A Chinese netizen looks at the logos of the messaging app Weixin, left, or WeChat, of Tencent, and Douyin, a Chinese version iteration of short video app Tik Tok, of Bytedance on smartphones in Ji'nan city, east China's Shandong province, 24 January 2018 (via REUTERS)
In tandem with its rising global political and economic power,
China is beginning to flex its muscles in the information space, both at home
and abroad. While censorship and propaganda have long been features of Chinese
domestic politics, Beijing is ramping up its information operations abroad,
according to a panel of experts speaking at the Atlantic Council Global Forum
on Strategic Communications 2019 (STRATCOM) on October 23.
According to Shanthi Kalathil, senior director of the
International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy,
Beijing’s information operations aim at “shaping global conversations and
information flow in a way that privileges the positions of the Chinese Communist
Party and tends to repress those opinions, facts, and inconvenient truths that [Beijing]
wants to repress.”
China’s activities differ greatly from the information operations
pursued by Russia, Laura Rosenberger, senior fellow and director of the Alliance
for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, explained. While Russia as
a declining power seeks to use information and disinformation to sow discord in
its rivals and weaken countries to gain relative power for Moscow, Beijing “is
much less risk tolerant,” Rosenberger argued. Because Beijing’s power is
already rising economically and politically, its “interests are not so much in
weakening others to gain relative power…[but rather] in weakening others or
their institutions in order to help remake them in way that is advantageous to
China, but not necessarily to weaken them for their own end,” Rosenberger said.
This has led Beijing to be much more targeted in its use of
information manipulation, using disinformation tactics for only limited
scenarios such as support for pro-Chinese politicians in Taiwan, while instead
focusing on broader messaging internationally. Kalathil pointed to the recent
controversy surrounding the
National Basketball Association (NBA) in the United States reprimanding a team
executive for making remarks in support of pro-democracy protestors in Hong
Kong as evidence that Beijing is successfully “leveraging its economic
power to suppress narratives it doesn’t like.” Rosenberger cited the prevalence
of billboards from Chinese telecom giant Huawei in Brussels in the lead-up to
the 2019 EU parliamentary elections as further evidence of Beijing “trying to
manicure a perception of what China is and the role it could play vis-à-vis
Europe in the context of upcoming parliament elections.”
These international activities differ greatly from Beijing’s
mastery of information manipulation domestically, where the Chinese Communist Party
uses “censorship, quick fire walls, [and] cybersecurity laws to control the
information in China,” Dr. King-wa Fu, an associate professor at the University
of Hong Kong, said. Through tight censorship and funneling the Chinese population
only the government’s version of events, Beijing can effectively control the
entire information space, he explained. Throughout the recent protests in Hong
Kong, King-wa continued, Beijing has been able to convince its domestic
audience that the protestors are pushing for full independence for Hong Kong,
rather than protesting violations of Hong Kong’s Basic Law.
Beijing is especially adept at controlling these domestic
narratives because it focuses on “rapid response to breaking events, agenda
setting in status-quo [or] peacetime, and then also adaptive messaging,” Nathan
Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a policy analyst at RAND corporation explained. “If the
message isn’t hitting home, [they start] changing to something else,” he added.
But importantly, China has not been able to translate this domestic success
into convincing other populations around the world to believe the Communist
Party’s narratives. “The biggest disadvantage for China when it moves outside
its border is that it doesn’t have control,” of the information space, Beauchamp-Mustafaga
explained. King-wa agreed, saying that he doesn’t “see that a lot of people
outside China really take the government version,” on issues like Hong Kong or
Taiwan.
But that does not mean China’s international information
activities have been wholly unsuccessful, as the recent NBA controversy and the
lack of criticism over social media app TikTok’s
political censorship show, Rosenberger and Kalathil argued. Kalathil
pointed to the recent acquisition of stakes in international media companies by
Chinese companies as a demonstration of Beijing’s desire to reach broader global
audiences. Rosenberger added that China is also pushing more countries and
international organizations to adopt similar cybersecurity and internet content
control laws that mirror those Beijing has in place.
As China increases its international information manipulation activities, the United States needs “to be much more clear-eyed about how to push back,” Rosenberger argued. She warned specifically about avoiding the temptation to engage in content censorship or removal on social media as that would begin a “slippery slope to create the information state that the Chinese Communist party is trying to create.” Beauchamp-Mustafaga suggested that the United States should do more to “engage with vulnerable populations” to help them identify and push back Chinese government narratives and attempts at censorship.
As Beijing continues to increase its global power, the information space will serve as another tool to advance its interests and restructure the international system in its favor. By adequately recognizing Beijing’s activities in this sphere, policy makers in democracies around the world can help build information resilience for their populations and push back on Beijing’s information operations.
David A. Wemer is associate
director, editorial at the Atlantic Council. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAWemer.
While censorship and propaganda have long been features of Chinese domestic politics, Beijing is ramping up its information operations abroad.
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