HOW CHINA SEDUCED ITS USEFUL IDIOTS
In 1954 Jack Perry – secret member of UK Communist party – forms ‘48 Group’with pariah Chinese premier
AS ThEY cosy up to Beijing, there are two fundamental errors its many influential ‘friends’ in the West make about China, whether they are hardnosed businessmen intent on making money or dreamers with a globalised vision of one-world. The first is that they shrug off the all- embracing power of the Communist Party, ignoring the fact that China remains an authoritarian regime with repressive values and practices, run by a Leninist political party replete with a central committee, a politburo and a general secretary backed by enormous economic, technological and military resources. It is a fantasy of wishful thinking to believe that, with increasing contact with the West, China will morph into a freedom-loving democracy. It won’t. Nor do its leaders want it to.
The second mistake is not to realise that ‘friendship’ has a very distinct meaning, a cynical and opportunistic one. It does not refer to an intimate personal bond, but to a strategic relationship on behalf of the party. This was made clear by China’s autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, when he told party members in 2017 that their friends are not their ‘ own personal resources’, but ‘friends for the Party’ or ‘for the public good’.
Foreign friends are nothing more than those willing and able to promote China’s interests. In Britain, there are many of these ‘useful idiots’ — a term attributed to Lenin that described naive foreign enthusiasts for the Russian revolution.
So entrenched are China’s networks among British elites that, in our judgment, we have passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate the UK from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail.
The centrepiece of China’s foreign policy is exerting commercial, technological, academic and cultural influence around the world through its Belt and Road Initiative, or the Silk Road. Xi launched it in 2013 and repeatedly refers to it as essential to his vision of constructing ‘ a community of common destiny for humankind’.
While the idea might sound good to Western ears, its aim is not. The Silk Road is Beijing’s primary mechanism for reordering the global geopolitical system in its favour — creating a China-led world in which the U.S. is knocked from its perch and left hollowed out. With this in mind, China targets other countries’ elites in business, politics, academia, think tanks, media and cultural institutions.
Information is collected on them, their friends and family. Targets include past, present and future political leaders as well as highlevel officials who advise and influence political leaders.
Anyone who may have the ear of a political leader, official and unofficial advisers, civil servants, party colleagues, donors, friends, spouses and other family members, business associates and military brass are all fair game.
Invitations are extended — to a conference, a reception or a cultural occasion, events organised by apparently neutral charities or academic organisations, where warm feelings are cultivated. Gifts may be given, setting up a sense of obligation and reciprocity. A free trip to China might follow, during which the target is worked on in a carefully scripted programme of meetings and tours.
Naive Western politicians readily walk into the trap of ‘friendship’, flattered by being called a lao peng
you (an old friend of China) and feeling they are being singled out for a special relationship.
Entrusted with the inner thoughts of top leaders, they often act as Beijing’s messengers, urging others ‘ to see it from China’s perspective’ and ‘ adopt a more nuanced position’.
Meanwhile, many business people in the West making money in dealings dealgs with China can be prompted to pressure t their i government tt to do nothing to upset Beijing.
THIS tactic is so common, it even has a name — yi shang
bi zheng ( literally, using business to pressure government).
The most glaring example of China exerting its influence in high places in Britain is the 48 Group Club, which boasts of members from the heart of the British establishment including a former Prime Minister and two former deputy
PMs, together with politicians of all three major parties, masters of Oxbridge i colleges and powerful f figures from industry and the City.
The 48 Group Club — also known as The Icebreakers — has built itself into the most powerful instrument of Beijing’s influence and intelligence gathering in the UK. The list of those who play a role in it is a Who’s Who of power elites.
Well-known names listed on its website include former deputy PMs Michael heseltine and John Prescott; the billionaire Duke of Westminster; foreign minister in the Blair government Jack Straw; Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland; former Labour
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Party powerbroker and European trade commissioner Peter Mandelsite. Mandelson. Also listed are five former British ambassadors to Beijing, a retired general, the chairman of the British Museum, the chief executive of the Royal Opera House, the chair of British Airways, a director of Huawei and people closely linked to the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.
Former PM Tony Blair is also listed on the website as a ‘fellow’ after he gave a speech in 2010 to The Young Icebreakers, which is part of the 48 Group Club.
It’s not clear how many of the club’s members were actually aware they were listed on its website. A spokeswoman for Blair told The Times that the speech was: ‘The first and only time he ever had anything to do with something connected to the organisation about which he knows nothing. To suggest he was “linked” to the organisation as part of some lobbying exercise for the Chinese government is utterly absurd.’
