RED CHINA SHADOW LOOMS OVER AUSTRALIA
Professor Hamilton assembled his findings into a book,
SILENT INVASION: HOW CHINA IS TURNING AUSTRALIA INTO A PUPPET STATE
in which he named the people he identified
as being at the forefront of China's influence campaign.
But months before the book's planned release, his long-time publisher, Allen & Unwin,
told him it could no longer go forward as planned, saying it was worried about
"potential threats to the book and the company
from possible action by Beijing".
China's shadow looms over the West
by Nathan VanderKlippe, Jeff Gray, Alexandra Li in Beijing/Toronto, Globe & Mail, November 23, 2017
Alarmed by creeping Chinese influence on Australian political life, Clive Hamilton set out to investigate. Business and people connected to China had already become the biggest foreign financial contributors to the country's political parties. But "it seemed to me there was much more going on", said Prof Hamilton, a scholar at Charles Stuart University. He found much to write about -- only to become, himself, the subject of China's efforts to promote its agenda around the world, after fears of retaliation by Beijing caused his publisher to back away from a book containing his findings. Now he is warning about the risks of China's rising power -- including in Canada, which has become an important target for Beijing-led campaign that relies on shadowy government-funded agencies to spread influence among Chinese living overseas.
Such "united front" work has been called a "magic weapon" by President Xi Jinping, who echoed a formulation that dates all the way back to Mao Zedong. But Mr Xi has overseen an effort to enhance China's international standing unparalleled in recent history, either in China or among countries such as Russia or Turkey, whose foreign-influence campaigns Beijing has eclipsed in scale and ambition.... "We have expanded to the maximum extent the boundaries of unity and called on Chinese people from every corner of the world to secure the core interests of our country, and to contribute to our reform and development", Zhang Yijiong, administrative vice-minister of the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party Central Committee, said in a rare public appearance in late October.
Critics, however, accuse Beijing of threatening the sovereignty of foreign political systems. It was that risk that Prof Hamilton sought to document. He tracked the rivers of money flowing into the Australian education system that "have made the universities beholden to China and extremely reluctant to do anything that might upset Beijing". He dug into work by Chinese emissaries "to turn the Chinese diaspora in Australia into a highly effective weapon for Beijing's diplomacy in this part of the world". He looked at opinion-makers espousing views favourable to China, some of whom "have been won over through financial ties to Chinese organizations". He looked at Chinese-language media in Australia, 90 per cent of which now "adopt a pro-Beijing political stance". He assembled his findings into a book, SILENT INVASION: HOW CHINA IS TURNING AUSTRALIA INTO A PUPPET STATE, in which he named the people he identified as being at the forefront of China's influence campaign. But months before the book's planned release, his long-time publisher, Allen & Unwin, told him it could no longer go forward as planned, saying in an e-mail it was worried about "potential threats to the book and the company from possible action by Beijing". In the email, first published by Australian media last week, the publisher cited "Beijing's agents of influence" and said printing the book would raise "the very high chance of a vexatious defamation action against Allen & Unwin, and possibly against you personally as well". "There have been, as far as I'm aware, no specific threats made to the publisher", Prof Hamilton said. "But, in a way, that's more worrying because it means the mere shadow of Beijing is enough to cause them to pull the plug on this book".
China's immense consumer market and economic power have made it a coveted business partner for countries around the world, not least Australia, which has benefited from its relative geographic proximity. But in courting Beijing, Australia has allowed China to gain so much sway, Prof Hamilton warns, that "it will take a decade of determined effort to unwind the program of influence that has been executed in this country". And, he says, other countries would do well to heed what he has experienced -- including Canada, where schools at all levels are increasingly reliant on tuition dollars from Chinese students, while Ottawa has approved controversial investments in sensitive sectors as it holds talks toward a free-trade agreement with Beijing.
Canada is far less economically reliant on China than Australia. But its large population of Chinese immigrants has also made it a target for the United Front Work Department and other arms orf the Communist Party and Chinese government tasked with exerting Beijing's influence abroad. A 2016 book UNITED FRONT THEORY AND THE FRONTIER OF ITS PRACTICE [by Beijing-based Chinese authors], says groups of large, relatively new immigrants overseas are "one of the most heated topics" for Chinese study, which has led researchers to devote special attention to countries such as Canada. The book then provides a description of networks of influence among the roughly one million Chinese immigrants who have arrived in Canada since 1980.... "The huge increase in population has given Chinese people stronger politicial influence in Canada. The number of Chinese people running for all levels of government positions is increasing. Some Chinese elites have had very impressive performances in elections", the authors [Chen Mingming and Ziao Cunliang] write in the book, which the Globe and Mail obtained in Beijing. Both researchers declined interview requests; Mr Xiao hung up on a reporter.
