Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World
CLIVE HAMILTON & MAREIKE OHLBERG
(ONEWORLD, 432 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet Through the People of One Town
BARBARA DEMICK
(GRANTA, 336 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 020 7799 4064
The thesis of Hidden Hand, which Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg defend with exhaustive and authoritative research, is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under President Xi Jinping has a specific global agenda. Its aim is to generate a culture of compliance with the party’s aims throughout the Western world.
The incentives to collaborate are money, in vast amounts, and persuasion that the Western democratic model prioritising human rights is outdated, and that the authoritarian model of the CCP is better suited to contemporary needs. The collusion with the CCP’s aims may be arm’s length or intimate, but either way Hamilton and Ohlberg offer familiar names across the Western world who have been sucked into the orbit of the CCP.
The party’s plethora of front organisations, all identified, are active in academia, publishing, business, culture – including sport – and business. The reappraisal of its approach to influencing the West can be traced back to 1989, when the Soviet empire collapsed and the Tiananmen Square massacre generated global opprobrium. The CCP had to devise more effective means of influence than the Soviet “fifth column” models. Its solution was to have its tentacles reach into universities, the media, big business, political think tanks, and to seduce political decision-makers themselves.