You Must Take Part in Revolution — journalist Melissa Chan and artist-in-exile Badiucao

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It's 1983, and Alan Bond has just won the America's Cup.

Melissa Chan (0:12)

The race of the century.

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I tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not setting up the diet is a bum.

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Bondy becomes a national hero, but quickly goes from hero to zero.

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Bond was at the centre of one of the biggest political scandals in Australian history.

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I'm Mark Humphries, and I'm here to tell a full Alan Bond story. Search ABC Rewind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

Natasha Mitchell (0:37)

Can art sow the seeds of revolution? Well, today on Big Ideas, art, authoritarianism and an extraordinary collaboration. Between a journalist who's made reporting on repressive regimes one hell of a specialty, and an artist in exile, a political cartoonist whose life and work has been changed and charged by the injustices that he's witnessed and experienced firsthand. Welcome to the show. I'm Natasha Mitchell.

Music Taiwanese-American journalist Melissa Chan, based in Berlin and LA, is an Emmy-nominated foreign correspondent who in 2012 was expelled from China after five years as Beijing's Al Jazeera correspondent, becoming the first of a wave of foreign media pushed out under President Xi Jinping. Chinese-Australian artist and activist Badiucao is a Walkley Award-winning cartoonist with the age. His works have been exhibited internationally, and in 2020, he was awarded the Human Rights Foundation's Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. Together, Melissa and Badiucao have collaborated on an extraordinary debut graphic novel just published in Australia. It's called You Must Take Part in Revolution, and it takes readers to a dystopian near future in China, Taiwan and the USA. One that feels very raw and real in actual fact for this very moment in the world. For its Australian launch by Readings Bookshop, they're joining me and you in Ngaam, Melbourne with an intimate audience at the Cinema Nova.

What did you want to imagine into being when you created this novel? Melissa.

Melissa Chan (2:43)

Wow, that's such a great question. No one's asked me that. I would say that it was, I wanted it to become a manifestation of all the things that has been swimming in my head as a journalist over the course of 25 years of working in all the places that you mentioned. I think that you spend 25 years obsessively chasing the facts, but I wanted to take those themes of resistance, the cost of resistance, sort of distill some of the conversations I've had with dissidents, not just in China, but all over the world, and try to transfer it into a creative space that was a nice outlet for me as a journalist after working for so many years in fairly rigid formats in its own way, whether it's broadcast reporting or writing for magazines or radio even, and just take it into a whole new direction, into a whole different medium.

Natasha Mitchell (3:44)

What about you Badiucao?

Badiucao (3:46)

I think for this book very much is a metaphor of how to survive as a dissident in the real life. I mean, the story started from Hong Kong, from the real facts of Hong Kong's protest in 2019

But as we all know, the protest was brutally cracking down by the Hong Kong authority and it kind of eventually murdered by this very infamous national security law. So for us, it's very important that we want to keep this tinder or flame of hope and resistance alive. But we all know in reality, it's very, very difficult. But at least in a space of fiction and imagination, this fight could go on.

Melissa Chan (4:37)

I should also add, as a journalist, I also felt that over the course of my years of reporting, that actually younger people, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, seemed to be more attracted to authoritarianism than even older generations. And that sort of shift was really bothering me. I mean, I don't know if I can say this on ABC Radio, but it's just seemed like Gen Z and Gen Alpha were just a bunch of autocratic shits.

And I just felt like, you know, if going on Vice News and doing that, which is supposed to be hip, had its limits, maybe I should try a different medium. And the graphic novel form, I mean, we can talk a little bit more about that later, but you know, I was deeply influenced as a child. My first graphic novel I ever read was Archie Spiegelman's Mouse about the Holocaust. And the second one that was really impactful for me was Marjana Satya Pi's Persepolis about the Iranian Revolution. So two of the most successful graphic-