.com reported.
Even still, Australian authorities are looking to charge the man, who inflicted burns on 60 percent of the child simply known in the press as “Baby Luka.”
Is life in prison too severe for a crime like this?
Dalton said that the suspect, also unidentified in media reports, fled Australia just 12 hours after he was positively identified as the alleged attacker.
“I was in the investigation centre when we put a name to the face and it was a very happy room, only for us to do a check in 15 minutes and find out we’ve lost him,” he said.
“We’ve got 30 detectives working for me. They’re devastated that they missed this person by 12 hours.”
The question becomes one of motive, which News.com buried near the end of the story:
He has lived in a number of locations on Australia’s east coast and previously worked in a meat processing plant.
But when his most recent visa application was rejected, the suspect was reportedly furious and allegedly sought to take out his anger on baby Luka.
“Finally, he vented his anger and [allegedly] hurt a baby before leaving Australia,” reported China’s New Tang Dynasty Television.
A person claiming to be a co-worker of the suspect said he had a “brain problem” on Chinese social media.
“On the mainland social media ‘Little Red Book’, a Chinese person in Australia who claimed to know him, broke the news that this man has always been weird and difficult to deal with,” added NTD Television.
“He has been working in a meat factory with a study permit for a long time. Later, the meat factory did not require a study permit.”
The TV station added that Luke was “probably [attacked] to take revenge on the white people.”
Now, there are a number of problems with taking this explanation at face value, even if the shaky reporting does end up being accurate in the end.
“Little Red Book” — more commonly known to Chinese mainlanders as Xiaohongshu, a combination of TikTok, microblogging, and e-commerce — users inside China generally don’t post in English, and the outlet that translated it didn’t help.
New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, Television, is a New York City-operated dissident outlet founded and primarily run by adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is persecuted by the CCP. It’s often a reliable source of the Chinese dissident movements — and often unreliable when it comes to stories that paint the CCP in a bad light, particularly if there’s no way to verify the user.
For that matter, they wouldn’t have the journalistic resources on the ground in China to verify that this user was, in fact, knowledgeable of the attacker or his mental state, nor would its checkered history prevent us from speculating they might have been the genesis of the post themselves.
Furthermore, this is going off of NTD’s translation of his remarks. Keep in mind that Chinese terminology for “white people,” Australians, or those of European descent is not necessarily a one-to-one match for the English term “white people” as we understand it — and NTD has every reason to contextualize what this guy said in the worst possible light, if they didn’t say it themselves.
In other words, this viral part of the story should probably be viewed with all the grains of salt in the Dead Sea. However, this is the part of the story we should probably be focusing on more intently, from News.com:
Under Chinese law, citizens cannot be extradited for prosecution to foreign countries.
It is understood that evidence from Queensland Police against the suspect has been provided to Chinese authorities. However, authorities have refused to confirm the move, the publication reports.
“There are ongoing conversations between Australia and China in relation to this matter,’’ an unnamed source told the publication, adding “it’s been made clear that they don’t extradite their own.”
This is apparently true even if the suspect allegedly almost killed a nine-month-old in an unprovoked attack that may have been influenced by his host country’s decision not to extend his visa. Yet, if Australia were to alter its visa protocols for Chinese citizens in any manner due to the incident, watch Beijing bray like a stuck donkey. (Perhaps Eeyore, given China’s leader?)
And yet we think there’s no reason to cast an eye of extreme distrust toward China and its leaders? It doesn’t matter that, prayerfully, Luka has recovered. This man allegedly attempted to murder a child, possibly because his visa was rejected and perhaps (although far from dispositively) on the basis of race. China’s response to a crime that has elicited national outrage in a close neighbor? Shrugged shoulders.
If they can afford to shield violent sociopaths, they can afford whatever tariffs or sanctions are thrown their way — and that may involve excluding Chinese students from studying at elite institutions. When we have no way of ensuring that they’ll be responsible for any crimes they commit, we have no reason to let them stay long-term in the first place.
We in the civilized world have got to screen immigrants incredibly well, and we’ve got be particularly careful with anyone from China, from any nation that hates us, and from any nation with whom we don’t have a reliable extradition treaty. Period.
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