Below is the congressional testimony by U.S. intelligence that the U.S. has been penetrated by Chinese intelligence agencies.
Here is an article
from the National Endowment of Democracy – which is funded through the
United States Information Agency – on the subject at hand:
I
would like to thank Chairman Schiff, Ranking Member Nunes, and the
other esteemed members of the Committee for the opportunity and
privilege of presenting testimony on the critical subject of the impact
of China’s influence on democratic institutions.
Since the end of the Cold War, the democratic West has
placed special emphasis on the idea of integrating nondemocratic regimes
into the rules-based international order. For political leaders and
analysts in the United States and Europe, integration has been a
dominant foreign-policy organizing concept. The democracies’ central
assumption has been that patient engagement with states would yield
clear mutual benefits. By embracing China and other such regimes and
encouraging their integration into the global economic system and key
political institutions, Western powers hoped to encourage autocracies
toward meaningful political reform.
But this approach has not turned out as we anticipated. Rather
than reforming, China and any number of other leading repressive regimes
have deepened their authoritarianism. And in an era of
hyperglobalization, they are turning it outward. Although the autocratic
states are today integrated in many ways into the global system, they
have tended not to become more transparent and accountable; rather, they
have developed policies and practices aimed at undermining democracy’s
advance. Exploiting globalization and the opportunities presented by
integration with open societies, these states are working to reshape the
very institutions and arenas that welcomed them.
Over the past decade in particular, the pendulum of global
politics has swung in the direction of authoritarian regimes, which are
shaping the political environment in a manner that would have been
unimaginable even a few years ago.
Even more striking is the resilience that the most influential
authoritarian states are displaying, despite the evident weaknesses and
flaws of their systems, and the systematic abuses that are found within
them. Led by China, these nondemocratic regimes are showing themselves
to be entrenched at home, even as they project influence beyond their
borders in ways that corrode and undermine democracy and its
institutions. The authorities in Beijing have refined and scaled up
their instruments of influence and, with them, the ability to manipulate
the political landscape of countries beyond their borders. As the
leadership in Beijing has become more repressive domestically, China has
grown emboldened and more ambitious internationally, with worrisome
implications for democratic institutions around the world.
In this new era of contestation, China has claimed a larger role
on the global stage and has sought to promote its own preferred ideas,
norms, and approach to governance. Beijing’s unexpected ability to carry
out digital censorship, to use economic leverage to cow voices in the
democracies, and more generally to influence democratic systems abroad
has created a need for fresh ways of thinking about and dealing with
this new situation.
Understanding “Sharp Power”
Through the Belt and Road Initiative and other forms of
engagement, China’s leadership is placing increasing importance on
exerting influence and shaping the political operating environment
overseas. To this end, over the past decade China has spent many of
billions of dollars to shape public opinion and perceptions around the
world in arenas typically associated with “soft power,” a term coined by
the American political scientist Joseph Nye and understood as the “ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion”
or seen as a way to boost a country’s positive image. In China’s case,
such efforts have included thousands of people-to-people exchanges,
extensive cultural activities, educational programs—including the
ever-expanding network of Confucius Institutes—and the development of
media and tech enterprises with global reach.
Although information is increasingly globalized and internet
access is spreading, China and other authoritarian states have managed
to reassert control over the realm of ideas. In China, the state keeps a
firm grip on the media environment, and the authorities in Beijing use
digital technologies to press their advantage at home and, increasingly,
abroad.
For too long, observers in democracies viewed authoritarian
influence through an outmoded lens. Under the direction of the Chinese
Communist Party, China has established platforms abroad for educational,
cultural, and other forms of influence within undemocratic and
democratic societies alike. Over time, it has become clearer that such
initiatives tend to be “accompanied by an authoritarian determination to
monopolize ideas, suppress alternative narratives, and exploit partner
institutions.” The unanticipated ability of authoritarian states like
China to exert influence abroad has created a need for new terms that
can adequately describe this new situation.
Among such terms is “sharp power.” This describes an approach to
international affairs that typically involves efforts at censorship and
the use of manipulation to degrade the integrity of independent
institutions. Neither “hard” but nor “soft,” sharp power has the effect
of limiting free expression and distorting the political environment, as
explained in a December 2017 report by the National Endowment for
Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies that coined the
term.
