Quotes from Clive Hamilton

In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume instead of our freedom to find our place in the world.

The CCP seemed to be following a dictum attributed to Stalin: 'Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

the CCP views the France China Foundation as its foremost avenue of influence on France's elites. In this respect, it is similar to Britain's 48 Group Club.

Chris Bowen, Labor's federal shadow treasurer from the New South Wales Right, is a patron of the ACPPRC, or was until the 2016 Sam Dastyari affair (discussed later) when his name was removed from the website. Bowen has so far managed to fly under the radar but his Chinese links are wide and deep.28

The first objective of including Australia in its overall periphery, he told them, was to secure Australia as a reliable and stable supply base for China's continued economic growth over the next twenty years. The longer-term goal was to drive a wedge into the America–Australia alliance

The Chinese Communist Party is present in all major enterprises in China and manipulates or directly controls their decisions to achieve political and strategic aims.

See John Haworth, Work, Leisure and Wellbeing, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 24–5.

Freedom is not the greatest thing; how we decide to use our freedom is the greatest thing.

For a modern state there are cheaper and less risky means of coercion, sometimes known as economic statecraft or geoeconomics. China has become the world's master practitioner. Geoeconomics can be defined as the deployment of economic punishments and rewards to coerce nations to adopt preferred policies.

In the marketing society, we seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume in stead of our freedom to find our place in the world.

People buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like.

There is only one inborn error: and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy. Arthur Schopenhauer

Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the "world" consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please.

Before Italy, Beijing had succeeded in persuading several Central and Eastern European nations to join the BRI—Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary—as well as Portugal, Greece and Malta in Southern Europe. Italy's joining reinforces the impression that Beijing is pursuing a strategy in Europe of 'use the countryside to surround the city'.

The accusation can be made only by conflating the CCP with Chinese people so that being anti-CCP must mean being anti-Chinese. (It's exactly what the CCP wants us to think.) It's a cheap accusation, but it serves as an effective silencing device in this country because of the widespread, and quite proper, sensitivity to inflaming racial tensions.

China was already a substantial investor in Italy, with a Chinese chemical company buying Pirelli, and Huawei buying mobile phone operator Wind.129 As China specialist François Godement points out, previous Italian governments were happy to sign a series of science and technology cooperation agreements that were 'essentially a carbon copy' of the priorities laid out in Made in China 2025, Beijing's blueprint for becoming the world's dominant technological power.

The Conte government has allowed a Chinese firm to buy into the nation's electricity network, and Italy's ports are also expected to feature strongly in the flow of BRI investment, especially in Trieste, which Geraci has said 'must be open to Chinese investments'.153 Trieste's port enhances Italy's role as China's gateway to Europe. (The city also boasts many of the nation's top scientific research institutions.)

Controlling people's thoughts obviates the need to control their behaviour and the party has striven constantly to implant patriotic thoughts into the minds of the people.

A powerful sense of national pride built on a belief in historical humiliation, combined with an inability to distinguish between the nation and its government, goes a long way towards explaining why many in the Chinese diaspora, including Chinese-Australian citizens, remain loyal to the PRC and defend its actions even when they conflict with Australia's values and interests.

The combination of close personal relationships, coupled with threats of punishment, is the standard Chinese modus operandi. Beijing hoped to turn Australia into a 'second France', 'a western country that would dare to say "no" to America'.

At the centre of the CCP's ambitious strategy for global economic domination is the push for China's currency, the renminbi or RMB (also known as the yuan), to become the foremost global currency, replacing the US dollar. The size of China's economy and the fact that the RMB is the second most used currency for trade helps, but financial markets know that China's financial system is not robust, and that the government manipulates it, which creates distrust.

The reasons why so many people in the West downplay or deny the threat posed by the CCP is a theme of this book. One reason is of course financial interest. As Upton Sinclair put it, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

a reader of the Daily Mail brings it down to earth: "Only the 'elite' will go. The rest of us will be left to die.

every proposal to cut carbon emissions, for example, must be tempered by assurances that economic growth will not be impeded - which makes one wonder whether the world would merit saving if growth had to be slowed to save it.