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Does the CCP control Extinction Rebellion? Western activists are blind to President Xi's ambition

Is he just a useful idiot? (NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images)


December 15, 2021   8 mins

A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by “focusing on cutting carbon emissions… China will promote green development, and continuously improve its ecology”. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination. Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that China’s leaders have repeatedly shown they are not “men of their word”.

Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?

Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its ‘useful idiots’ often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xi’s avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.

Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.

I asked Hamilton if China’s wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: “They’ve fallen for what the Party calls ‘discourse control’ — to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.”

For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting — prematurely — that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimed in a paper for the World Economic Forum that China was “emerging as a global leader in climate policy”. His co-author was He Jiankun, a ‘counsellor’ to China’s top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: “The world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.”

Has Stern been naïve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinping’s alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the People’s Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Stern’s spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry, and — of course — Xie Zhenhua.

This year, for what it’s worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this year’s CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained “keen to learn from the UK’s example of world-leading action on climate change” and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, China’s emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.

On paper, at least, you might argue there’s no harm in that. After all, the CCICED’s “mission” is to build “a more beautiful China and a green and bountiful world”. Who could possibly object?

Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICED’s Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with China’s United Front Work Department, one of the CCP’s main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of China’s late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries — which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of China’s most important foreign influence organisations.

What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to “close supervision” by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling China’s secret police. Any organisation deemed to have “harmed the national interest” risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.

Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and provoking troubles” for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, “it was no longer safe for us to work in China”. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: “They hope they can influence China’s leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise China’s policy would be suicide.”

Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its “independent adviser on climate projects”. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of China’s puppet parliament, the National People’s Congress.

To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyone’s guess. But it is striking that the CIFF — a registered UK charity — gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an £18 million grant to “help contribute to peaking China’s emissions”, £14 million to give China “evidence-based recommendations” for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, £8 million to assist China “in global climate governance”.

This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 from the CIFF. When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”

But not, apparently, to China’s role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me: “It would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.”

Yet the CIFF’s China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated £29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECF’s deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFF’s Kate Hampton.

Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK ‘grantees’ include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.

Its ‘global ambassador’, meanwhile, is the Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared “Sinophile” who said last year that China “will come over to our side”, and it was vital “not to raise the temperature” by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed “a wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassador”, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’ together, inspired by mud’s supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on China’s terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the ‘China model’ as superior to the West’s.

Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of China’s environment ministry. The meeting’s attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed “the building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destiny”. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of China’s Total State Security Outlook Research Centre — an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.

Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

An ECF spokesperson told me: “Climate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.” A CIFF spokesperson added: “China is the world’s largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFF’s work in China aims to accelerate this transition.”

ClientEarth said: “As a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account… We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.” And a WWF campaigns chief added: “All countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had ‘given an important signal’.

Ultimately, however, the meaning of that “signal” remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?


David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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Ed Cameron
Ed Cameron
2 years ago

Spot on.
When it comes to the CCP, the willing naivety of many is only matched by the blind greed of so many more.
During the 90’s and early 00’s I witnessed Western businesses plunge their snouts into the Chinese trough, stubbornly deaf to any advice urging caution.  Many were gobsmacked when their joint venture turned out to be nothing more than a heist of their intellectual property, for which there was no legal recourse.
As the estimable Anson Chan warned Western leaders – You people have no idea who you are dealing with. The CCP is committed to only one goal. The perpetuation of the CCP.      

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  Ed Cameron

And yet when we get an actual trougher on here, and I point this out to him, oooh the downvotes!
What’s the good of recognising what you and the article note if you don’t challenge the useful idiots when they stick their heads up?

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
Reply to  Ed Cameron

I’m an American. Imagine how I feel that the man pretending to be the president of our country is completely bought and paid for by the CCP. The Clintons were notorious at the aforementioned trough; they’re the soulless scheming grifters who led the other swine to dine.

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago

Fact check: Joe Biden is actually the legally elected President of the United States.
Kindly stop spreading lies, disinformation and lunatic conspiracy theories on this page.