United-front work internationally serves two primary purposes: to understand what is happening amongst overseas Chinese and to use them to further Beijing's objectives, said Gerry Groot, a Chinese studies scholar at The Universtiy of Adelaide who has extensively studed the trend. Ethnic Chinese in positions of influence overseas are particularly valuable. "They hope to be able to use those sort of representatives directly or indirectly to help promote positions which are useful to China or to the Communist Party", Prof Groot said. "They hope that ethnic Chinese will be much more sympathetic to Chinese positions and be able to persuade audiences in other countries of the validity of those positions".... By 2010, it says, there were "oveseas Chinese" candidates in [Canadian] local, regional and school trustee elections....
In 2010, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Serivce [CSIS] warned that cabinet ministers in two provinces, as well as several municipal politicians in British Columbia, were suspected of operating under foreign influence.... See CHINA IN CANADA WARNS SPY CHIEF*
Critics say China's efforts are so wide-reaching that its "foreign influence activities have the potential to undermine the sovereignty and integrity of the poltitical system of targeted states". That was the conclusion of Anne-Marie Brady, a University of Canterbury professor who recently published a paper documenting extensive Chinese interference in New Zealand.... "New Zealand, like many other states in the world, is becoming saturated with the PRC's political influence activities", Prof Brady wrote, referring to the People's Republic of China. Those Chinese efforts create profound questions for diverse, democratic countries, where free speech is cherished and the idea of casting suspicion on an ethnic group is considered repugnant. At the same time, China's united-front efforts target a specific ethnic group. "It's a very difficult problem. And it's one that the united-front departments like because Western liberal democracies can tie themselves up in knots trying to figure out how best to cope with this", Prof Groot said. She added: "We need to be very clear-eyed about the fact that China as a communist state has all sorts of reasons and means to try to influence ethnic Chinese overseas".
Prof Hamilton has argued for tougher laws in response to "this new kind of influence that is being exerted on nations like Australia and Canada". Australia, for example, is planning new rules to force the registration of foreign agents. Canada has no such legislation, although such a law has long existed in the United States, where the USA China Economic and Security Review Commission recently recommended registering Chinese journalists as foreign agents. Prof Hamilton also called for Western countries to be vigilant in guarding their own values as China links its economic clout with a desire for global influence. "Humans have a remarkable capapcity to be blinded by money", he said. "And we are seeing that blindness exploited at all levels".
Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/Zoom silence China's critics
RED CHINA TERRORIZES KIWI PATRIOT
(NZ gov't not protecting people/democratic freedoms)
Oz cops ban Where is Peng Shuai shirts & signs
(tennis star raped/disappeared by China gov't official)
WIZARDS OF OZ EXPEL DJOKOVIC NOT CHINA
(kick athlete out to keep country safe)
January 2022
Canada warned of China's subtle, intense influence (on parliaments, provincial governments, universities, intellectual community...)
Beware effects of China's 'united front' in Canada: former envoy, CTV, Dec 8, 2017
UANGZHOU, China -- He [Canada's Prime Minister] was a curious 23-year-old in a bustling train station somewhere in China, at the height of its busiest season, Chinese New Year. He and his two friends didn't have tickets, but it didn't matter. "It was wonderful", Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week in Beijing as he recalled his first adult excursion to the country. He'd been to China before, of course -- as a child, with his father [Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau] visiting on official political business -- but this trip was different. "The landscapes I got to see, the discovery of myself through travelling through China was extraordinary for me." Trudeau referenced the formative influence of his backpacking experiences in China repeatedly this week as he tried to sell the merits of doubling the number of Chinese tourists next year. With his pursuit of free trade, it is one part of a major plan to deepen relations with the economically ascendant People's Republic, the country Pierre Trudeau [former Prime Minister] established