The authorities in Beijing in particular have cultivated economic
leverage as a tool for getting others to play by its rules. Beijing’s
approach seeks to reduce, neutralize, or preempt any challenges to the
regime’s presentation of itself. Its state-funded research centers,
media outlets, people-to-people exchange programs, and network of
Confucius Institutes often mimic civil society initiatives that in
democracies function independently of government. Meanwhile, local
partners and others in democracies are often unaware of the logic that
underpins China’s foreign policy and how tightly the Chinese authorities
control social groups, media, and political discourse at home.
As China expert John Fitzgerald observes: “There is no boundary
between politics and what passes for culture in contemporary China. The
Cultural Revolution, a violent political movement that ripped China
apart in the late sixties, was not called a ‘cultural’ revolution for
nothing. A bitter struggle over power and policy was waged in the
cultural realm on the understanding that parties wanting to influence or
command a government must first control what is said about them through
a country’s education, media, and cultural institutions. Politics as we
know it, involving opposition, debate, and negotiation, gave way to the
politics of controlling universities, media, and culture.”
Today, beyond China’s borders, the corrosive effects of sharp
power are increasingly apparent in a number of such crucial domains,
including in the spheres of publishing, culture, academia, and
media—sectors that are essential for determining how citizens of
democracies understand the world around them. As the International Forum
report observes, China’s influence activities aim to discourage
challenges to its preferred self-presentation, as well as to its
positions or standing. Crucially, limiting or muting public discussion
of issues deemed unwelcome by the Chinese party-state is a critical
characteristic of sharp power.
Publishing
The publishing sector is a sphere in which independent standards
of expression are being challenged. In August 2017, Cambridge University
Press (CUP) took the controversial step of removing roughly three
hundred articles from a Chinese website that hosted the China Quarterly. The
move came after the PRC’s General Administration of Press and
Publication threatened to make all CUP-published journals inaccessible
from within China. In this case, pushback from the academy and civil
society was pivotal in causing CUP to reverse its removal decision. Yet
in October 2017, Springer Nature, which is among the world’s largest
publishers of scholarly periodicals, announced that under PRC pressure
it had blocked access on its Chinese-language website to hundreds of
articles, many dealing with elite politics, human rights, Taiwan, and
Tibet.
The stakes of censorship are growing as PRC authorities improve
their capabilities. Independent researchers have observed that in the
online editions of journals published in the PRC, dozens of articles
dating as far back as the 1950s have been taken out by Chinese censors.
As with the Chinese government’s pressure on CUP and other publishers,
this is about rewriting Chinese history to suit the party-state. The
scholar Glenn Tiffert has noted that enterprising censors or hackers
can now fabricate versions of the historical record, attuned to shifting
CCP ideological or political requirements—and that by simply digitally
consolidating sources onto servers under its control, a savvy
authoritarian government can project its domestic censorship regime
abroad in order to shape public opinion globally. As machine learning
and other technological advances accelerate, the precision and
comprehensiveness with which the Chinese government and other
authoritarian regimes will be able to modernize censorship is bound to
grow.
Media
Having learned to control political ideas within their own
countries, autocrats are now bending globalization to their own ends by
manipulating discourse abroad, especially in the wide-open information
space afforded to them by the democracies. Massive investments in
overseas media infrastructure play a central role. It is worth noting
that Russia has crafted a template for information manipulation that can
be adapted to local circumstances and is now applied in countries
around the world. China has similarly scaled up a multifaceted effort to
shape the realm of ideas. The authoritarians pursue “information
sovereignty” (effectively state dominance and control of the internet)
within their own borders while treating everything beyond them as fair
game.
State dominance over political expression and communication is
integral to authoritarian governance. Such control enables the promotion
of favored narratives across media platforms, as well as through the
words of state officials and surrogates. In an era of global information
saturation and fragmentation, the authorities in Beijing understand the
“discourse power” that can be exercised through focused and amply
funded information initiatives.
As the PRC’s media platforms expand and its largest internet
firms go global, Beijing’s ability to curate information in a systematic
and selective manner will only grow stronger, especially in places
where local media organizations are vulnerable, and as AI-related
capabilities improve.