David George
David George
2 years ago
Reply to  Penelope Lane

Legally elected as, but pretending to be, the US president?

JP Martin
JP Martin
2 years ago
Reply to  Penelope Lane

I took the previous comment to be a statement about the corruption of the Bidens and the Clintons rather than any allegation of election fraud. Or maybe I am the one who misunderstood? In any case, I do not consider myself a lunatic, a liar, or a conspiracy theorist but, having witnessed US elections while living in that country, I am actually quite receptive to these arguments about electoral fraud. When so many Americans question the integrity of their electoral system, it is worth asking ourselves ‘why?’

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago
Reply to  JP Martin

…pretending to be the president… completely bought and paid for by the CCP…
Perhaps “pretending” can be understood in more than one way, as David George’s reply shows.
But “completely bought and paid for” is unequivocal. It alleges more than just corruption. It alleges an illegitimate election whose votes were bought by the Chinese government.
That is worse than misguided; it is an outright, demonstrable lie proceeding from a mind corrupted by alt-right conspiracy theorists.
We all have been asking why Americans question the integrity of their electoral system. But many of us have reached a different conclusion about the answer from Allison Barrows. Many of us have been following the alt-right trail assiduously, and feel horror at the way so many Americans like her have been conned by outright lies and disinformation.

D Glover
D Glover
2 years ago

Extinction Rebellion protest against emissions, but not Chinese emissions. Muslims protest against Israeli abuse of Palestinians, but not Chinese abuse of Uighurs. Our opposition criticise the government for mishandling covid, but not China for starting it.
Truly, China is now too big to be held accountable. Once western economies are trashed and western youths are leaving school uneducated the job will be done.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
2 years ago

It is astonishing how our lefty activist friends are all over the place in the West with their mostly peaceful protests, but it’s “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” with the Commies.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago

It is not really the Commies. George Soros funds all the Extreme Left organizations – he funds the DAs who let the criminals run rampant, the BLM, the antifa, everything sick and degenerate he funds – seemingly hard left – but no, he is a Global Elite, not Communist. He is out to destroy the West so the Global Elites (who include the CCP) may rule the world. (although they will not rule jointly in peace –

“Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are the three fictional superstates in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Orwell already predicted where the world goes when it is taken over by the Elites….

D Ward
D Ward
2 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I get the whole Soros thing. What I don’t understand is why he wants this.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Reply to  D Ward

Do you actually take this serial ranter seriously? He advocates a worldwide conspiracy involving all or most government leaders (possibly Trump excepted but no longer Johnson), all NGOs, various billionaires, and of course Big Tech. One that would require the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, yet we have not had a single whistle blower.

And one of which at the same time we can ‘look up’ the details or find them on YouTube! And somehow Unherd is excluded from all this. Some conspiracy!

The Occam’s razor principle is usually the best way of understanding the world. The CCP undoubtedly has a lot of power, the self styled ‘World Economic Forum’ and Davos gatherings, not to mention the endless COP conferences, are largely talking shops and do not.

Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Yup. There can be an alignment of destructive left-wing world views without explicit communication or SPECTRE-style board meetings among the actors in secret places. But they don’t amount to a co-ordinated fifth column. As with CND in the 80s, you have to ask cui bono if saboteurs like XR get their way? The obvious and correct answer 40 years ago was the USSR, and the obvious and correct answer today is China.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Well said.

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago
Reply to  D Ward

You have been conned, it seems. The roots of the anti-Soros stuff lie in vicious anti-Semitism.

David George
David George
2 years ago
Reply to  Penelope Lane

That’s a claim I’ve heard before. Soros’ meddling (to put it mildly) is OK and any criticism is fundamentally anti-Semitic?
Sounds like a conspiracy theory itself, what evidence do you have Penelope.

