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Hidden Hand
Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World
Clive Hamilton, Mareike Ohlberg
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eBook - ePub
Hidden Hand
Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World
Clive Hamilton, Mareike Ohlberg
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About This Book
'Heavily sourced, crisply written and deeply alarming.' The Times 'This is a remarkable book with a chilling message.' Guardian The Chinese Communist Party is determined to reshape the world in its image.Its decades-long infiltration of the West threatens democracy, human rights, privacy, security and free speech. Throughout North America and Europe, political and business elites, Wall Street, Hollywood, think tanks, universities and the Chinese diaspora are being manipulated with money, pressure and privilege. Hidden Hand reveals the myriad ways the CCP is fulfilling its dream of undermining liberal values and controlling the world.
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1
An overview of the CCPâs ambitions
The Chinese Communist Party is determined to transform the international order, to shape the world in its own image, without a shot being fired. Rather than challenging from the outside, it has been eroding resistance to it from within, by winning supporters, silencing critics and subverting institutions.
Whereas analysts on both sides of the Atlantic continue to agonise over whether to label China an opponent or even an enemy, the CCP decided this matter thirty years ago. In the post-Soviet world, it saw itself surrounded by enemies that it needed to defeat or neutralise. While the CCP and its supporters in the West like to speak of a ânew Cold Warâ being waged against China, the Party itself has all along been engaged in an ideological struggle against âhostile forcesâ. For the CCP, the Cold War never ended.
The reshaping of alliances and the remoulding of the way the world thinks about it are essential to the Party securing continued rule at home, as well as to its reach and eventually making China the number one global power. The Partyâs plans have been explained at length in speeches and documents. Its implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome Chinaâs dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile. In some nations, mobilising the wealth and political influence of the Chinese diaspora, while at the same time silencing critics within it, is central to the strategy.
Backed by its enormous economic clout, China engages in arm-twisting, diplomatic pressure, united front and âfriendshipâ work, and the manipulation of media, think tanks and universitiesâall these tactics overlap and reinforce each another. Some people claim that Beijingâs influence around the word is no different to that of any other country. While not everything the Party does in this respect is unique, the scope, degree of organisation, and eagerness to use coercion distinguish the CCPâs actions from other nationsâ diplomatic activities.
As the worldâs largest factory and second-biggest economy, China has been a magnet for Western businesses and many Western politicians. Some industries are heavily dependent on access to Chinaâs huge market, and Beijing is willing to use this dependence as a political weapon. In the words of one close observer, âIf you donât do what Beijingâs political leaders want they will punish you economically. They put the economic vise on politicians around the world. They have been doing it for years and it works.â1
At times, the vice has been tightened in conspicuous ways. After the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Canada in 2018, for example, imports of Canadian soybeans, canola and pork were blocked. Beijing reacted in a similar way in 2017 when South Korea, in response to aggression from the North, began installing an American antiballistic missile system. Beijing took forty-three retaliatory measures, including banning Chinese tourist groups to South Korea, driving a large Korean conglomerate out of China, barring K-pop stars, and blocking imports of electronics and cosmetics.2 Beijing was still punishing South Koreans in October 2019 when it demanded that the prestigious Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, in New York State, exclude three Korean students from its top orchestra if it wanted a planned tour of China to go ahead.3 Citing the damage to Eastmanâs reputation in China if the tour were to be cancelled, the dean agreed to leave the Koreans behind. Only after an outcry by students and alumni did the school decide to cancel the tour.4
When Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, tweeted his support for Hong Kong protesters in late 2019, Beijingâs backlash was instantaneous.5 (The torrent of criticism on Twitter appears to have come from trolls and fake accounts in China.6) The televising of Rockets games to its huge fan base in China was suspended. Sponsors withdrew. Beijing raged that Morey had âhurt the feelings of the Chinese peopleâ. The state broadcaster, China Central Television, redefined freedom of speech to exclude âchallenging national sovereignty and social stabilityâ.7 Desperate to protect its growing market in China, the US National Basketball Association issued a fawning apology that read as if written by the CCPâs Central Propaganda Department.8
While only a few examples of extreme punishment are needed in order to sow fear in everyone, Beijing prefers to keep its threats vague and thus deniable, to keep the targets guessing. As Perry Link puts it, vagueness frightens more people because no-one can rule themselves out, and those in the frame therefore âcurtail a wider range of activityâ.9
Beijing has become the worldâs master practitioner of the dark arts of economic statecraft, in part because in recent decades Western nationsâ commitment to free-market policies makes them reluctant to manipulate trade for political reasons. Thatâs why the world was shocked when Donald Trump launched a trade war against China in 2018. While he is wrong on many other things, Trump is right that Beijing has been systematically violating the principles of international economic engagement and getting away with it.
Beijingâs vast program of infrastructure investment abroad, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, is the ultimate instrument of economic statecraft or, more accurately, economic blackmail. It provides an outlet for Chinaâs construction industry and enormous capital reserves, while at the same time supplying the investment needs of other countries who are short of capital and excluded from mainstream sources of finance. The offer of low-interest loans is hard to resist, especially when they come without environmental or other conditions.10
However, the objectives of the BRI, also known as the New Silk Road (see the list of acronyms on page 277), go well beyond providing an outlet for surplus Chinese capital or helping poorer nations develop; the initiative is Beijingâs primary mechanism for reordering the global geopolitical system.11 Xi Jinpingâs signature policy is now so closely integrated with almost all Chinese government activity abroadâcommercial, technological, academic, culturalâthat it cannot be separated from the PRCâs overall diplomatic engagement.
Xi Jinping has repeatedly referred to the BRI as essential to his vision of constructing âa community of common destiny for humankindâ.12 While the idea might sound good to Western ears, its aim is a Sinocentric world; that is, the one envisaged by the hawks elevated by Xi to the top leadership positions. They view a China-led world order as an essential part of the âgreat rejuvenation of the Chinese peopleâ.13
So the BRI is the most powerful vehicle by which Beijing is changing the postwar international order.14 In a revealing 2015 speech, defence strategist and retired PLA major-general Qiao Liang described the BRI purely as the vehicle for China to achieve dominance over the United States. It represents, he stated, Chinaâs new and irresistible form of globalisation, the success of which will be measured by the renminbi displacing the dollar as the world currency, leaving the United States âhollowed outâ.15 While Qiao is a pusher of boundaries, the geostrategic rationale of the BRI is also made plain elsewhere, such as the leaked minutes of a 2019 ChineseâMalaysian meeting on a BRI project, which noted that despite the projectâs âpolitical natureâ, the public had to see it as market-driven.16
The adjective most frequently attached to the BRI is âvastâ, and when Chinaâs top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, said in April 2019 that the BRI âdoes not play little geopolitical gamesâ, he was speaking the truth.17 The former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Nayan Chanda, describes the BRI as âan overt expression of Chinaâs power ambitions in the 21st centuryâ.18
Like other so-called parallel institutions created by the Chinese government, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRI pretends to pose no challenge to countriesâ existing institutions, while incrementally realigning their interests and shifting the global balance of power. A key part of the CCPâs thinking on global and regional power dynamics is the identification of a âmain contradictionâ and a âmain enemyâ to unite against. On a global scale, that enemy is the United States, which needs to be split from its allies and isolated.
Brexit, dissension in the European Union and the election of Donald Trump have created a strategic opportunity for Beijing to weaken the transatlantic alliance and further erode European unity. Long seen by the CCP as the largely irrelevant junior partner of the United States, Europe is now viewed as the great prize. By winning over Europe, the CCP hopes to convince the world that China is the âchampion of multilateralismâ and a much-needed counterweight to US hegemony and unilateralism.19 Beijing wants to mobilise European support for its initiatives in the developing world. (Although we wonât be covering them in this book, similar strategies of breaking up existing alliances play out in other parts of the world.)
Despite all the news stories about âdebt diplomacyâ, âglobal connectivityâ and âwin-win cooperationâ, itâs apparent that the BRIâs goal of strategic rebalancing is to be achieved not only by the political influence that goes with infrastructure investment, but also by a subtle and multi-pronged program of global thought management. The BRI is about the projection of power through controlling the terms of the debate. (We develop this argument in chapter six.) It no longer makes sense to confine discussion of the BRI to business and economics, because it sprouts everywhere, from the Silk Road network of think tanks, media agreements, and ties between cultural institutions, to the establishment of sister cities and âpeople-to-people exchangesâ, all of which are incorporated into BRI memoranda of understanding.
Today, the CCP remains deeply anxious about âideological infiltrationâ by hostile forces bent on regime change in China. As a manual published by the Central Propaganda Department in 2006 explained, âwhen hostile forces want to bring disarray to a society and overthrow a political regime, they always start by opening a hole to creep through in the ideological field and by confusing peopleâs thoughtâ.20 This Cold War mentality is vital to an understanding of the CCPâs international activities, which are first and foremost the global extension of the Partyâs desire for regime security.
In the face of this threat of ideological infiltration, the CCP decided that the best form of defence is attack. Thus when its leaders talk of making the international order more âdemocraticâ, âopenâ and âdiverseâ, this is code for an order in which âauthoritarian systems and values have global status equal to liberal democratic onesâ, as Melanie Hart and Blaine Johnson express it.21
In April 2016 the Global Times, the Partyâs pugnacious tabloid, gave its readers a glimpse into the mindset of the CCP when it justified the internet-censoring Great Firewall as a temporary defensive tool that âquelled Western intentions to penetrate China ideologicallyâ.22 That is to say, once the CCP has reshaped global opinion, once its values, political system and policies have gained worldwide acceptance, the threat to the CCP of Western ideas will be overcome and the Great Firewall may no longer be needed. The Party believes it is now powerful enough to transform the global conversation.23
Beijing also seeks to ensure that the world community shuns Chinese dissidents and proponents of an independent Taiwan. It wants international support for the idea that the CCP is the sole party fit to rule China. It also craves recognition that its political and economic system is superior to Western democracy and the liberal-capitalist economic order, and that CCP-ruled China, in contrast to the United States, is a responsible global actor working for the greater good of humankind.
Some have argued that this attempt to export the Partyâs ideology is bound to fail, but itâs an argument that no longer holds, as we shall see. For others, Beijingâs claim to be a responsible world power, and its criticism of the United States as an âirresponsible global rogueâ, have appeal in the light of evidence from the Snowden leaks, the calamitous invasion of Iraq, and Donald Trumpâs call for regime change in Venezuela, among other events. The irony of Trump is that he has been pushing back hard against Chinaâs economic power while at the same time playing into the CCPâs hands by isolating the US from its allies, making them more vulnerable to Party interference. Chinaâs rising influence in Europe has been welcomed by those who distrust America, as well as by some Eurosceptics who view China as a counterweight to the European Union or Europeâs larger, more powerful countries.
Beyond these camps, others are questioning the effectiveness of democracy and expressing admiration for Chinaâs system of authoritarian government. Others still, including squads of Western journ...