On my vacation I was trying to relax. Strenuously, by studying Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. A bit late, you might say, and corny, though I've always liked corn. The trouble is, I was also reading Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg's Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinse Communist Party is Reshaping the World. Which left me about as relaxed as Jean-François Revel's How Democracies Perish had a third of a century earlier.
To some extent Hidden Hand achieves the unusual result of being a rivetingly boring read. The authors document at great length the bewildering variety of Chinese front groups and the useful Western idiots who belong to them. And while it's scary stuff it's also dry. I can't remember it all. But luckily there's an appendix.
I know. It all sounds paranoid. But even paranoids have enemies. And so do people blithely unwilling to contemplate the possibility. So for those who find the title lurid and the thought of a Communist conspiracy so badly out of date it should be in a black and white film or news reel, ask two simple questions: If a foreign government really were trying to take over the world in the name of a collectivist ideology, what would it do? And is the Chinese Communist Party doing it?
Hamilton and Ohlberg don't just say yes. They catalogue it, focusing less on things like the military buildup or the buying of Third World governments than the way the CCP creates "front organizations" in democratic nations and draws cultural, media and political figures into them so that they become fairly reliable defenders of the Chinese government and reliable critics of its critics.
By "on the way" I don't just mean they talk about the fact of it and list the organizations. I mean they discuss the methods, from the legal bribery of grants, fellowships, professorships and favourable business deals through infiltrating ethnic organizations down to the darker stuff.
Some people defend communism from honest if vacuous inability to see that ideas matter. And people from nowhere will take cash from anywhere, untroubled by principles. Thus, to cite just one example, "Apple, whose iPhones are assembled in China, also came under fire for deleting an app that allowed Hong Kong people to avoid street clashes with the police. It acted a day after China's state media accused it of protecting 'rioters'. Soon after, Apple CEO Tim Cook was appointed to chair a Business School Advisory Board at Tsinghua University." As if he even needed the money. But it gets worse.
A lot of the useful idiotry described by Hamilton and Ohlberg, as by Revel back in the day, is the result of appeals to vanity and a generalized revolt of the elites against their own Western civilization. But when you contemplate the reluctance of many ardent proponents of social justice and peace to acknowledge and denounce the repression and aggression of the regime in Beijing you may be very sure that prominent Western business and political figures are being blackmailed as well as bribed, legally or otherwise.
Honey traps are not an invention of Hollywood. Nor are slippery slopes where you start by taking money to write papers or do some low-effort, high-lifestyle consulting and without realizing it slide into providing information that implicates you in espionage and opens you to blackmail.
Of course we cannot rule out the possibility, in our own government's spineless response to China, that they are honest convinced appeasers, or as clueless as many Western politicians contrived to be over Soviet Communism while calling it sophistication. But we also cannot rule out that they have been deeply compromised, through sophisticated exploitation of their naivete or the cheesy trick of a girl in a bar and a camera in a hotel room. And let me be blunt: The authors observe on a number of occasions that, however it happened, the program has been especially effective in Canada.
Before dismissing such things as a par with The Manchurian Candidate remember that while McCarthy was a drunken idiot the Cambridge Five were real, and not alone. There really was Soviet espionage at high levels of the American, British, West German and other governments. And just as the KGB really was up to stuff, so is the United Front Work Department.
Why do you think it exists? And if the Politburo cares as much as they evidently do, surely we should care enough to read Hidden Hand. If you read it and find that it's factually wrong, then I wasted your time. But if you read it and find that it's true, and still don't care, go edit the Wikipedia entry on "Useful idiot" by adding your picture. And if you do care, say something and do something.
At the very least, check the index to see if any outfit you're involved with is a tentacle of the Chinese Communist Party. Of course one danger of doing so, for prominent people, is that they might find their own name there. If so, they seem to have two choices. Bluster about McCarthyism or refuse to acknowledge the issue. But there's a third. Repent and join the side of freedom even if, like Whittaker Chambers, you think it's the losing side.
Indeed, everyone should embrace freedom and denounce Chinese communism, repenting their naivete along the way if need be. And remember in doing so that the democracies did not manage to perish in the Cold War. Chambers was not joining the losing side. Freedom stumbled to victory over Soviet Communism and my guess is we'll stagger to triumph over the Chinese variety as well. But we'll do so because, and if, enough people again wake up to the sinister goals and devious methods of its hidden as well as overt hands.
