Australia And New Zealand Are Ground Zero For Chinese Influence
From a hill overlooking Canberra, Australia's landlocked capital, Clive Hamilton points to the National Carillon, a bell tower that happens to be striking noon, then to a massive glass and concrete monolith.
"That's where ASIO lives," he says, using the common shorthand for Australia's intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.
He then points out Australia's federal police building and to a compound in the middle, where China built its embassy.
"They picked that spot, and they have a lot of clout, they have a vast compound, and they kind of get what they want around here," he says.
When Hamilton, a professor at Charles Sturt University, first tried to publish his new book, Silent Invasion: China's Influence in Australia, the fear of China's Communist Party crept in, he says. Hamilton's original publisher, Allen and Unwin, informed him last November that it was canceling the book's publication because it feared legal action from what it called "Beijing's agents of influence."
"I was shocked," remembers Hamilton. "I felt betrayed. We knew this was a difficult subject. We knew that Beijing has some powerful friends in Australia. We knew that the Chinese government would be highly critical of the book and of me. Of course, it was great comfort to have a really good, solid publisher behind me, and all of a sudden I was left out there on the battlefield, looking over my shoulder, saying, 'Where is my support?' "
The episode was a vindication of the central thesis of Hamilton's book — that China's Communist Party has infiltrated Australia — but not
