We all do it. All we countries. We all spy. We all influence peddle. So why pick on China? Two reasons: First, it has become much more aggressive since it’s become so much wealthier. Second, because its driving force is so much more malign. It’s working on behalf of a corrupt dictatorship. Sure, one that’s made many richer and happier, I’ll give them that, but which is at heart an authoritarian state, seeking to expand its influence. That is why it is so much more to be feared when it is China that’s doing the influence-peddling, the buying of military secrets, the hacking and stacking.
China has always had its diaspora to call on, in support of the “motherland”. And now many more, as well. Since it has so much money to splash around, many are now beholden to Beijing. They love the money and will attack anyone who calls out this vile influence peddling. Like professor Anne-Marie Brady, a graduate of my alma mater, the Australian National University. She’s now in New Zealand, at the University of Canterbury, has written broadly around this subject but been vilified, attacked and burgled for her troubles.
Recently she presented a paper to the New Zealand parliament, titled “Holding a pen in one hand, grasping a gun in the other” [WebArchive] the heading a borrowing from Mao Zedong, he of the pithy aphorisms (“power flows from the barrel of a gun” and all that).
For presenting meticulously researched and referenced evidence of China’s malign efforts to steal secrets, blackmail businesspeople and politicians, influence elections, hack systems -- prof Brady has been censured by her very own Canterbury University. Shame on Vice Chancellor, Cheryl de la Rey, who has led the denunciations.
Today I read that a group of China scholars, 142 at latest count, have come with an Open Letter in support of prof Anne-Marie Brady. They ask the university to apologise to prof Brady, for not rejecting outright the complaints against her and for not standing up for academic freedom.
I know a number of the signatories to this letter. Benedict Rogers, Clive Hamilton, Ding Qiang, Dong Luobin, Feng Chongyi, Jonathan Mirsky, Roger Garside. And some I was classmates with in the seventies in China: Geremie Barmé (probably the world's most accomplished non-Chinese Sinologist), John Fitzgerald and Jonathan Unger, all professors. And the big daddy of sinology, Jerome A. Cohen. These are people who really know their China stuff. They have fact-checked the prof Brady paper and found “no manifest errors or misleading inferences”. [going on then, to my pedant’s delight, to offer the grammatical observation that the paper “makes” no inferences, as these are taken by the reader, not made by the writer. What the writers meant, clearly was “implications” -- this being one that often trips up folks].
I would have found this nowhere in the MSM, because it’s not there. I learnt about it here. But it’s surely critical to the west. The extent to which China is influence peddling, both through its massive diaspora and through those it has suborned.
Not addressed in any of the recent debates: who does China prefer? The answer, we know, is Biden. What does that tell us about the hard-nosed Chinese? That they expect less trouble, less hassle, from Joe. That they will be able to carry out their influence peddling, their intelligence gathering, their covert acquisitions of military secrets, more easily under Joe than under Trump. Think on’t.