One such place is Africa. There, China has made major investments
in media infrastructure, and Chinese censorship tactics are being
deployed in matters that Beijing deems sensitive. Throughout sub-Saharan
Africa, Chinese state-media outlets have bureaus with two sets of
editors: There are African editors on the local payroll, but a group of
Chinese editors in Beijing vets their decisions, at least regarding
stories that the PRC feels strongly about. African reporters might have
some latitude to cover local news, but they may well find Beijing
rejecting, censoring, or altering their content when Chinese interests
are involved—all to ensure that China constantly appears in a “positive”
or “constructive” light. The Chinese government gives African
journalists “training” and brings them to visit China. Real journalism
education, however, is not the goal. Instead, the focus is on taking in
Chinese achievements (cultural sites, big infrastructure projects) and
on learning how to report from the Chinese government’s perspective.
This is part of a global pattern that is also visible in Latin
America. China’s president Xi Jinping has said that he wants to bring
ten thousand Latin American politicians, academics, journalists,
officials, and former diplomats to China by 2020.
Through its formidable global media apparatus more generally,
China is spreading messages abroad, using a variety of tools, about
alternatives to democracy as models of governance, how the media can be
controlled, and value-neutral internationalist positions in debates on
issues like internet governance and overseas development assistance
where Beijing is opposed to support for independent media development.
For instance, China uses a co-production model as one means of
transmitting Beijing-friendly messages and arguments to audiences
abroad. China analyst David Bandurski describes how the Discovery
Channel entered into an agreement with Chinese state-linked partners in
an international film co-production effort titled “China: Time of Xi”
that reached many millions of viewers across 37 countries in Asia. This
effort was billed “as an independent television production” but, as
Bandurski notes, while this initiative offered the illusion of
independence “the series was in fact a co-production of a three-year
content deal inked in March 2015 between Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific
and China Intercontinental Communications Centre (CICC), a company
operated by the State Council Information Office (CSIO) —the Chinese
government organ sharing an address with the Central Propaganda
Department’s Office of Foreign Propaganda (OFP), responsible for
spearheading its official messages overseas.”
Confucius Institutes
Confucius Institutes are controversial because of the lack of
transparency with which they operate on university campuses. Although
some observers note that many Confucius Institutes activities seem
innocuous, emphasizing Chinese language instruction and cultural events
such as film exhibitions, other elements of Confucius Institute
programming are quite out of place in an open, university setting. The
Chinese government’s control of staffing and curricula ensures that
courses and programming will subtly promote CCP positions on issues
deemed critical or sensitive by the Chinese authorities, such as
territorial disputes or religious minorities in China.
Chinese authorities portray the Confucius Institutes as being
similar to France’s Alliance Française or Germany’s Goethe-Institut,
both of which receive government funding to give language and culture
classes. Yet unlike those freestanding organizations, the Confucius
Institutes are embedded within educational institutions, most of which
are committed to the type of free intellectual inquiry that is
impossible at Confucius Institutes themselves. Many casual observers of
the Confucius Institutes might not realize that the Confucius
Institutes’ constitution, found on the website of Hanban (the Chinese
arm of the government that directs them), implies that Chinese law
applies within the premises of the Institutes. Moreover, the Confucius
Institutes employ staffers who at times have sought to block host
universities from holding discussions on sensitive topics such as Taiwan
or Tibet.
Little about these institutes is transparent; it is hard to say,
for instance, what amount of Chinese government money goes to individual
host universities. It is also unclear what level of control
universities have over curricula within the Institutes because the
agreements between these parties often remain confidential.
Technology
China’s considerable influence is increasingly evident in the
digital space, and a full treatment of the multitude of ways such
influence is exerting an impact on democratic standards is beyond the
scope of this statement. China and other autocratic regimes have applied
the online tools and techniques that they have refined for domestic use
at the international level as well. Many of the techniques that are
applied abroad are first incubated at the domestic level by the Chinese
authorities. Through the online censorship system known as the Great
Firewall, Chinese authorities have long been able to manage and restrict
what China’s people—the world’s largest number of internet users inside
a single set of national borders—can access when they go online. Now
the government is increasingly applying machine learning to combine
censorship and surveillance into comprehensive social management, a
development that will increasingly impact global freedom of expression.
Beijing also has successfully pressured global technology platforms such
as Google and Facebook (both currently blocked in China) to remove
selected content.
