So Russia is attempting to “meddle” in our elections and disrupt democracy, eh? In the view of some observers, specifically analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, that’s small beer compared to what China is up to. They’re actually trying to take over our country from the inside through huge investments and influence peddling. And America isn’t their only target by a long shot. The Free Beacon takes an in-depth look at a recent CIA report which indicates that the Chinese are flushing vast amounts of capital and human resources into moving the United States to a position far more friendly to Chinese objectives.

The CIA has issued a classified report detailing China’s far-reaching foreign influence operations campaign in the United States, which imparts financial incentives as leverage to permeate American institutions.

In an unclassified page of the report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the CIA cautions against efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to stipulate funding to universities and policy institutes in exchange for academic censorship.

“The CCP provides ‘strings-attached’ funding to academic institutions and think tanks to deter research that casts it in a negative light,” the report says. “It has used this tactic to reward pro-China viewpoints and coerce Western academic publications and conferences to self-censor. The CCP often denies visas to academics who criticize the regime, encouraging many China scholars to preemptively self-censor so they can maintain access to the country on which their research depends.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is particularly interested in American colleges and universities, where they offer extremely generous endowments provided the academics there avoid taking positions which criticize China and its objectives. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given the Chinese philosophy of indoctrinating people at an early age to gain a lifetime of loyalty from them. How better than to infiltrate academia?

Such investments come on top of the already well known fact that China has been investing heavily in real estate and infrastructure in the United States for decades. Back in 2016, CNBC reported that China had already acquired more than a quarter trillion dollars in American real estate and that figure was growing exponentially. The amount of subtle influence you can exert by controlling that much property is significant.

But as I said, America isn’t the only place where this is going on. The Chinese have been overtly working to basically take over the government of Australia for years. A recent book published Down Under by a former government official and professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University has a lot of people talking. It’s one of those secrets hiding in plain sight, and the methods they have been using there closely mirror the details from the CIA report linked above. (ABC – Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Thousands of agents of the Chinese state have integrated themselves into Australian public life — from the high spheres of politics, academia and business all the way down to suburban churches and local writers’ groups — according to a controversial book to be published on Monday.

The book, Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, is written by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University.

In it, he alleges that a systematic Chinese government campaign of espionage and influence peddling is leading to “the erosion of Australian sovereignty”.

The playbook is remarkably similar. Chinese expats are entering the country and becoming citizens, joining in various groups, churches and businesses, all while pushing a pro-China agenda. They also have been buying up property at breakneck paces, not only controlling those assets but contributing heavily to skyrocketing real estate costs. In Sydney, the median house price just passed one million dollars and that’s in an area where the median annual income is around $80K. People simply can’t afford to buy property and wind up renting for most of their lives.

Why would the Chinese ever bother worrying about going to war? If you can erode your adversaries from the inside and buy their countries, there’s no need to fire any missiles.