Hidden Hand Quotes

“As Elsa Kania put it, ‘Huawei’s global expansion, in and of itself, can serve as a vector for Beijing’s influence.’137 After all, if Huawei achieves its goal of becoming the dominant supplier and builder of the global communication network of the twenty-first century, that gives Beijing enormous influence around the world. Huawei is at the fulcrum of President Xi’s two fusions, the Party–corporate fusion and the civilian–military fusion, to which might be added a third, the influence–espionage fusion.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“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

“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

“While the United States has been cracking down on illegal technology transfer, Canada has for years been actively facilitating the work of CAIEP and removing barriers for the ‘exchange of talent’.86 SAFEA’s objective of recruiting spies is hinted at on its website, where it states that its mission is to use ‘many types of recruitment channels’ and to do so by making ‘full use of contacts with governments, exchanges with sister cities, international economic and trade negotiations, international conferences, and like opportunities’ to recruit foreign experts.87 One such channel is private companies. Triway Enterprises is a Virginia-based company set up under SAFEA’s auspices, with branches in Beijing and Nanjing.88 Its function is to link Chinese firms and local government offices with US experts who can supply intellectual property.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“The China Association for International Exchange of Personnel keeps a low profile and few people outside China have heard of it. Ostensibly dedicated to people-to-people exchanges, the CAIEP has offices in the US, Canada, Russia, Germany, the UK, Australia, Israel, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, and has agreements and collaborates with organisations in many more countries. In 1999 the US Congress’s landmark Cox Committee report on Chinese nuclear spying described the CAIEP as ‘one of several organisations set up by the PRC to illegally acquire technology through contacts with Western scientists and engineers’.”
― 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 March 2019 it was reported that the nation’s largest funder of science, the Maryland-based National Institutes of Health, had written to hundreds of research universities asking about the links of certain researchers to foreign governments.75 It expressed concern about the theft of intellectual property by researchers linked to the Chinese government or Chinese universities (Russia and Iran were also on the radar). The following month a story broke about the prominent Houston cancer centre MD Anderson, which had fired three Chinese-American researchers named by the National Institutes of Health as suspected of stealing research and failing to disclose foreign ties.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“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

“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 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 third method is the formation of a long-term relationship that causes the target to turn—that is, to see the world from a CCP point of view. In May 2018 two former agents of France’s external intelligence service, Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), were arrested for spying for China.46 One of them, Colonel Henri Manioc, had allegedly defected in 1998 after falling in love with a Chinese woman. He had been head of mission at the French embassy in Beijing.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“When sex is the means of exploitation, there are three methods. The first is seduction that leads to the direct theft of secrets. For example, Ian Clement, deputy to the then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was caught in a honey trap while in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. He was approached by an attractive woman, agreed to have a couple of drinks, then invited her up to his hotel room.40 There he passed out, apparently drugged, and woke to find his room ransacked for documents and the contents of his BlackBerry downloaded. A top aide to Prime Minister Gordon Brown fell for the same trap in the same year.41 The second method is seduction that leads to blackmail, using compromising photographs. This classic honey trap (meiren ji, literally ‘beautiful person plan’) was perfected by the Russians.42 Though the method is not uncommon, cases rarely come to light.43 In 2017 the former deputy head of MI6, Nigel Inkster, said that China’s agencies were using honey traps more often.44 In 2016 reports suggested that the Dutch ambassador to Beijing had been entrapped.”
― 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

“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

“A review of China-linked espionage cases of all kinds in the US between 2000 and early 2019, carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tallied 137 reported instances. It found that 57 per cent of actors were ‘Chinese military or government employees’, 36 per cent were ‘private Chinese citizens’, and 7 per cent were ‘non-Chinese actors (usually US persons)’.29 (A study of all cases of economic espionage in the US between 2009 and 2015 found that 52 per cent of those charged were of Chinese heritage, a tripling of the percentage for the period 1997 to 2009.30) It’s possible that the high proportion of Chinese-heritage spies is due to racial bias in the FBI and Department of Justice. But rather than a sharp rise of anti-Chinese racism in federal agencies, a more plausible explanation is that Beijing has stepped up its program of industrial espionage in the US and has recruited Chinese visitors to America, and Chinese-Americans, to commit the crimes.31 Even so, the number of people of non-Chinese heritage induced to spy for China appears to be rising.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“The psychological techniques used by the CCP in united front work have been developed and refined over decades and are taught to cadres with the help of classified manuals. James To observes that the techniques are effective for ‘intensive behavioural control and manipulation’ while appearing to be ‘benign, benevolent and helpful’.9 Speaking to the Central United Front Work Conference in 2015, Xi Jinping emphasised that the art of ‘making friends’ must be practised because it is ‘an important method of carrying out united front work’.”
― 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