Beijing’s paramount aim, it seems, is to exert control over key
information spheres and the tools for manipulating thoughts, images, and
ideas. Its management model is centralized and unitary.
The idea is to enable the regime to pursue the systematic control
of multiple forms of communication, extending well into the
democracies. As the authorities in Beijing deepen their artificial
intelligence (AI) capacities, they are likely to apply these
technologies to devise ever more precise methods of social management,
including predicting individual behavior and potential collective
action.
In China, the companies responsible for developing these
technologies are not only partnering with the state security apparatus,
but are intertwining themselves within key institutions in democratic
societies, giving them an increasing stake in the platforms and
algorithms that determine speech on a worldwide basis. Chinese ambitions
to become a global powerhouse in big data, AI, and other emerging
technologies have significant ramifications for democratic governance
globally, yet the community of civil society actors involved in the
governance of emerging technologies has yet to engage on this issue in a
meaningful way. The full implications of China’s wide-ranging activity
in the digital sphere on African subcontinent is among the issues that
deserves closer attention.
Corrosive Capital
Many emerging and vulnerable democracies face challenges in
governing foreign direct investment, including weak accountability in
public spending, opaque corporate governance, poor procurement
oversight, and lax anti-corruption enforcement. These challenges are
easily exploited by authoritarian regimes intent on using
state-connected financial resources for reasons other than development
or mutual economic benefit, leading to potentially disastrous outcomes
for open and democratic governance. When investment and foreign
assistance is part of broader conversations involving civil society in
developing economies, the effect can be to strengthen such essential
features of democratic governance as citizen voice and participation,
media independence, transparency, and accountability. If the
authoritarian-linked firms and institutions driving the capital flows
ignore or even undermine liberal-democratic values and concerns,
however, the durability of democratic governance can suffer, corruption
can flourish, and authoritarianism can find fertile ground.
The situation in Central Europe and the Balkans, where young,
aspiring or vulnerable democracies predominate, is illustrative. In
countries throughout those regions there are indications that China has
sought to utilize various forms of capital inflows, including equity,
debt, and aid, to achieve geostrategic aims and divert the region from a
trajectory of integration into the community of democratic states.
Regional initiatives, such as China’s “16+1” initiative to strengthen
bilateral ties with former Eastern Bloc countries, offer Beijing an easy
alternative to dealing with the EU as a whole. In regions such as the
Western Balkans where the interests of local political elites, who
retain power by catering to key patronage networks, overlap with China’s
high tolerance for corruption, Beijing’s way of doing business
exacerbates existing problems surrounding transparency and
accountability.
Indeed, China’s BRI, initially conceived as an infrastructure
network, has become in essence an operating system for Xi Jinping’s
vision of an interconnected, China-centric order positioned as an
alternative to the existing rules-based international system. In
countries where its projects have turned for the worse, its combining of
infrastructure financing with geopolitical aims has raised doubt and
opposition. In December 2017, for instance, the government of Sri Lanka
admitted its inability to repay the US$8 billion that it had borrowed
from Chinese firms to build a deepwater port at Hambantota, handing the
project to Beijing on a 99-year lease in an instance of what critics
have called “debt-trap diplomacy.” In other cases, Chinese financing for
infrastructure projects under the BRI have seen countries take on
unsustainable debt levels for projects of questionable economic
viability. For example, in Montenegro a project financed by China’s
Export-Import Bank to link the coastal port of Bar by road to Serbia has
been dubbed “the highway to nowhere” after the government could not
afford to take out further loans to complete the overruns of the
project.
Such deals with China tend to be characterized by an essential
lack of transparency. Patterns across regions and sectors have taken
shape that illustrate the extent of the problem. Several other recent
cases have come to light, for instance, which demonstrate how Beijing’s
preference for working directly and exclusively with executive branch
elites in its engagement with foreign governments and how this can have
had a corrosive effect on the integrity of institutions and governance
more broadly.
Ecuador’s negotiation under President Rafael Correa of a
Chinese-financed loan to acquire surveillance equipment and technology
to power its ECU-911 monitoring system also took place in the absence of
meaningful public debate, and civil society is only now in a position
where it can begin to grapple with the potential ramifications of such
an extensive system that has already been put into place.