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago
Reply to  David George

Read up on the background of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and the social forces that nurtured and formed him, as well as those influences informing his actions today.
Googling “viktor orbán antisemitism” brings up ten pages of articles from a range of both left-and right-wing sources. There’s plenty of detailed data from reliable and respected sources, including dedicated Jewish researchers. No conspiracy theory.
Unfortunately, a lot of the right-wing so-called Christian “save our cultural heritage” stuff masks deeply embedded anti-Semitic prejudices going back centuries. So, not actually Christian at all, just their perverted, deformed idea of an “Aryan” Christian culture.
Same thing is true of certain sectors of Polish society too. And Russia.
This reading will inform you about the source of Orbán’s vicious campaign of lies and disinformation against George Soros, who is Jewish.

Last edited 2 years ago by Penelope Lane
George Glashan
George Glashan
2 years ago
Reply to  Penelope Lane

Penelope, Don’t forget our home grown anti-semites like Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, Jacqueline Walker, Shami Chakrabarti & The Guardian media group, 

Last edited 2 years ago by George Glashan
Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago
Reply to  George Glashan

David George asked me for evidence to back up my claim about the anti-Semitism lying at the root of the anti-Soros feeling.
That is what I provided.
Your comment regarding “home grown” anti-Semites has nothing to do with those roots, deflects attention away from Orbán so is misleading, off-topic and irrelevant to my reply.
Furthermore, your reply is also misleading in implying that home-grown anti-Semitism only has to do with the leftwing of politics. You make no mention of anti-Semitism on the British right.
You do not advance the cause of truth by obfuscating and misleading people, nor by trying to make everything fit your preconceived hatred of leftwing politics. Your comments about the Guardian are laughable.
David George asked a legitimate and useful question about the history and origins of Hungarian anti-Semitism. I provided some facts and pointers for further reading.
Nine trollers showed their inability to appreciate facts and accurate historical accounts by splashing the usual ignorant red ink in response.

Jamie Smith
Jamie Smith
2 years ago
Reply to  Penelope Lane

So, people object to Soros funding boats to carry migrants across the Mediterranean and the election campaign’s of woke DAs in the US because of Orban?

Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago
Reply to  Jamie Smith

See my reply to George Glashan above.
Learn to read the question, then follow the reply to that question. Try to reason logically. Stay on topic if you wish to respond.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Go on then. How does George Soros fund “the DAs who let the criminals run rampant, the BLM, the antifa, everything sick and degenerate”? What’s the path between George Soros’ bank account and the district attorney’s office in say Baltimore?

George Glashan
George Glashan
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Jon if you’ll allow me to don my tinfoil hat for a moment.
I don’t know about the biases of the below website link, but this article appears pretty sound it does a better job explaining what I would try to. Soros gets a mention in the article but its more focused on “Jennifer” Pritzker & Penny ( no scare quotes as she is an actual woman) Pritzker. the article concerns the opacity of funding for the transgender movements. In essence billionaires create and directly fund multiple NGO’s, think tanks and research institutions. The NGO’s, think tanks and research institutions’, don’t acknowledge that they all have the same source of funding, and then all talk to each other, make reports and rely on the others research and feign independence from each other, they also create subsidiary NGO’s to support and repeat all of the above, but these are funded through the first line of NGO’s and not directly by the billionaire. The whole merry go round is so convoluted. Its like a money laundering scheme, Billionaire cash goes in at the top, the magician drops a curtain and then trans kids come out at the bottom.
https://www.thestandardsc.org/jennifer-bilek/billionaires-funding-transgender-movement-for-profit/

Last edited 2 years ago by George Glashan
George Glashan
George Glashan
2 years ago
Reply to  George Glashan

since im on tinfoil hat topics :
the below doesn’t seem to have crossed unherds radar yet, but it broadly fits with the topic of useful idiots (sort of, not really)
THE GREAT (FAKE) CHILD-SEX-TRAFFICKING EPIDEMIC,
there is a good explainer by breaking points:
https://youtu.be/IfJUVMgcFH4?t=175
i dont want to spoil the twist, its worth watching for , hopefully one of unherds writers is working on a piece for this.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

Those of us who are of a certain age can remember something very similar with the USSR and CND. The latter spent all its time protesting about nuclear weapons, but never in Russia, nor about the ones actually pointed at us.
The method then was the same as now: you recruit influential but suggestible people to spread scare stories that purport to be based on “the science”. You insist that your suicidally stupid solution is the only one possible. You hurl insults at anyone who disagrees with your solution and you accuse them of being someone’s stooge. You take direct action to force things you can’t get anybody to vote for. You infiltrate established parties and bodies to get them to spout your lines. You recruit quislings. And above all, while mouthing pietisms about saving the world, you insist on weakening the western democracies first and you work on nothing else.
Cue the denial from the usual suspects. CND did that, too.

