Ben Bland

Ben Bland is a research fellow and the Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute. He is the author of Generation HK: Seeking identity in China’s shadow (Penguin Random House, 2017) and Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the struggle to remake Indonesia (Penguin Random House, 2020). Before joining the Lowy Institute, Ben worked in Asia for a decade as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, based in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Ben Bland reviews 'Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world' by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

September 2020, no. 424 • 21 August 2020

Sometime in 2017, one of the world’s largest academic publishers started quietly removing thousands of articles from its websites in China because they covered topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinse Communist Party (CCP). Much of the offending material related to the three Ts: Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time I was a China correspondent for the Fin ... (read more)