In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Revealing China’s “Hidden Hand”
  • Charles Parton (bio)
Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Re-shaping the World. By Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. London: Oneworld, 2020. 280 pp.

Legal threats and letters delayed the publication of this book on the united front strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how that strategy operates in Europe and North America. You cannot buy publicity like that. Media coverage of the controversy has ensured reprints already. It is an object lesson for Xi Jinping’s Central Propaganda Department: If you want publicity for something, pretend you object to it and threaten to sue; if you want to kill a story, the best thing is to keep quiet.

In 2018, the Australian public intellectual Clive Hamilton published Silent Invasion, his first foray against CCP influence and interference abroad. (There is a difference: The first is called “public diplomacy” and all countries do it; the second is what Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called “covert, coercive, or corrupt[ing],” and the CCP devotes vast resources to the dire art.) Silent Invasion was a rol-licking polemic in the best Australian tradition; it aimed to expose CCP attempts to bend Australia to a CCP narrative and detach the country from its allies.

Hidden Hand comes from the same kitchen. It offers the reader a gallimaufry of incidents, people, events, and organizations—all thrown into the pot, sometimes fittingly, occasionally jarringly. Some may condemn this as a merely polemical stew, but (to shift the metaphor) the authors’ unabashed aim is indeed to throw grenades. They want to rouse Europeans [End Page 182] and North Americans from their complacent slumbers, and to expose those who put their personal interests above the values they say they espouse and above the general good. If that means occasional overinterpretations, they are the casualties of combat. And this book is nothing if not “combat-atative”—the neologism captures the high rate of fire which Hamilton and Ohlberg aim at the target.

Hidden Hand is also a highly readable primer on the united front strategy and how the CCP interferes in the internal affairs of other countries (the CCP does a fine line in hypocrisy; how often do we hear that phrase whenever foreigners express views on China?). Ohlberg is a fluent speaker and reader of Chinese, an excellent China scholar with an intimate knowledge of the CCP’s workings and an ability to explain clearly what the united front strategy is and how the CCP implements it. You do not have to be a China scholar to follow the passages which lay these out, although it helps if you have a memory for impossible acronyms containing the letter C in profusion. Fortunately, there is an annex setting out organizations and their acronyms, as well as 123 pages of notes, a highly useful feature for those wishing to dig more deeply. Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is that almost every assertion is backed up by a reference, allowing interested readers to make up their own minds on a claim’s reliability and significance.

Besides its value as a polemic and primer, the book has a third purpose. That is to ask: How are likeminded democracies to deal with CCP interference? This is where the reader must work a bit harder. The text supplies or implies many suggestions, but does not set them out in one place for easy digestion. Fair enough, this is not a policy paper; there are enough of those elsewhere to mine for ideas and solutions. Waking the broader public and politicians to the issue and explaining it to them are the first and most crucial steps. A lack of understanding of the CCP, its aims, and its methods remains rife—and there are those who do not wish to be awakened.

Although the primary role of the CCP Central Committee’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) is to align non-Party elements of society with CCP interests, the UFWD is also a very significant player in promoting those interests abroad. First, it sets the united front strategy, whose goals the authors define as “to induce, co-opt and coerce those outside...

pdf

Share