BEWARE THE SNARL OF THE DRAGON
His chilling warnings in the Mail of how China infiltrated Britain could hardly have been more timely: the Huawei deal is finally dead. But in this devastating analysis, CLIVE HAMILTON — himself the target of Communist party revenge — warns we must brace for the backlash...
THIs week I should have been flying into Heathrow for the launch of my new book Hidden Hand: Exposing How The Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping The World, serialised exclusively in the Mail this week. Coronavirus has put paid to that, but it got me thinking about who would have been the perfect guest of honour.
step forward the Chinese ambassador to the Court of st James. Not because Liu Xiaoming endorses the book — far from it. But because His Excellency exemplifies the book’s alarm call to the world.
His sinister and bombastic treatment of your country reveals the true face of China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Even before your Government yesterday found some backbone and — belatedly — decided the Chinese tech giant Huawei is a danger to national security, the ambassador was making threats of retaliation and giving the British media a dressing down.
Britain’s protests about the crackdown in Hong Kong — including the imposition of a draconian new security law and its offer of a path to UK citizenship for three million Hong Kongers were ‘gross interference’, he said last week.
If Britain stands up to China, it would ‘face the consequences’.
Liu Xiaoming warned then that the Huawei decision was ‘a litmus test of whether Britain is a true and faithful partner of China’.
so, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, the decision to ban Huawei from the UK’s 5G infrastructure means that this country has spectacularly failed that test of friendship.
In the eyes of your oldest allies, however, you have finally come to your senses.
The Johnson Government’s toleration of Huawei’s role in the next-generation mobile data network caused consternation in the United states — and in my own country, Australia.
How could we, along with New Zealand and Canada, Britain’s closest intelligence partners, trust you with our secrets, if the CCP’s favourite technology company were running your critical communications infrastructure?
AUsTRALIA is far more dependent economically on China than Britain. And Chinese penetration of Australian politics — as I detailed in my first book, silent Invasion — is more dangerous. But my country had no hesitation in telling China that Huawei could have no role in what will be the central nervous system of our economy for the coming decades.
True, we have paid a price — Chinese proxies have huffed and puffed. We faced cyber-attacks and a propaganda blitz. Our exports including beef and barley have been hard hit by punitive tariffs. Be under no illusion: now Britain faces the same. For the message of what has been dubbed China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy is simple: be our friends, or else...
As my co-author Mareike Ohlberg and I explain in Hidden Hand — this ‘friendship’ comes at a price.
If you play along with the bullies of Beijing, you will be feted and rewarded. If you step out of line you will be punished by the world’s second largest economy.
This is not friendship. It is servitude. To see the true nature of the CCP regime, let us return to Hong Kong.
Few expected that Hong Kong, once part of the Commonwealth and with decades-long ties to Britain, could be crushed so speedily and ruthlessly as it has in the past few months — and with such contempt for world opinion. And so I applaud Boris Johnson’s decision to offer sanctuary to people in the former British colony around whom the walls of the CCP’s prison are going up fast. The thousands of young people who have campaigned for democracy over the past year with their dramatic weekend protests now face secret trials and long stretches — potentially life imprisonment — in Beijing’s gulag.
Meanwhile, the ‘Great Firewall’ of China’s internet censorship is descending on your former colony.
Beijing’s Ministry of state security, which last week brazenly opened an office in the supposedly autonomous region, will pounce on any whisper of dissent.
Books are being purged from libraries. The principles of freedom and democracy are vanishing from the school curriculum.
The crackdown has chilling echoes of the barbaric treatment meted out to millions of Muslim Uighurs living in their — also supposedly autonomous — region of Western China. In recent weeks, evidence has emerged of a grotesque policy of mass sterilisation, on top of a systematic attempt to obliterate this ancient people’s language and culture.
Australia has offered limited asylum to Hong Kongers already living there, urged businesses to relocate, and is warning against travel to the territory. China has responded with the same bellicose threats it issues to Britain: Australia must stop ‘meddling ... otherwise it will lead to nothing but lifting a rock only to hit its own feet’.
I hope that Australia and other countries will join you in making a much bigger offer of political refuge in the months to come. But be in no doubt. Those who flee will find that the CCP’s tentacles stretch all over the world — especially Britain — to an extent that you (and they) will find terrifying.
The Pentagon says China is now the greatest military threat to the United states. The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, warns that the Chinese regime is ‘engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary’.
Aggressive naval expansion in pursuit of preposterous territorial claims in the south China sea is stoking unprecedented concern. Yesterday we learned that Britain’s new aircraft carrier may be deployed there next year to bolster allied efforts to keep sea lanes open.
RECENT violent skirmishes on the Himalayan border between India and China — both nuclear powers — are another warning signal, even as Beijing has been boosting its arsenal of doomsday weapons.
The threat stretches further, to unprecedented cyber-attacks on Western democracies, a program of espionage, and the subversion of other countries’ decision-making.
Under the isolationist and erratic leadership of Donald Trump, as the
U.s. has retreated from the world, China has grabbed the opportunity, not least when coronavirus — spreading fast in Wuhan as we finished our book — hit.
China’s leadership used the pandemic to showcase the country’s global clout. Its propaganda organs trumpeted the success of its efforts. Although their claims are often bogus, many around the world believed them, as politicised aid shipments took the message into the heart of the West.
In countries like Italy, China was the most visible aid donor.
The real and still untold story is about the origins of the virus: the bullying of Chinese doctors and the silencing of its world-class virologists in the early weeks of the outbreak. Yes, Western governments have blundered, some badly. But if the Beijing regime had been efficient and transparent, hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide would have been saved. Yet
the CCP’s power rests on its ability to twist the facts, at home and abroad, backed up with colossal economic sway. Depressingly, in many countries China appears to have won the propaganda battle.