relations with the year [1972] before he was born. The attempt to create a tourism boon comes amid concern over a more malevolent form of cross-cultural influence -- a deliberate and unprecedented effort by Chinese President Xi Jinping to project the power of his country in ways that some say amounts to international political meddling. "China does have a strategy for influencing public opinion and political opinion in other countries on issues that are important to China," said David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China and a senior national security adviser. Under Xi, China has undertaken a co-ordinated campaign known as the "united front" to influence events in foreign countries, including Canada, said Mulroney. That includes mobilizing Chinese students and tapping the diaspora in Canada. During past visits by Chinese leaders to Ottawa, the Chinese embassy has bussed in students from Kingston and Montreal to counter the inevitable demonstrations against the Chinese government, he said. The protests are commonplace, ranging from the treatment of religious minorities in Tibet to allegations of organ harvesting. "The Chinese communist successfully links patriotism to support for the party and the government," Mulroney said. Chinese students often bristle at reading criticism about their country when abroad and feel embattled, so it can drive them to be "super patriots".... Trudeau was subjected to a more benign version of relentless Chinese messaging off the top of a meeting with the secretary of the Communist Party for Guangdong province, Li Xi on Guangzhou's picturesque Shamian Island. Instead of the usual minute of small talk that usually opens the photo-ops for such meetings, Li welcomed Trudeau with a 15-minute monologue about his province's priorities and aspirations. Trudeau sat patiently listening, occasionally smiling and nodding, his eyes fixed straight ahead at Li. When he was finished, the prime minister thanked his host for the warm welcome and remarked how vividly he recalled walking the tree-lined cobblestone streets of the neighbourhood they were in his halcyon backpacker days. This time, Trudeau need not have mentioned his formative busman's holiday. Li made sure to include that too in his welcoming monologue. See CANADA'S RED TRUDEAU
RED CHINA SHADOW LOOMS OVER WEST
MAYDAY MAYDAY CHINA TAKING CANADA
JFK SAY USA WON'T TRADE WITH RED CHINA
(JFK's last press conference, November 14, 1963, one week before assassination)
CHINA TRAPPING & SKINNING CANADA
RED TRUDEAU-2 SHEDS SHIRT & JOBS
COMMUNISTS ENSLAVE BRITISH FREE PRESS
RUSSIAN KGB BUYS UK NEWSPAPERS
KING EDWARD ABDICATION A CONSIRACY
CANADA PULLS RICKSHAW FOR RED CHINA
BOBBY FISCHER'S ORWELLIAN END GAME
JFK OPPOSED MONOLITHIC CONSPIRACY
STALIN PROUD OF KHADR SHOW TRIAL
SECRET WORLD CHINA COMMIE PARTY
CHINA FOODFIGHT FOR CANADA POTASH
* CHINA IN CANADA WARNS SPY CHIEF
CANADA BLOODY SEVERED-HEAD STATUES
LENIN-MAO MOCK CANADA OLYMPICS
RUSSIA IN CANADA'S SCIENCE WORLD
RUSSIA & CHINA SKATING CONSPIRACY
TROTSKY REVELLED IN SOVIET EVIL
CANADA COMMIE LENIN-MAO STATUE
MCCARTHY DEMAND CHINA FREE POWS
MCCARTHY ON CHINA & NORTH KOREA
JOE MCCARTHY'S SECRETARY SPEAKS
CHINA TALONS IN CANADA OIL SANDS
CHINA RAILROADING CONGO RAILROAD
OZ & CANADA FUEL CHINA'S NUKES
USA FORFEITS ICELAND TO RUSSIA
OZ PM SPIED FOR CHINA (...Holt proceeded over the next thirty years to send intelligence abroad about Australia's domestic and foreign policies and those of her allies - up to and including the time when he was prime minister. It seems certain that Harold Holt was the highest placed spy the Communist world has ever had in the West...)
CHINA RAIN-CONTROLLED OLYMPICS
ORWELL & LENIN DIED & HISS JAILED
FABIAN'S WEBB WORSHIPPED LENIN
HUEY LONG & JOE MCCARTHY HEROES
MACARTHUR, JFK, KOREA & VIETNAM
RICH RUSSIANS LIKE LENINRED CHINESE CAPITALIST BANKERS
ATOMIC-BOMB SCIENTIST COMMUNIST
CHINA'S FOOT IN TAR SANDS DOOR
USA APPLAUDS CHINA TAKE CARRIBEAN
COMMUNIST CAPITALIST ORWELL MOVIES
CANADA'S HUSKY BARKING CHINESE
CHINA DEVOURING CANADA'S METAL
MY JOURNEY THROUGH FAMINE STRICKEN RUSSIA, 1933
EXPERIENCES IN RUSSIA, 1931, A DIARY
SOVIET UNION FAMINE EXPOSURE, 1930-1933
AUSTRALIA'S PERSECUTED PAULINE
SPYING FOR STALIN WAS BAD, RIGHT?
SOVIET GULAG'S HAUNTING LEGACY
MCCARTHY GLIMPSED VISCIOUS TRUTH
SUPERMAN A SOVIET - CLARK KENT A COMMIE
COMMUNISTS COINED "MCCARTHYISM"
LENIN BEHIND ENVIRONMENTALISTS
DARK SIDE OF RED ARMY'S LIBERATION OF GERMANY
6.Super-States and 7.Systems of Thought and 10.The Rulers and Big Brother's Brotherhood
Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~
email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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