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Comment by LIV2 | Hacker News Reader

One of our politicians has been caught taking money from a wealthy Chinese business man and another is tied to the propaganda arm of the Chinese government so you can guarantee there's a bunch more of our politicians owned by them that we will never hear about

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United Front is not a propaganda arm, it was Mao's main weapon againt the then Nationalist Chinese government, by infiltrating deep in, exploiting it's freedom and rights constitution (and it's why he said "we don't do that (constitution)"), Mao was able to subvert it without going to head-on war.

You can call it soft war.

Xi: "Overseas students are United Front work's new foothold." http://www.zytzb.gov.cn/tzb2010/wxwb/201604/d53a3ab80f1149f7...

Thanks for sharing, though Google Translate leaves something to be desired. I'm interested in how the CPP views overseas students since hearing about a small controversy at a southern US university:

https://vanderbilthustler.com/25557/featured/vpr-deletes-res...

Source? If that were the case, what should I even be mad at first? China doing the hacking or our "own people" (I'm not Australian but generally speaking) betraying us? What would be so outrageous is that it's the politicians themselves, not just some IT clerk with a shotty salary they managed to buy.

Sam Dastyari[0] is the first one, old news, and Gladys Liu[1] is the second one, recent news.

I'm more mad at the politicians whose positions exist for, and salaries are paid by the people they're supposed to represent.

We also have politicians retiring from politics and going straight into the private sector to leverage their inside knowledge of government policy for the purposes of getting the inside track on government contracts[2][3]. There are toothless and poorly enforced laws against this (that I don't think have ever been successfully used)

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-14/sam-dastyari-scandal-...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-14/gladys-liu-was-part-o...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-13/christopher-pyne-disc...

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-05/julie-bishop-defends-...

I think this might have been the one the parent comment was taking about - https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-27/labor-staffer-tell...

Was in 2015 but I think only came to light recently.

In a capitalist society, politics is all about buying/renting other people. Don't think US/EU diplomats don't buy local politicians elsewhere.

Of course if the commercial negotiation fails, there's always "intelligence" agencies and military to help overthrow that evil government that does not want to sell out. Contrary to our western powers and Russia, China is not doing that just yet.

Can't wait for a true democracy without middlemen selling our resources/interests to other middlemen for private profits. The world would be a much better place imo.

We have no proof that they are not already doing that especially with smaller countries which they are influencing heavily with debt diplomacy for infrastructure projects.

If chinese security services had assassinated democratically-elected representatives like French/US services have DOZENS of times since WWII, i assume we'd know. (Although they have militarily invaded a few areas such as Tibet)

Investing in debt and huge infrastructure projects is indeed a more discreet and stable way of getting a hold of a country than plainly invading it. It's a form of economic colonization, but as much as i hate it it's orders of magnitude less bloody than the self-proclaimed "civilizing mission" our western countries are perpetuating to this day.

To be clear, i'm not a fan of the chinese regime, at all. Or any imperialist regime for that matter. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of western propaganda in regards to chinese activities. That is, i'm refusing to choose a side in the next world war they're preparing.

No war between peoples, no peace between classes!

>Can't wait for a true democracy without middlemen selling our resources/interests to other middlemen for private profits.

Be prepared to wait, forevermore.

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