At present, my biggest worry is Germany, where Angela Merkel’s government seems to put trade and investment ahead of national security and human rights.
Never underestimate the political power of the German auto industry, whose largest market is China. The CCP has for years been grooming Germany’s elite as indeed it has in other countries — including Britain, as the Mail has revealed this week.
In Australia, I have seen for myself how far the CCP’s power can stretch. In November 2017 my publisher Allen & Unwin shelved publication of my book, Silent Invasion, which detailed the CCP’s influence in my own country.
It was cold comfort that its preemptive capitulation confirmed the book’s central argument:
China uses our system against us.
Beijing can punish publishers in a number of ways. One is ‘lawfare’, expensive libel actions from deeppocketed ‘friends of China’. These can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees, even if rocksolid research means the publisher eventually wins in court.
Another worry is cyber-attacks: devastating intrusions into the publisher’s computer networks, crippling its activities.
Then there is financial pressure. Australian publishers, like their British counterparts, use low-cost printing plants in China. Those commercial contracts now have a political twist. China’s censors have prescribed for Western publishers a list of banned topics.
No Chinese dissidents can be mentioned. No religion or politics, or maps that contradict the Chinese leadership’s dogmas. So, the regime in Beijing can censor even books written by Westerners and published by Western publishers for Western readers. Those bastions of free speech, university publishers, shunned my book too, fearful that they might jinx the lucrative flow of student fee income from China.
My personal safety became an issue. Other China analysts have suffered break-ins to steal computers and intimidatingly intrusive surveillance. Before I knew it, Australian security experts turned up at my office to advise me.
We installed swipe cards and security cameras in the building. In cafes, suspicious characters sat near me and placed devices on the seats between us — until I started taking photos of them to send to the authorities.
At first I fumed: ‘I’m just an academic who’s written a book in a country with free speech. How dare they try to intimidate me!’
Then I came to accept that this is the new normal for those who dare cross the CCP. For activists in Hong Kong, or human rights lawyers in China, it is far worse: life and death are at stake.
The Australian public sensed something was wrong. Once a small but brave publishing house took on my book, they bought Silent Invasion by the pallet load.
Britons too are beginning to question the way the country has succumbed to China’s blandishments and pressure.
And the clearest sign of that is Boris Johnson’s Government Uturn on Huawei yesterday, in response to the opposition of members of the Tory Party and criticism of security experts in the UK and abroad.
Treated as a privileged insider in the UK for years, the tech company founded by a former member of the People’s Liberation Army — the military wing of the CCP — weaselled its way into critical infrastructure while courting the support of influential figures — including a peer, three knights, a top Whitehall mandarin, City grandees and charity heads — on its board, as the Mail has revealed.
PrIvATeLy, British spooks were furious, but Government arm-twisting forced spymasters to say that the risk could be ‘managed’.
Please understand: this is not just an argument about technological standards. The new 5G system is the backbone of the world’s future economy. It is essential for the so-called ‘internet of things’. Until now, people have used computers mainly to communicate with other people. The next industrial revolution will involve machines talking to each other.
That promises great improvements in efficiency and convenience — but it is an irresistible target for those wishing to compromise the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data.
Huawei has become the global leader in 5G equipment and systems, offering the cheapest and most advanced products. It claims to be an independent employeeowned company.
On paper, it is. But Huawei also enjoys a protected home market and both hidden and overt support from the Chinese regime — exemplified by Chinese official demands that foreign countries treat it favourably.
Moreover, any business in China is subject to the country’s strict national security laws, which demand immediate and complete compliance with its spy agencies.
The West can trust Huawei, in short, only as much as it can trust the CCP. Which is not at all.
It is time to call a halt, and to put safety and security ahead of cost and convenience — as Britain has done, although the price may be considerable. The roll-out of better broadband, and the exciting new services promised by 5G will be slower. It will hurt this country’s competitiveness.
But the cost of continued complacency will be even higher.
The decision on Huawei is just a small step on a long march to protecting the nation’s security and sovereignty.
NexT, Britain will have to deal with other aspects of China’s technological clout. It should worry greatly about seemingly harmless manifestations such as the TikTok app, beloved by teenagers for its ability to create amusing videos.
But TikTok is a pernicious part of China’s global data collection efforts, vacuuming up details — including address books and photos — from mobile phones.
That data can easily end up in Beijing, in the hands of Chinese spymasters, fuelling the country’s surveillance system. This is no longer just targeted at inmates of the CCP’s realm. It is used to monitor and bully people abroad, part of a global effort to blunt threats and criticism that may offend the paranoid regime in Beijing.
No wonder that India has banned TikTok, and other countries are considering following suit.
Another worry for Britain should be China’s grip on the nuclear power industry.
In partnership with the French company eDF, China has a minority share in Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell C in Suffolk. China General Nuclear Power Corporation also hopes to build a nuclear reactor at Bradwell in essex.
I hope the people who praised China’s reliability when those contracts were awarded are now eating their words. And I hope Boris Johnson has contingency plans for the future of Britain’s energy sector if Beijing pulls the plug.
A more sinister and less visible danger is the Chinese regime’s penetration of universities, the business community and cultural institutions — and, of course, the political system.
Far more is yet to emerge of the depth and scale of these efforts, in Britain and elsewhere.
Be warned: the Chinese Communist Party loves to operate in the shadows. It snarls when the spotlight is turned on it.
I wish you luck as you try to extricate your country from the mire into which your decision-makers’ greed, naivety and complacency have buried you. you will need it.
ADAPTED from Hidden Hand: exposing How the Chinese Communist party Is Reshaping the World, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, to be published by Oneworld on July 16 at £20. © 2020 Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg.