The Problem with In-Groups
Or 'Hidden Hands All Over'
There’s one thing I want to immediately make clear about Clive Hamilton and Marieke Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World. And that’s that this book is not about the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s true that the book is a magnificent study of the Chinese Communist Party and their statecraft. Though it does not lack for style or ‘readability’, it is so utterly comprehensive in its sweeping essay of the party’s influence, and of the methods it uses to cultivate that influence, that it resembles a very long research summary for some even more unfathomable, as-yet unwritten tome. It’s also replete in its every grammatical fibre with a moral charge that most documents of this kind would shy away from. But, though it does not devote so much as a single sentence to any secondary subject, the book is not about the CCP.
What the book really is about is the in-group, and the way in which the will towards in-group membership may, all things considered, be the most dangerous force in all of civilisation.
Wanting In
I grew up notionally without any diagnosis of an outstanding psychological or developmental condition (it wasn’t done to submit to such things in the far-off days of the early 21st century). Nonetheless, friends who have one or the other of OCD, ADHD, autism and Tourette’s have, in the years since, all claimed me as one of ‘theirs’. Given that such a big-four coalition is at least present enough within me to make friends of mine suspicious, it should be no surprise to anyone reading this that I spent most of my earliest years looking at the stony grey walls of in-group membership from the outside. Some of the worst tendencies of in-group membership are most visible to the outsider, though some of these are exaggerated even still to the outsider because they are emotionally injurious, just as the same traits may be decidedly under-observed within an in-group because of the in-group’s natural will to view itself positively.
Through a curious mix of favourable fortune and furious drive to master the finer science of social interaction (pursued as though it were the study of organic chemistry or Avestan Persian), in later times I found myself in a position of being courted by relative in-groups. Viewing them from the inside was edifying, primarily because I observed in those groups I had briefly belonged to the precise same cache of flaws I had observed in the in-groups to which I had most assuredly not belonged.
In the main, I found that those people who belonged to in-groups with high social energy (that’s to say, full of people keen to move up in the local hierarchy) typically appeared much less intelligent encountered within the group than outside of it. In the context of the group, people seemed genuinely and bafflingly less capable of accurately appraising the actions and motivations of other members of the group according to simple laws of human behaviour. The acceptable range of conversational cues in-group was much narrower than during a meeting with one or more in-group members outside of the circle. Outside of the group, people seemed considerably less sure-footed of their feelings and positions on things, particularly complex political and behavioural subjects, and explored them sensitively, if at all. Inside the group, the same people approached difficult topics with magnificent assurance, their discussion of them always manicured with carefully-deployed memes and well-memorised conventional wisdom, so that in discussing them they could seem brave and cavalier while departing not an inch from the most important orthodoxy, which was the group’s own.
People in the in-group were also crueller, including to each other. They often exercised harsh judgement where it was not required and failed to exercise judgement where it ostensibly was required, especially if exercising judgement would imperil their standing in the group.
In short, in-group dynamics seemed to conspire at all angles to make people seem less human. I use the word ‘seem’ with intent because these adopted standards of behaviour in-group were performative and deliberate. If people acted out of character in a group, it was done for a reason.
I found out very quickly that the only purpose of being in these groups was the knowledge that one was in them, and that in any objective sense this meant very little. The groups purposed their often considerable energy and resources to get exactly nothing done, and indeed the way the groups comported themselves seemed to make it less likely that anyone in them would, through distraction or by cultivation of insecurity, ever get anything done individually. While I approached each fresh membership with some new ideal in view — that this new group seemed like they would be more adventurous, or that other one more expansively minded and ambitious — I didn’t maintain my membership for very long in any such instance.
Social capital mints a rough, rust-prone coin.
Getting In
Of course, there are in-group ties that are more consequential from a material point of view, in-group ties that portend access to real power and real money. And it is these kinds of in-groups, based around commercial and political favour, that Hidden Hand primarily concerns itself with.
Among the many outstanding passages of the book — which creates a picture of the bewilderingly complex mesh of Chinese instruments of soft-power with a clarity that really should not be possible — one of the best and most thought-provoking is Hamilton and Ohlberg’s early chapter essaying the many and various links between the British governing/financial classes and Chinese state and business interests. It begins with the foundation of the 48 Club, a party of 48 British business interests who journeyed to the PRC in 1954 to explore opportunities for trade. They, like the savviest of out-groups-who-would-be-in, sought to increase their standing by capturing a flow of value that was untapped otherwise in their region. Their visit was successful, and across two generations the club and its members flourished, with much good commerce brokered. And its ranks have swollen over the years, to say the least. According to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the group founded by fringe businessmen some 70-odd years ago now claims among its members:
Former prime minister Tony Blair
Former deputy PMs Michael Heseltine and John Prescott
The billionaire Duke of Westminster
Various other luminaries from the Blair government (including Jack Straw and former European trade commissioner Peter Mandelson)
Retired generals in the British army
Nine Oxbridge college masters and various professors
The chair of British Airways
Eminent members of the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan
Li Yuanchao, former head of the CCP Organisation Department and former vice premier of the PRC
Madam Fu Ying, vice minister of Foreign Affairs
Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission
Zha Peixin, chair of the NPC-European Parliament Relations Group
Who wouldn’t look at such a rostrum and, even if just for a moment, wonder what membership in such a club could offer them? The club’s president, Stephen Perry (son of founder Jack Perry) has, we are told, unlimited access to the CCP’s chain of command, up to and including Xi Jinping himself. The club is well-known and feted with banquets whenever they visit China. But their existence, as the book notes with pregnant understatement, is completely unknown to the British public. Their existence is exclusively a means to favour with the CCP.
As the book continues to train its eye on CCP interests in Britain, things carry on very much as you might expect — we hear of large banks paying massive bribes for access to China at the dawn of the 21st century, and handing prestigious jobs to the patently underqualified children of Politburo officials. The years continue to go by: the CCP looks to formulate adequate strategies for pushing China’s currency to the centre of international monetary concern and builds up a party-affiliated organisation, the IMI, for the purpose of gaining access to senior players in the City of London. It finds an early champion, Labour party peer Lord Davidson of Glen Cova, and leverages his keenness to encourage CCP investment interest to begin fostering a new in-group dynamic in and around the City of London, one that seeks to enable the CCP and win the fruits of the party’s good graces. Davidson certainly runs a good line for the CCP, chastising the British Treasury for not doing more to stockpile Chinese currency and scheduling several conferences, many of which he uses to be highly equivocal and most relativistic about the CCP’s record on human rights.
In good time, Brexit hits, and Lord Davidson’s effusive pursuit of CCP investment becomes the norm in London. Individuals of huge stature in British finance — an institution which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg note with spice, is virtually inseparable from the British government itself in every operative sense — are falling over themselves to announce that London is open for Chinese business, granting concessions and giving access here, there, and everywhere.
Thus, the appeal of gaining purchase in Britain’s political heart, and the CCP’s success in gaining it, are made mutually self-evident. A cooperative Britain, an alliance-minded Britain, is more likely to be receptive to CCP ideas that will both directly and indirectly benefit the latter. The parties are drawn into positions of supposedly mutual benefit, bound by mutually reinforced customary ideas, into a new in-group that is, as in-groups so often are, primarily driven by the more aggressive of the partners involved (i.e. the CCP).
But, as Hamilton and Ohlberg make clear, large institution-sets like the EU, Wall Street, the City of London or Westminster are not the CCP’s only interest. What might be considered smaller concerns — Midwestern American farming towns, obscure Australian hamlets— also find themselves the subject of CCP ingratiation and root-setting. Often, as in the case of the Iowan town of Muscatine, which is now the site of repeat visits by Chinese youth symphony orchestras and even a home-away-from-home for CCP-affiliated businessmen, the underpinning rationale is the party’s desire gain proximity to natural resources and those responsible for them. Elsewhere, like in the remote Australian town of Rockhampton, the foundational desire is pettier (in this case, to forbid two children of Taiwanese descent from parading a pro-Taiwan float in a neighbourhood fete). Either way, and as above, the party is enabled by local figures of relative influence who are after succour: the director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and his wife, keen on both Chinese investment and perhaps the highly exclusive title of Friendship Ambassador in return for their cooperation; the parochial mayor of Rockhampton, presuming that acting in accordance with Australia’s one-China policy (that the nation “acknowledges” without endorsing it) might help him up rise up the chain of his own political ambitions. They are enabled by people who want, in one way or another, ‘in’.
These same tactics — of cultivating close personal ties with figures of relative influence eager to leverage the bounty of a connection with China to enlarge their own standing in a local in-group — are rolled out by the CCP around the world with admirable consistency. Such ties are strong in the German countryside, where industrial heartland organisations form ties with Chinese outfits whose affiliations with the CCP are not even apparent in the first degree, though Hamilton and Ohlberg allow for no ambiguity in their tireless elucidation of the links between various front organisations and the Chinese state committees to which they correspond. Much of this cultivation, particularly in industrial and local political circles, is geared towards building a positive view of, and opportunities for, the Belt and Road Initiative.
Where many Western governments are officially and collectively leery of the initiative’s power to tip global trade balances in the CCP’s favour, by currying favour with local politicians (out-groupers, or on the liminal boundary between in- and out-) the CCP can create counter-pressure with a band of thought that is not just amenable to the BRI in abstract, but willing to welcome it directly into Western domains. Some places, like the Swedish town of Lysekil, who were approached with the proposition of a shiny new port district courtesy of the BRI, find the will to refuse such influence-mongering gestures. Many others, like the entire Australian state of Victoria, are much more excited to accept, and do so even when their nation’s official line disavows the BRI. Those who accept, unsurprisingly, are much more easily persuaded by dint of their lovely new infrastructure not to express any misgivings about the benefactor who provided them. In acceding to in-group status, and benefitting materially thereby, these entities adopt the voluntary ignorance that is the pre-requisite of almost all in-group belonging.
It is a move that is classically Maoist, to shape the wiles of the city (the notional in-group) by controlling the countryside (the notional out-group). The CCP have put this into action by creating in-groups of their own among those who desire favour but are far enough away from their larger domestic in-groups to be susceptible to what the CCP can promise. Then they charge those in-groups with the social energy that comes from seeming proximity to powerful exotic patronage, and with the immensely potent flattery that comes with the belief that those ‘champions’ the CCP selects among Westerners are selected because they uniquely understand modern China in a way their compatriots fail to.
Via the creation of these smaller in-groups that are, in the context of their wider predominating institutions, more like out-groups, the CCP can build its influence in both localised pockets of specific influence as well as in the areas of high-society that hold broader influence. There is no more reason to doubt that an in-group can also be an out-group than there is to doubt that a given length can be both a half and a double. The cultivation of a secondary in-group with strong organisation and high social energy that acts as an out-group relative to a larger in-group is an excellent means of challenging the stability of the larger in-group. That the CCP is literate in such refined forms of exercised influence should come as a surprise to no one familiar with the philosophy that underpins Chinese society, with its easy acceptance of dualisms and frequent exhibitions of dialectical movement. That the CCP should be so conscientious as to think small community interests in the American Midwest are worth influencing in this way may come as a surprise to Westerners, however, but this is only because we are unused in our time to seeing a government whose goals are so precise and whose drive towards said goals is so direct and steadfast.
Of course, the reassuring thing about a lot of in-groups is that they are like the very first one I described — many of them exist primarily so that their members can congratulate themselves for belonging to them. Perhaps, one briefly reflects, that is all that Beijing’s voracious friend-making amounts to. And there are those who would turn to just this suggestion to reassure us. It seems soothing, for instance, that such a member of the British governing class as Charles Parton found it appropriate to play down the influence of 48 Group Club on British policy making in his own review of Hidden Hand. But then we might reflect that the 48 Group Club [1] is made up of highly eminent membership, full of former heads and secretaries of state who in their retirement plough fantastically well-remunerated furrows in celebrated institutions. These are the kinds of people who will author actions with wide-reaching second and third order consequences whether they mean to or not. Simply because their actions have no direct influence on policy — presuming that this is, in fact, so — is no reason not to take them seriously.
After all, the 48 Group Club certainly takes itself, and its connections to China, extremely seriously. Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken the unprecedented step of trying to block Hidden Hand’s publication in Britain and Canada through a libel suit.
