Silent Invasion Quotes

“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

“Chris Bowen, Labor’s federal shadow treasurer from the New South Wales Right, is a patron of the ACPPRC, or was until the 2016 Sam Dastyari affair (discussed later) when his name was removed from the website. Bowen has so far managed to fly under the radar but his Chinese links are wide and deep.28”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“The accusation can be made only by conflating the CCP with Chinese people so that being anti-CCP must mean being anti-Chinese. (It’s exactly what the CCP wants us to think.) It’s a cheap accusation, but it serves as an effective silencing device in this country because of the widespread, and quite proper, sensitivity to inflaming racial tensions.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“The combination of close personal relationships, coupled with threats of punishment, is the standard Chinese modus operandi. Beijing hoped to turn Australia into a ‘second France’, ‘a western country that would dare to say “no” to America’.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“For a modern state there are cheaper and less risky means of coercion, sometimes known as economic statecraft or geoeconomics. China has become the world’s master practitioner. Geoeconomics can be defined as the deployment of economic punishments and rewards to coerce nations to adopt preferred policies.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“The Chinese Communist Party is present in all major enterprises in China and manipulates or directly controls their decisions to achieve political and strategic aims.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“Geoff Wade, pointed out that China is ‘openly utilising its financial clout globally to facilitate expanded strategic leverage. Chinese capital is, without doubt, being employed as a strategic tool.’19 British, American and Japanese investors do not hail from one-party states that habitually use overseas trade and investment to pressure and coerce other countries into policy positions sympathetic to their strategic interests. For them the guiding principle is not ‘economic ties serve political goals’. Nor do they bring modes of operating that are secretive, deceptive and frequently corrupt, and whose important decisions are often made by political cadres embedded in companies and answerable to a totalitarian party at home. Only when the Chinese state no longer operates in these ways should we treat Chinese investment like any other.”
― Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China's Influence In Australia

“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

“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

“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