David B
David B
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Good comment. Quasi-Alinsky

Doug Pingel
Doug Pingel
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Can I throw the “Global Warming” activists into your pot as well? That’s another “We-must-cut-our-economic-throats to save ‘Others’

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  Doug Pingel

Well, yes, that’s pretty much what the article is saying. The West relies on cheap energy to maintain its economy and its power, so China can overhaul the West economically by destroying its energy infrastructure. The tell that this is a malign power’s foreign policy is that all of the activism is against the West.

Paul Johnston
Paul Johnston
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

CND never quite managed to recruit the Prime Minister’s father as one of its useful idiots, even during Labour governments. What bothers me is the apparent CCP influence even in Conservative organisations and charities presided over by the Prince of Wales. This carries infiltration to altogether new depths.

Last edited 2 years ago by Paul Johnston
Penelope Lane
Penelope Lane
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Your entire second paragraph can be applied equally to the extreme right. In fact, it describes the behaviour of Trump’s coterie perfectly.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago

This has always been exceedingly clear – the Western Left, especially the intellectual ones (vs the old days of the militant Labour Oik Unions all toadying to USSR) are completely clients of the CCP. As is the WHO, and vast parts of the UN.

But what then is odd is how the WEF, that supposedly hard Capitalist gang is also in bed with the CCP. But then it really is not as both are merely Global Elite Masters.

No what is odd is they Our governments, USA, UK, EU all seem to think it OK for the Western Left to be in bed (as their Bi*ch though) with the CCP.

Back in days leading up to WWII there were quite a few Allied citizens openly pro N*zis. Like Charles Lindbergh in USA, Oswald Mosley – the British Fas*ist (You may remember PG Wodehouse based ‘Spode’ (Lord Sidcup) on him, with his ‘Black Shorts’ followers).

But they were open – and the government and much of the people regarded them as traitorous, they were known and watched as enemy sympathizers. And Also – – There turned out to be essentially no ‘Fifth Column’. They may have been tratiors, but they were not sneaky, they had some honour and openly displayed their affiliation.

Utterly different to our creepy ‘Enemy Within The Gates’ Postmodernist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Liberal, hard left, scum who hate the West, love the Communists, but pretend otherwise. Not like the old time British Commies, hanging Red Flags, singing ‘The Internationale.’ and reading the ‘Red Star’ in the working mans cafe….

But – what is most amazing is how the West Governments do NOT watch them, treat them like the enemy – and to me that means the Western Governments have also been captured by the CCP and the rest of the Global Elites – and they all are one and the same.

““The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell “

Justin Clark
Justin Clark
2 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

The late Anthony C Sutton identified the connection between Wall Street Capitalist and Russian Bolsheviks…. We (have been groomed to) assume (far) Left and (far) Right are the opposite ends of the line when in fact it is horseshoe shaped and they are surprisingly close to each other with similar power aims (of control)…

Last edited 2 years ago by Justin Clark
Peter Taylor
Peter Taylor
2 years ago

Reading this and the comments below, I wonder if I am just naive and uneducated in geopolitics – however, my speciality is climate science and energy politics and so I do try to follow the money game. It strikes me that all of you politicos are way behind ont he money trail. What you call the Communist Party is now very far from what it used to be – since the mid-1990s and deals brokered by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the CCP became a capitalist organisation – or rather, joined the capitalist organisation as represented by the investment banks. It then rapidly became the ideal for modern capitalism – cheap labour (even slave labour), minimal worker’s rights and rock bottom environmental standards, and recently even more attractive with its control mechanisms in the aftermath of the Wuhan virus now touted by some western environmentalists as a model for combatting climate change. There has been a huge relocation of manufacturing capital to China – and of course, this was foreseen under the permitted emission protocol finalised at Kyoto – effectively allowing global capital to maintain its growth syndrome (as well as CO2 emissions which continued their linear increase globally since 1995). Western society ‘benefits’ from white goods at half the price, clothing at one-third, and…the list is endless. Meanwhile western financiers collect their share of the profits – much to be re-invested in China, and most especially this past year, in pharmaceuticals. The key players are anonymous investment bankers – everyone else is a figurehead. As for the XR and climate coalition contigents – they haven’t got the brains to see what is going down, having been mind-fogged by climate miasma, and they care little for the Muslim Uigar predicament and even less for the environmental impact of the policies of mitigation that they espouse – turbines, hydro, biomass and even nuclear are green-lighted without an adequate impact appraisal of the oeverall strategy. Such new ‘greens’ are readily seduced by social control technologies as the only way to avoid ‘climate catastrophe’ – this is not ‘communism’, rather a new form of technocratic control, nor is it (yet) fascism. We need some new words and a lot more analysis on global capital flows and who controls them.

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter Taylor

I agree with your comments about the CCP being a capitalist organization and not much else. There is no serious money in being a pure communist state. Just look at N. Korea or Cuba for examples. It is why some, in the U.S., say that Wall Street sold out to the CCP years ago. Like you say, “follow the money”.
As far as the green movement and the myriad NGO’s that is has spawned, I think it has become a fine way for young naive libs to make a living, while at the same time jetting off to endless conferences at fancy destinations, replete with sumptuous meals, entertainment and opportunities to meet influential contacts, who may be able to get them into even more lucrative positions someday. All the while, “fighting to save the planet!” Nothing more than mental mastur*ation.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter Taylor

Spot on. The CCP model has become the goal of Western capital, who view Chinese access to a massive pool of cheap labour with envy. And so they step up their support of mass immigration – legal and illegal – in their unholy alliance with the useful idiots of the political left in government, the media, and of course well-founded NGO’s.

And the Chinese virus has been embraced with an almost religious zeal by the same cohorts as a vehicle to control the behaviour of Western populations toward their cure for the climate crisis – ending movement between home and office or school, and the travel industry – but not of course in China.

Jonathan Ellman
Jonathan Ellman
2 years ago

The main motivation of the overwhelming majority of environmentalists is power and status. It has nothing to do with the environment. The CCP has power, therefore they like the CCP.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
2 years ago

They follow the money. Where there are grants, they are sure to be found.

JP Martin
JP Martin
2 years ago

The most dangerous enemy is the enemy within. The CCP will exploit this weakness.

Justin Clark
Justin Clark
2 years ago
Reply to  JP Martin

perhaps CCP’s most dangerous enemy is within too… the billionaires with their taste for capitalism…. A good friend of mine in China was adamant there would be a revolution but prayed for a peaceful transfer of power to the people… food for thought.

JP Martin
JP Martin
2 years ago
Reply to  Justin Clark

Hmm….That would be a good strategic adaptation, but I don’t see Chinese people betraying their country. Even when they hate the CCP, they seem proud of their Chinese culture (as they should be). Meanwhile westerners will insult their countries for likes on social media.

Justin Clark
Justin Clark
2 years ago
Reply to  JP Martin

you’re not wrong

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
2 years ago
Reply to  JP Martin

The product of decades of Marxist critique of Western society enthusiasticly promoted by academia. It is second nature now, so that patriotism or even cultural pride are treated with deep suspicion, even labelled as toxic.

Stuart McCullough
Stuart McCullough
2 years ago
Reply to  Justin Clark

From my time doing business in China (selling to them, not buying from them) I was frequently told that the internal danger for the CCP would come when they could no longer keep up the pace of economic growth.

It’s a huge country that still has to accommodate large numbers of the population moving from the country to the wealthy cities.

When the Prime Minister’s father is a shill for the Chinese, how on earth can we expect our government to look at the threat they pose in a rational way?