The club was founded in 1954 after 48 British businessmen went to Beijing to establish trade relations at a time when, due to its involvement in the Korean War, China was the subject of an embargo on strategic goods by the U.S. and Britain. It was set up by businessman Jack Perry, prompted discu Prem quickly developed an unrivalled level of trust and intimacy with the top leadership of the CCP, and reaching into the highest ranks of Britain’s political, business, media and university elites, the club plays a decisive role in shaping British attitudes to China.
Four years after its inaugural trip to China in 1954, club members were returning from Beijing to report on the ‘extraordinary prestige’ of the group in China. Puzzled but pleased at the solicitous treatment they’d received, they began to speak of the group’s ‘mystique’.
Today the 48 Group Club is playing an even greater role, enthusiastically fostering the interests of the CCP in the United Kingdom or, as Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, prefers to put it, ‘promoting positive UK-China relations’.
Among the less prominent names it lists as members are Tom Glocer, former boss of Thomson Reuters; Professor Peter Nolan, University of Cambridge; and Professor Hugo de Burgh, University of Westminster. Katy Tse Blair, Tony Blair’s Chinese-American sister-in-law, is also listed as a member.
She is married to his brother William and is a founder of Chinese For Labour, which is affiliated to the Labour Party, represented on the National Executive Committee and regularly meets with the leader and shadow cabinet.
The 48 Group Club is chaired by Stephen Perry, the son of its founder. As a sign of its importance to China’s leadership, when he visits he is granted unmatched access, from Xi Jinping down.
In 2018 he was honoured with a prestigious China Reform Friendship Medal, conferred on him personally by Xi. While the 48 Group Club is feted at banquets in
Beijing, it keeps a very low profile in the UK. With more than 500 members, it serves as a meeting place and networking hub for friends of China, through which Beijing grooms Britain’s elites.
Perry’s stream of commentary on the group’s website is a robotic repetition of CCP propaganda. He defends the abolition of limits on the term of China’s presidency, and says Xi is responsible for freeing our minds. He told New China TV that China’s system of democratic governance, that of ‘hearing the people, listening to the people and . . . serving the people’, will lead the world in the 21st century.
NO GROUP in Britain enjoys more intimacy and trust with the CCP leadership than The 48 Group Club. In 2018 the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a Communist Party front group, hosted a grand banquet in Beijing to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the original group’s visit.
Perry had an audience with Xi, something UK diplomats cannot achieve, signalling the CCP leadership sees the 48 Group Club as vital to its influence. Xi applauded the club while Perry lauded China’s ‘tremendous achievement’, praising Xi’s idea of a ‘community with a shared future for humanity’.
One event is especially revealing about the role of the 48 Group Club. In 2017, the CCP Congress voted unanimously to incorporate a new manual on Chinese socialism known as ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ into its and the nation’s constitution. In April last year, the Chinese
embassy in London held a study session to explain the leader’s ideas. More than 70 people were present, including many from the club, as ambassador Liu Xiaoming urged them to engage in ‘earnest study and accurate interpretation’ of Xi Jinping Thought.
He finished by echoing Xi-ism’s central concept: ‘I count on your contribution to the building of a community with a shared future for mankind!’ There was a speech by Professor Martin Albrow, author of China’s Role in a Shared Human Future, which argues that Xi Jinping Thought can promote global peace.
That book was greeted enthusiastically by party media in China and here by Anthony Giddens, a prominent sociologist and theorist for the Blair government, who lauded it for explaining how China ‘must assume a pivotal position in shaping world society for the better’.
Another invited to speak at the study session was Martin Jacques, author of the bestselling 2009 book When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. At the G20 summit in Osaka in 2019, he gave an interview laying all the blame for the breakdown of Sino-U.S. relations on Washington. Jacques identified the rise of American nationalism as the problem.
He also attacked the protesters in Hong Kong as militants whose actions should not be tolerated by the authorities.
Jacques is frequently interviewed on China Global TV and said in 2017 that the West must learn from China, and that the shift to a China-led world is an ‘unalloyed good thing, one of the greatest periods of democratisation the world has seen’.
Among the other participants at the embassy study session were the chair of the House of Lords international relations committee, Lord Howell; the chairman of the China-Britain Business Council, Lord Sassoon; the director of the Confucius Institute at the School of African and Asian Studies, Nathan Hill, and Ian MacGregor, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph.