Hidden Hand

Clive Hamilton

Description

'Headline: The Globe and Mail: Legal challenge halts Canadian, U.S. and U.K. release of book critical of Chinese Communist Party by Robert Fife That said it all. The hands of the Chinese Communist Party were going on the offence. The 48 Group Club a China friendly group of former UK ambassadors and Prime Ministers were embarrassed by their connections to a Club founded by key members of the Chinese Communist Party of Britain who's chair Stephen Perry suggested that China's approach to world order and rule was superior to democracy and the UK should embrace them. Asked if he believed the lawsuit was an effort by the Chinese government to stop the publication of his book, Mr. Hamilton said: I have no evidence of that, although it should be noted that the Chinese government has used lawfare in the past. Lawfare is the use of legal action as part of a campaign against a target. Governments around t

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780888903082
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hidden Hand


Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg
Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and academic. His influential books include Silent Invasion, Growth Fetish, Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change and Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene. For fourteen years he was the executive director of The Australia Institute, a think tank he founded. A professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, he has held visiting academic positions at the University of Oxford, Yale University and Sciences Po. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The New York Times, Times Higher Education Supplement, Nature and Scientific American.
Mareike Ohiberg is a researcher based in Berlin who focuses on China's digital policies and the global influence of the Chinese Communist Party. From 2016 to 2020 she was a research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Her work involves briefing E uropean governments and policy-makers on developments in China. She has an MA in East Asian Studies from Columbia University and a PhD in Chinese Studies from the University of Heidelberg. Her doctoral thesis was on Chinese propaganda targeted at foreign audiences, and she was a co-author of the landmark report Authoritarian Advance: Responding to China's growing political influence in Europe. Her articles have been published in The New York Times, The Neue Zürcher Zeitung and various other European media.
Foreword
Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World
In 1939 British historian E.H. Carr noted that "for the past hundred years, and more especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed the dominant group in the world; and current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate their supremacy."
Ten years after Carr wrote those words, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, inaugurated the new People's Republic in China by declaring that "ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. The Chinese people have stood up!" Mao promised that China would redress the ignominy of China's defeat by Britain in the Opium War of 1839-42 and the subsequent imperialist incursions by Japan and the Western powers. Today under Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, China claims itself to be the rising civilizational superpower that will soon displace the declining U.S.-led Western alliance and assert China's renewed supremacy by reshaping the world on Chinese terms. The "community of the common destiny of mankind" as Mr. Xi defines it, will by the year 2050 displace the domination of the liberal democratic institutions of the rules-based international order, including the UN and WTO under a strong China-centred new global economy and Chinese Communist "socialist" morality. That is the CCP's plan anyway.
The CCP seeks sanction for its rise to global power on the basis that it is Leninist autocratic rule is a contemporary expression of China's Confucian tradition and the realization of China's historical destiny. It puts forth that the PRC's CCP régime is a benevolent dictatorship that stands for advancing global economic prosperity. Its highly ambitious worldwide infrastructure scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), already signed on to by 60 countries representing 2/3 of the world's population, is touted as a win-win for all. But on closer examination inevitably all the proposed belts and roads begin and end in China indicating a core and periphery dependency model. Sadly, it is evident that, in fact, the BRI is part and parcel of the CCP's malevolent geostrategy to re-orient the world's political economy to serve the insatiable empowerment of Beijing.
Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg in this tightly argued and meticulously researched text reveal how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to debase the Westphalian principles of the sovereignty of nations and undermine principles of fairness, reciprocity, law and human rights in favour of asymmetrical power relations putting the interests of China on top. Enormous resources and technological power have been put into a formidable program of deception, subversion and coercion to further the CCP's global hegemonistic ambitions. This carefully calculated program of manipulation plays on the greed and naivety of political and business élites throughout the world. This book builds on Hamilton and Ohlberg's previous studies of CCP influence and interference operations in Australia and Europe respectively drawing on the findings of a burgeoning network of courageous scholars in Europe and North America that dare to expose the powerful monied interests co-opted by the CCP's sophisticated program of "United Front Work." They reveal how the CCP's "hidden hand" through years of patient and relentless work has engendered a massive tangled web of prominent Western policymakers and opinion shapers who serve the CCP's power designs at the expense of their own nations' interests.
Many at the senior levels of Western government believe that the rise of China is inevitable, so they have no choice but to make the concessions of sovereignty and political freedoms to accommodate the emerging global reality of a China-centred world, especially as powerful economic interests are at stake. Indeed, in recent years, the CCP has been bolder and bolder in applying economic coercion to leverage its political interests. This includes threats to Australia to stop exports of wine and meat and refuse to allow PRC nationals to go to Australia for tourism and educational purposes if an investigation ensues on the PRC's culpability over the spread of COVID-19. The CCP has taken Canadians hostage and cancelled over $3 billion in agricultural commodity imports to pressure the Canadian Government not to extradite the Huawei CFO to face charges in the U.S. Furthermore; the PRC has gone to considerable lengths to subvert multilateral institutions from the WHO to Interpol and the Human Rights Council to acquiesce to the demands of the CCP.
However, the examples of strong support for democracy and the entitlements to the rights of citizens in Hong Kong and Taiwan suggest that CCP autocracy is not the necessary expression of Chinese historical and cultural norms. Without question, China could rise to power as a responsible stakeholder in global affairs if the correct political choices were made.
This book is a clarion call for the democratic nations to unite to meet the threat of the CCP to universal norms of human rights, freedom and democracy. China's success in its strategy of disinformation and subversion is emboldened by Western passivity in the face of China's blatant violations of the accepted norms of international trade and diplomacy. Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg make clear that we absolutely must take decisive action to stand up for honesty and transparency in our engagement with the PRC. Moreover, very soon before it is too late.
Optimum Publishing International
This Canadian Edition of Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World is published by Optimum Publishing International by arrangement with Oneworld Publications.
© Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg 2020
The moral right of Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
A CIP record for this title is available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN: 978-0-88890-306-8 eISBN: 978-0-88890-305-1
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens, Winnipeg Manitoba
Optimum Publishing International 144 Rochester Avenue, Toronto Canada M4N 1P1