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago

China is facing demographic collapse over the next fifty years or so.

JP Martin
JP Martin
2 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

True, but it might not be good news. It will take a long time and I worry that a declining, insecure China could be more dangerous than a rising, confident China. And all those surplus unmarried men will need something to keep them occupied. Sorry to be a pessimist!

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
2 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

Like the West?

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago
Reply to  Justin Clark

They didn’t rise up against Mao when he was starving millions.

I can’t see any possibility of a populace that is being fed a realistic vision of a newly emerging global hegemon, and having all the toys of modern life hurled at them, having any motivation to take on the worlds most effective surveillance state.

It’s the west that is rotting from within, no doubt helped along considerably by a state with a well thought out long term strategy.

Arrayed against this are … Biden and Boris. Maybe ingratiating his dad demonstrates Boris’s assessment of where this going.

Justin Clark
Justin Clark
2 years ago

The old saying goes – “China has modernised (- but not westernised)”. You have to admire their use of Useful Idiots and Xi’s recognition that climate change is designed to prevent China scaling up the benefits of (our) industrialisation. People have no idea how deadly China is, in so many ways. Their blueprints are outlined in James McGregor’s book One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China…Great article btw thanks.

Scott S
Scott S
2 years ago

The Book quoted in this article is a fantastic and eye opening read, ‘The Hidden Hand’, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. In the said book the authors quote ‘In our judgement, so entrenched are the CCP’s influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Bejing’s orbit would probably fail’. This, is mainly down to the efforts of the ’48 Group Club’, which is made up of people such as Blair, Mandleson and Hestletine, among many others. This is a must read for anyone interested in geopolitics. It’s also worth noting that the 48 Group Club went to court to try and ban the book, but failed. Very interesting indeed.

Last edited 2 years ago by Scott S
Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago

Good analysis. But another factor is perhaps the deep rooted human tendency at least in modern complex industrial societies to consider that words in themselves are a form of action. No ‘skin in the game’. China SAYS it will do x, it is actually doing almost the opposite.

Another example is the almost universal condemnation of Fascism, against the much more muted views on Communism, which has outkilled Fascism several fold. It SOUNDS a nicer system, you see…..

D Glover
D Glover
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

I have overheard liberal types deploy the ‘fascist’ word almost casually against both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Neither has had his opponents actually killed. Keir Starmer and Nancy Pelosi remain alive and speak, often, in public. The media are not silenced for broadcasting their words.
The Chinese and Russian regimes really do kill opponents, yet no-one uses the ‘F word’.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Communism is just a variety of fascism with better PR and a many more corpses.

Graff von Frankenheim
Graff von Frankenheim
2 years ago

The so-called elites have always fallen for real life examples of Utopian societies…these political pilgrims fell for the Popular Front in the 1930’s, for the Cuban Revolution in the 1960’s, for North Vietnam, for North Korea etc. They love the absolute power their fellow elites enjoy in these worshiped societies and they are so easy to seduce by a little propaganda and an invitation to participate in the latest experiment in top-down social engineering. On top of that they hate their own societies for not appreciating them enough. Read Paul Hollander and Edward Banfield.

David Shipley
David Shipley
2 years ago

Sir Christopher Hohn is a hedge fund man and in keeping with his occupation has bets on both sides of this debate. As well as being a major funder of XR, he is the largest private investor in Heathrow airport and also in Aena, the parent company of Luton Airport’s operating company.

Catherine McBride
Catherine McBride
2 years ago
Reply to  David Shipley

Heathrow probably worth more as a housing development site after flight numbers are quartered and rerouted to other airports. Smart investment.

Terence Fitch
Terence Fitch
2 years ago

George Bernard Shaw- Soviet Union. Repeat.

Rob Britton
Rob Britton
2 years ago

The Soviet Union had its admirers, mainly among the academics and the intellectuals – as did the Nazi party before it. Worship of authoritarian and despotic regimes hostile to the West, by the political elites, is nothing new

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
2 years ago

OK, so where do we go from here? By, “we” I principally mean the UK.