“Port investments are viewed as vehicles with which China can cultivate political influence to constrain recipient countries and build dual-use infrastructure to facilitate Beijing’s long-range naval operations.’139 The shift in strategic landscape is most advanced in the Indo-Pacific, but good progress is being made in the Mediterranean. In Chinese-language sources, PLA Navy experts put the strategy this way: ‘meticulously select locations, deploy discreetly, prioritise cooperation, and slowly infiltrate’.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“The BRI is the perfect vehicle for winning over nations that feel hard done by, and these countries do not have the investment filters that some others use to keep foreign firms out of vital infrastructure.138 China also has a growing naval presence in the Mediterranean. The PLA Navy has been conspicuous for its activity in the Eastern Mediterranean and in 2015 held joint manoeuvres with Greece’s navy.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“In Europe, Chinese companies now own airports, seaports and wind farms across nine countries.136 (They also own the tyre-maker Pirelli, the Swiss agrichemicals company Syngenta, a large slice of Daimler, a slew of office towers in London’s financial hubs, and thirteen professional soccer teams.) All or part of the ports of Rotterdam (Europe’s largest), Antwerp and Zeebrugge are Chinese-owned. The state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company owns the major Greek port of Piraeus and has a majority share in the Spanish port-management firm Noatum, and so controls the ports of Bilbao and Valencia.137 Barcelona’s huge new container terminal is owned by a Hong Kong–based company.”
― 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

“In Germany, the government appears to have at times adopted a more critical position towards Beijing, only to revert back to a more ‘business friendly’ stance. The CCP’s use of business to exert pressure here is essential to understanding why. When Chancellor Angela Merkel ruled out a law blocking Huawei from Germany’s 5G network, Handelsblatt reported that she ‘feared a rift with China’.115 In 2018 the bilateral trade volume between the two countries was almost €200 billion, making China Germany’s largest trading partner for the third consecutive year. Chinese imports of German goods that year totalled €93 billion.116 Such has been the growth in Germany’s economic relations with China in recent years that it is now, of all the EU countries, the most dependent on China.”
― 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

“China’s government is deeply concerned about any loss of confidence in the country’s fragile financial markets, both legitimate and shadow. If a financial crisis were to cause the economy to crash, it would jeopardise the Party’s hold on power, not to mention a huge writedown in the value of assets owned by the red aristocracy. When China’s stock market was crashing in June 2015, a directive was issued to state media ordering them to change their reporting so as to ‘rationally lead market expectations’.99 They were directed to halt all discussions and expert interviews. The directive went on: ‘Do not exaggerate panic or sadness. Do not use emotionally charged words such as “slump”, “spike”, or “collapse”.’ Two months after the crash, a reporter for the respected business magazine Caijing, Wang Xiaolu, was arrested on charges of ‘spreading rumors’.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“At the centre of the CCP’s ambitious strategy for global economic domination is the push for China’s currency, the renminbi or RMB (also known as the yuan), to become the foremost global currency, replacing the US dollar. The size of China’s economy and the fact that the RMB is the second most used currency for trade helps, but financial markets know that China’s financial system is not robust, and that the government manipulates it, which creates distrust.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“Beijing’s logic for subnational influence is straightforward. First, friendly relations at this level can help smooth the way for investment in strategic assets—ports, regional airports (including pilot training schools), satellite dishes (as in New Zealand), developments adjacent to military bases, certain agricultural developments and the like. Second, Beijing knows that some subnational leaders will graduate to national parliaments, where the friendship can pay even higher dividends. Finally, they understand that local leaders can exert political pressure on the centre.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“CCP analyst Jichang Lulu has explored the localisation of united front influence activities in the Nordic countries, where local officials with considerable decision-making power are targeted for ‘friendly contact’ because they are insulated from strategic debates in the capital cities and do not have the expertise to understand Beijing’s intentions and tactics.1 He notes that Beijing has been actively cultivating political influence in Greenland, which Beijing sees as important for resource supply and for being an Arctic state. The strategy includes investments, an attempt to acquire a derelict naval base, and political work on Greenland’s elites, activities that have rung alarm bells in Denmark.”
― 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

“the CCP views the France China Foundation as its foremost avenue of influence on France’s elites. In this respect, it is similar to Britain’s 48 Group Club.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

“If, as some believe, the BRI is a Trojan horse smuggling CCP influence into a country’s political system, some seemingly innocuous provisions in the Italian memorandum of understanding hint at what is hidden in its belly. Along with promoting sister-city networks—and specifically the twinning of Verona and Hangzhou—the memorandum agreed that ‘Parties will promote exchanges and cooperation between their local authorities, media, think tanks, universities and the youth’, including cooperation between Italy’s national public broadcaster, RAI, and the China Media Group (overseen by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department).154 These provisions open the door for greater CCP influence activity.”
― Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World