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Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

by
September 2020, no. 424

Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Hardie Grant Books, $32.99 pb, 438 pp

Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

by
September 2020, no. 424

Sometime in 2017, one of the world’s largest academic publishers started quietly removing thousands of articles from its websites in China because they covered topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinse Communist Party (CCP). Much of the offending material related to the three Ts: Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time I was a China correspondent for the Financial Times, and an academic who was horrified by this censorship tipped me off. I contacted the publisher, Springer Nature, which admitted that it had begun censoring to comply with ‘local distribution laws’. I naïvely thought that the exposure of such craven behaviour by the owner of Nature, Scientific American, and the Palgrave Macmillan imprint would prompt a huge backlash from academics, universities, and governments.

Ben Bland reviews 'Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world' by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world

by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Hardie Grant Books, $32.99 pb, 438 pp

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Comments (2)

  • "Hidden Hand reveals as much about the fragilities of Western democracies as it does about the dark arts of the CCP." So good; there was enormous value to be head reading this and then reading it again. Much thanks!
    Posted by Patrick Hockey
    29 September 2020
  • Many thanks for such a judicious and trenchant review. Sober but informed voices are an acute need in this debate.
    Posted by Kyle Wilson
    14 September 2020

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