China’s Useful Idiots
Review by James Quinn
Just a week before November 3, the last day of voting in the 2020 U.S. election, Newsweek broke a bombshell of a story: “600 U.S. Groups Linked to Chinese Communist Party Influence Effort with Ambition Beyond Election.” The article identified and mapped out a sophisticated and wide-ranging array of organizations involved in influencing American society, encompassing many dozens of diasporic Chinese groups in the U.S., various chambers of commerce, and other cultural and educational organizations.
It’s the kind of discovery that could have been expected to dominate the conversation in the home stretch of a campaign season in which the two candidates have accused each other of being soft on China. The Newsweek piece didn’t get the attention it deserved.
None of this would surprise Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, co-authors of Hidden Hand. Both are experts in Chinese political-interference operations — he an Australian academic, and she a German researcher of China. Their book provides a comprehensive look at how the Chinese Communist Party has for years managed perceptions in democracies in North America and Western Europe, using all manner of methods to make friends of elites, average people, and everyone in between.
All of this shows how the Party is an existential threat to Western democracy. READ MORE HERE