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Contents
Preface
1 An overview of the CCP's ambitions
2 A Leninist party goes out to the world
The CCP's Cold War mentality
'Big external propaganda'
The Party rules
The united front
Double-hatting and double-plating
The people and their friends and enemies
The 5 per cent rule and quiet diplomacy
CCP operating procedures
3 Political elites at the centre: North America
Making friends
The sad case of John McCallum
Influence in Washington D.C.
The White House
The Department of Enemy Work
Canada's Beijing elite
4 Political elites at the centre: Europe
Party-to-party diplomacy
Grooming Europe
The EU-China Friendship Group
Britain's 48 Group Club
The Italian conversion
Elite entanglement in France
China's friends in Germany
5 Political elites on the periphery
Subnational work
The curious case of Muscatine
Malleable mayors
BRI support in Germany's 'countryside'
Sister cities
6 The Party-corporate conglomerate
The Party and business
Comrade billionaire
America's 'globalist billionaires'
The princelings of Wall Street
CCP in the City of London
Shaping economic perceptions
Yi shang bi zheng
The Belt and Road strategy
BRI as discourse control
7 Mobilising the Chinese diaspora
Qiaowu: overseas Chinese work
United Front: modus operandi and structure
Threats and harassment
Huaren canzheng
Huaren canzheng in the United Kingdom
8 The ecology of espionage
Influence and spying
China's espionage agencies
Recruitment methods
Think tanks and research institutes
A thousand talents
Professional associations
PLA scientists in Western universities
Cyber attacks and influence ops
The Huawei case
9 Media: 'Our surname is Party'
Media discourse
Party above all
A global media force
Westerners finetune CCP propaganda
Crossing the Great Firewall
Borrowing boats
Cooperation agreements
Chinese-language media
Buying boats
Self-censorship by foreign media
10 Culture as battleground
Political culture
Poly Culture
The Ch