Clive Hamilton > Quotes

“In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume in stead of our freedom to find our place in the world.”
― Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish

“People buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like.”
― Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish

“There is only one inborn error: and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy. Arthur Schopenhauer”
― Clive Hamilton, Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics

“Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please.”
― Clive Hamilton

“Italy, in a coup for Beijing, was the first major industrial power to join the BRI. According to Ding Chun, director of the Centre for European Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University, Beijing saw Italy’s debt crisis as an opportunity to expand the BRI into ‘the heart’ of Western powers, and the outcome was of ‘huge significance’ to China as it met stronger headwinds with the United States.125 Strategists in China had been taking close note of the fractures in the EU over the debt crisis, the austerity imposed by Germany, conflicts about migration, and Britain’s decision to leave. A divided Europe was much easier to tempt and subvert. A senior Chinese academic and former diplomat, Wang Yiwei of Renmin University, said that the Euroscepticism of the new Italian government made it willing to defy Washington and move closer to China.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“Freedom is not the greatest thing; how we decide to use our freedom is the greatest thing.”
― Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene

“Western universities have displayed extraordinary naivety in their dealings with Chinese companies and universities, and are often unwilling to admit the risks even when confronted with the evidence. Funding bodies like the US National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council have no due diligence procedures, and rely on universities to vet researchers and companies.118 The universities often have a strong financial incentive to keep themselves in the dark while defending the traditional scientific culture of openness and transparency, even though this is being systematically exploited by Beijing.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“assuming existing policies are fully implemented, the global average temperature is likely to rise by 2.2°C to 3.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.12 A”
― Clive Hamilton, Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet

“The CCP seemed to be following a dictum attributed to Stalin: ‘Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“Typically, Westerners are lured by money, sexual favours and the excitement of clandestine operations. Money appears to be the most common bait for those Westerners, judging by the cases that have become public. A target might be offered a modest sum for a short ‘white paper’ on, for example, US–China trade relations. Once payment for information has been normalised, larger payments and requests for confidential information are made, until the line has been crossed into illegality. In the case of commercial secrets, the target, such as an engineer at a high-tech US company, might be offered a trip with expenses paid plus a stipend to give a lecture at a university in China.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“the United States shares the concern of some in Asia that the BRI could be a Trojan horse for China-led regional development, military expansion, and Beijing-controlled institutions’.132 And, it should be stressed, for the control of critical infrastructure. After 40 per cent of the Philippines’ national electricity network was sold to the giant state-owned State Grid Corporation of China, the head of the national transmission corporation conceded that the Philippines’ entire power supply could be shut down by the flick of a switch in Nanjing, the location of the monitoring and control system.133 State Grid also owns a large share of the electricity networks in the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia.134 Its bid for the New South Wales grid was rejected on national security grounds.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“political friendship is ‘an application of united front principles to divide the enemy by focusing on contradictions and uniting all forces that can be united around a common goal’. In the language of the CCP, ‘friendship’ does not refer to an intimate personal bond, but to a strategic relationship. The Party’s terminology of friendship ‘is a means to neutralise opposition psychologically and to reorder reality’. Foreign friends, writes Brady, are those willing and able to promote China’s interests.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“The first objective of including Australia in its overall periphery, he told them, was to secure Australia as a reliable and stable supply base for China’s continued economic growth over the next twenty years. The longer-term goal was to drive a wedge into the America–Australia alliance”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“Even if the world were to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, elevated levels of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere – up from 270 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 420 parts per million today – will keep global temperatures high for centuries. Slow processes like melting ice masses, thawing tundra and rising sea levels are in effect irreversible once they begin. There are signs that some tipping points may have been breached already. What humans have done and will do over the century 1950 to 2050 will change the way the Earth functions for many thousands of years.”
― Clive Hamilton, Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet

“In the first decades of the twenty-first century China must aim to surpass the United States ‘to become the world’s No. 1 power’.32 Liu’s 2010 book became a nationwide bestseller in China, appealing to a public ready to embrace a global master narrative in which the revival of the Middle Kingdom would restore China to its proper place as the centre of the world, and from where it would spread harmony through its culture, language and values, an empire that, in the words of another scholar, ‘values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance over democracy and human rights’.33”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“On 28 January 2020 one of Harvard’s most senior faculty members, chemist and nanoscientist Dr Charles Lieber, was taken away in handcuffs when the FBI alleged that he had been recruited into the Thousand Talents Program. The Department of Justice alleges that between 2012 and 2017 he was paid $50,000 a month plus generous living expenses to set up a lab at Wuhan University of Technology and transfer his knowledge.78 Lieber failed to disclose his China links to Harvard, even though the Wuhan centre was called the ‘WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory’.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“journalist Sabine Pamperrien noted that German support for China tended to emanate from two distinct camps—‘left-wing politicians and publicists’, often fuelled by anti-Americanism; and powerful businesspeople who don’t want to see their ‘flourishing trade’ with China impeded by concerns over human rights.196 These two need not necessarily contradict each other. For some, sympathy for nominally left-wing regimes and profit motives go hand in hand. Few embody this mix better than former chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Schröder is mainly known in Germany for having sold out to Russia after leaving office in 2005, and for becoming chairman of the board of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft in 2017.197 But he is also firmly in Beijing’s orbit, so much so that in 2009 Der Spiegel published a photo of him literally hugging a panda.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“Controlling people’s thoughts obviates the need to control their behaviour and the party has striven constantly to implant patriotic thoughts into the minds of the people.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“Belgium is an easy target for China’s spying and influence because of its fractured political system and lackadaisical attitude.45 And the government wants to cultivate Beijing for greater investment. If Italy is Beijing’s southern entry point into Europe, Belgium is its northern gateway. Some of the CCP’s most unapologetic supporters are found in the EU-China Friendship Group of the European Parliament in Brussels. In 2019 the group claimed a membership of forty-six MEPs from some twenty countries, making it the parliament’s largest friendship group.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“From the outset, the BRI has been presented as a model of ‘inclusive globalisation’ and aimed at those who feel shut out. The language plays to the dream of global harmony through trade and cultural exchange. When Xi Jinping uses the phrase ‘community of shared future’, the subtext is that China’s new world order will replace the postwar American hegemony. The BRI can be seen as the CCP’s principal vehicle for promoting and entrenching the Party’s alternative discourse system for the world. To the outside world, Xi and other leaders talk about ‘win-win cooperation’, and ‘a big family of harmonious co-existence’ and ‘a bridge for peace and East-West cooperation’, but in discussions at home, the talk is of achieving global discursive and geostrategic dominance.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“so many scientists from Los Alamos [science and technology labs] have returned to Chinese universities and research institutes that people have dubbed them the “Los Alamos club”’.73 Although the Thousand Talents Plan was only established in 2008, the systematic transfer of technology from the West has been under way for much longer. When China began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a program was developed to send technically talented young Chinese to the West. Many of the brightest students were sent to Germany and the United States to obtain PhDs in physics; some stayed on and achieved senior positions at top universities, from where they could send information to China.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“The Chinese Mission to the EU is very active and has so far faced very little backlash. As we will see in chapter eleven, it sponsors almost all think tanks working on China and Asia in Brussels, quite a few of which are headed by former EU officials. Many of the mission’s activities are jointly organised with departments of the European Union.40 As well as a range of EU institutions, Brussels hosts NATO’s headquarters. The city is a hub for diplomats, military brass, journalists and political leaders, and attracts intense interest from Beijing’s influence and espionage agencies. In fact, Brussels is described by Belgium’s intelligence agency as a ‘chessboard’ for spies, notably from China.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“The Thousand Talents Plan aims to recruit highly qualified ethnic Chinese people to ‘return’ to China with the expertise and knowledge they’ve acquired abroad. Alternatively, those loyal to China can ‘remain in place’ to serve. The US Department of Energy, whose work includes nuclear weapons and advanced R&D on energy, has been heavily targeted to this end.72 Around 35,000 foreign researchers are employed in the department’s labs, 10,000 of them from China. Many of the latter return via the Thousand Talents or other programs.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“the Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute does not actually exist. It has no website, no phone number and no buildings. It does have a post office box in Henan province’s capital city, Zhengzhou, but that’s about it. The name is in fact a cover for the university that trains China’s military hackers and signals intelligence officers, the People’s Liberation Army Information Engineering University, which is based in Zhengzhou.109 Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Clemson University in South Carolina, Louisiana State University, and City University of New York have all collaborated with individuals who disguise their affiliation with this PLA university, which is in effect its cyberwarfare training school.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“A powerful sense of national pride built on a belief in historical humiliation, combined with an inability to distinguish between the nation and its government, goes a long way towards explaining why many in the Chinese diaspora, including Chinese-Australian citizens, remain loyal to the PRC and defend its actions even when they conflict with Australia’s values and interests.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“China was already a substantial investor in Italy, with a Chinese chemical company buying Pirelli, and Huawei buying mobile phone operator Wind.129 As China specialist François Godement points out, previous Italian governments were happy to sign a series of science and technology cooperation agreements that were ‘essentially a carbon copy’ of the priorities laid out in Made in China 2025, Beijing’s blueprint for becoming the world’s dominant technological power.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“In 2019 the Department of Justice arrested the head of its New York office on a charge of conspiracy to commit visa fraud.82 The indictment gave an invaluable insight into CAIEP’s recruitment of scientists, engineers, IT specialists and others to return to China with their workplaces’ intellectual property. Building on united front work, the CAIEP works with ethnic Chinese professional associations, ‘friends’ in US universities, and Confucius Institutes, all in close collaboration with Chinese consulates.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“In May 2019 the head of the ILD, Song Tao, met with Manfred Grund, a delegate of the German Bundestag and member of its Committee on Foreign Affairs. According to the ILD, Grund offered assurances that his party, the Christian Democratic Union, ‘actively supports the Belt and Road Initiative’ and ‘stands ready to strengthen exchanges and mutual learning with the CPC’.11 When later asked to comment, Grund said that he did not recall saying this, but that he did see common interests for Europe and China in Central Asia.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“By influencing the private and public pronouncements of economists, Beijing shapes global perceptions of China’s economic outlook. When financial risks to the Chinese economy became serious in 2015, the CCP began exerting subtle influence on international banks not to rock the boat with bad news. UBS, the largest Swiss bank, has a long history in China and has been actively pursuing a deeper role in its financial system.103 It too has been pressured to rein in its public commentary, and in 2018 one of its employees was detained in China, for no apparent reason, causing UBS management to bar travel by its staff to China.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“Feinstein has been a China-booster from the early 1990s, often backing pro-Beijing legislation in the Senate. Her husband has strong business links in China, which she denies have had any influence on her. In 1997 she compared the Tiananmen Square massacre to the shooting of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970, and called for a joint US–China commission on the two nations’ human rights records.35 Lowe left Feinstein’s office after the FBI warned her about him. China’s intelligence agencies also target Westerners not of Chinese heritage for information-gathering. In 2017 a long-serving State Department employee, Candace Claiborne, was indicted for accepting money and gifts from Chinese agents in exchange for diplomatic and economic information.36 She had been targeted by the MSS’s Shanghai State Security Bureau after she asked a Chinese friend to find a job in China for a family member. Claiborne maintained secret contact with MSS agents for five years, supplying them with information in return for help with her ‘financial woes’. She was sentenced to forty months in prison. In the early 1990s Britain’s MI5 wrote a protection manual for businesspeople visiting China; the advice remains relevant today: ‘Be especially alert for flattery and over-generous hospitality … [Westerners] are more likely to be the subject of long-term, low key cultivation, aimed at making “friends” … The aim of these tactics is to create a debt of obligation on the part of the target, who will eventually find it difficult to refuse inevitable requests for favours in return.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World