Eric Campbell

You can move around freely.

You don't need permission.

and people will criticise the government.

The hardest thing I found when I was in China was finding people who would come on camera and criticise the Communist Party because, to a certain extent, they're so patriotic, they felt it was criticising China to a big-nosed foreigner, hairy barbarian, so...

It was hard.

But Taiwan, as one diplomat said to me once, they're just like us being in Australia.

It is a bit like West Berlin was in the days of the Cold War, you know, surrounded by these hostile powers, even though there wasn't a feeling that...

war was imminent, it gave a certain kind of extremity to the place.

And there's fabulous art and music and literature that's coming out of Taiwan that I think is largely a product of all these sort of, not just the freedoms, but also the pressures, the intensity of the environment, the reality of what's at stake.

Yes, yes, you can always trust the Chinese Communist Party's stupidity to make good television out of an otherwise dull story.

And on this occasion, we were looking at the geopolitics of the South China Sea when a PLA helicopter tried to kill us.

Right now we're being shadowed by a Chinese helicopter, which no one was expecting.

The pilots reckon it is too close for safety.

But this is all about brinkmanship.

Without warning, the helicopter comes frighteningly close, passing within three metres of our plane.

Talking about the South China Sea, China claims it owns 90% of it, but it's, you know, contested by six different countries, including the Philippines.

And China has claimed Filipino islands or Filipino underwater reefs.

A lot of it is about rocks you can't even see.

Mm.

And one of the big ones is Scarborough Shoal, which had been a very important fishing ground for Filipino soldiers.