Waking up to the US-China Information War, plus China's consumers mired in debt & Alibaba accused of "possible espionage" in Belgium -- China Boss News 10.06.23

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What happened.

China lashed out vehemently at the U.S. over a State Department report that "accused Beijing of ploughing billions of dollars annually into information manipulation efforts,” Reuters reported.

The report, “How the People's Republic of China seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment” is a humdinger.

It dissects Beijing's "attempts to influence the international information environment" into 5 “elements”: Leveraging Propaganda and Censorship, Promoting Digital Authoritarianism, Exploiting International Organizations and Bilateral Relationships, Pairing Cooptation and Pressure and Exercising Control Over Chinese-Language Media.

It’s also bursting with real-world illustrations of how China legally and illegally suppresses “information that contradicts its desired narratives.” 

But Beijing wasn’t having it.

“The agencies of the U.S. State Department that produced the report ‘were the source of false information and the command post of 'cognitive warfare.' Facts have repeatedly proven that the United States is the true 'empire of lies,'“ China’s foreign ministry spokesman said.

Why it matters

Waking up to the US-China information war

“As the PRC has grown more confident in its power, it appears to have calculated that it can more aggressively pursue its interests via information manipulation,” the US State Department said in its report.

A relic of what was thought a bygone era - when information was wielded during the Cold War to promote one system over another, Chinese propaganda targeting foreign audiences today is strategically aimed at world-wide acceptance of ideas that are - and there’s really no other way to put this - part and parcel of Xi Jinping's totalitarianism.

The ideology underpinning China’s information campaigns is unabashedly promoted as "Xi-Thought,” and is less well known by its formal name - “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” - which is a set of political theories and policies created to Xi-spin Deng Xiaoping’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” to both domestic and global audiences.

“With his outstanding political wisdom, his extraordinary theoretical courage and his deep sense of the world as a Marxist statesman, thinker and strategist, General Secretary Xi Jinping firmly grasps the general development trend of China and the world, thinks deeply about the future and the destiny of humanity, and inherits and carries forward the fundamental principles and excellent diplomacy of the new China,” Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu once said in a video appearance.

Sorry for throwing that last bit on you, but it does illustrate a point, eh?

The Belt and Road initiative, China’s "modern take on the Silk Road trade route,” helped Beijing make vast leaps in propagandizing China’s “general development trend” in ways unimaginable to the Soviets.

More than 140 countries and 32 international organizations throughout Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Carribbean, and other parts of Asia have signed onto BRI memorandums with Beijing - to the point that the framework for worldwide “cooperation” has become too much of a good thing with economically challenged coutnries, saddling Beijing with an international debt crisis at a time when China already had one at home.

To save itself from its own “debt trap,” Beijing is now selectively recoiling from new funding - it just turned down Pakistan’s request for more cash to support the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), once considered the BRI’s crowning achievement.

The retreat forced China’s propagandists to find a gap-filler, and they did. Xi now widely champions three new concepts: The Global Security Initiative (GSI), Global Development Initiative (GDI), and the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI). You might think of them as his new world order manifesto.

In other words, this is not your parents’ information war.

An influence beyond Soviet imagination

The State Department report was published in that context as the US also tries to push back on “China’s military presence in the South China Sea, [and] the production of semiconductors and clean energy technology,” Financial Times staff noted.

“The report also marks another US effort to counter Chinese activities that it believes threaten American influence, as some developing countries grow increasingly willing to reproduce Chinese content that undermines western media sources,” it said.

In its report, “the State Department contends what U.S. officials are seeing now is different, that China's information manipulation efforts have matured beyond specific campaigns centered around a specific topic or event,” says VOA News.

“If successful, ‘Beijing would develop a surgical capability to shape the information particular groups and even individuals consume. In this possible future, the information available to publics, media, civil society, academia, and governments as they engage with the PRC would be distorted,’” new staff wrote, citing the report verbatim.

Beijing’s attempts to dominate the global information environment rely on “a multi-pronged approach combining its expansive state-run media, surveillance technologies, financial and political coercion and Chinese-language media, and “[t]he result is an information ecosystem in which bots and trolls, and even officials, amplify pro-Beijing voices while drowning out or suppressing opponents.”

Recently state media outlet China Radio International (CRI), for example, has drawn attention for producing and airing Chinese propaganda to “local partners” in Europe “without transparently disclosing the sponsorship of content creation to the listeners,” according to Ivana Karásková in The Diplomat.

“This strategy, known in Chinese as ‘borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean,’ plays a pivotal role in laundering Beijing’s propaganda and fostering the acceptance of its messaging among local audiences,” she said.

China struggles with pushback from media and civil society in democratic countries, the report’s researchers admitted, but it is making inroads into the Global South.

“Unchecked, Beijing’s efforts could result in a future in which technology exported by the PRC, coopted local governments, and fear of Beijing’s direct retaliation produce a sharp contraction of global freedom of expression. Beijing would play a significant – and often hidden – role in determining the print and digital content that audiences in developing countries consume,” it said.

With billions of dollars invested in foreign media, online influencers, twitter bots, censorship, including legal pressure on international publishers, and papers with statements "attributed to authors without discernible links to the PRC Government," Beijing’s efforts to influence the global information environment make the old Soviet info ops from the 20th century, by comparison, look quaint.

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