When Panama and El Salvador switched diplomatic recognition from
Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China, key government, private
sector, and civil society actors were kept in the dark until after
official announcements were made. In the case of El Salvador, its
congress has launched an effort to review and halt the advancement of an
accompanying agreement to establish a special economic zone that would
comprise 14 percent of the country’s territory in strategic areas along
the coast and give preferential benefits to Chinese firms. Only a few
weeks ago, more than a dozen other agreements that the El Salvadorian
president had reached with China were made public for the first time,
spanning from promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, to scientific and
technological cooperation, and educational exchange, among others. In
all of these cases, civil society and policymakers have been forced to
try to catch up from behind to understand the implications of how such
agreements may impact their countries and to retrofit monitoring and
accountability mechanisms.
In Argentina, a deal reached with the Cristina Kirchner
administration saw the People’s Liberation Army given a fifty-year lease
to build and operate a space observation station with dual-use
capabilities in Patagonia. After recent reporting revealed the agreement
provided the Argentine government with no mechanisms for oversight or
access to the station, Argentina’s national congress launched an
investigation and is seeking to revisit the agreement. In Africa,
agreements on major deals also fit the pattern.
In the wake of these developments, civil society actors across
the world have awakened to the need to scrutinize such investments, or
run the risk of their governments finding themselves obliged to sign
over strategic assets or territory.
Implications for the United States
The pattern of China’s engagement that has taken shape globally has not eluded the U.S.
In recent years, reports of influence that were once episodic
have become more frequent as journalists and other observers have begun
to look more closely; the patterns of opacity and manipulation that have
characterized China’s engagements in other parts of the world have come
to light here. China’s Influence and American Interests,
a report produced by the Hoover Institution and the Asia Society and
released in November 2018 found that “in certain key ways China is
exploiting America’s openness in order to advance its aims on a
competitive playing field that is hardly level. For at the same time
that China’s authoritarian system takes advantage of the openness of
American society to seek influence, it impedes legitimate efforts by
American counterpart institutions to engage Chinese society on a
reciprocal basis.”
This report, on whose working group I participated, further
observed that “China’s influence activities have moved beyond their
traditional United Front focus on diaspora communities to target a far
broader range of sectors in Western societies, ranging from think tanks,
universities, and media to state, local, and national government
institutions. China seeks to promote views sympathetic to the Chinese
Government, policies, society, and culture; suppress alternative views;
and co-opt key American players to support China’s foreign policy goals
and economic interests.”
One example that indicates the global nature of the challenge was
reported in November 2015, when it came to light that China Radio
International (CRI), Beijing’s state-run radio network, was operating as
a hidden hand behind a global web of stations on which the Chinese
government controls much of the content. According to a Reuters
investigation, 33 stations in 14 countries “primarily broadcast content
created or supplied by CRI or by media companies it controls in the
United States, Australia, and Europe.” As part of this elaborate
Chinese-government effort to exploit the open media space, more than a
dozen stations across the United States operate as part of the CCP’s
“borrowed boat” approach, in which existing media outlets in foreign
countries are used to project China’s messages.
The Chinese government has trained its attention on Hollywood,
where its presence shapes the industry in ways both visible and unseen.
Because China is an increasingly important market for the global film
industry, entertainment firms have been striking deals that help give
them access to that market, but put them at the mercy of Chinese
censors. This leads to content either edited to fit the Chinese market,
or proactively shaped to exclude anything the Chinese government might
consider sensitive in the first place. Chinese co-productions are also
more likely to feature positive depictions of China. Marvel’s “Doctor
Strange” changed one character’s origin story from Tibetan to Celtic;
the screenwriter acknowledged that offending China’s sensibilities was a
concern. Prominent Tibet supporter and actor Richard Gere told The
Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that the year before he “had an episode where
someone said they could not finance a film with [him] because it would
upset the Chinese.”
Dealing with the New Environment
The leadership of institutions essential to the functioning of
the public sphere within democratic societies—publishers, university
administrators, media and technology executives, and others—in the past
did not need to take into account to such a degree the prospect of
manipulation or censorship by external authoritarian powers. Today,
however, the exertion of sharp power makes it necessary for them to
renew and deepen their commitment to democratic standards and free
political expression. The mechanisms to achieve a deepening of such
commitment are not self-evident or straightforward. To address this
challenge, common standards must be developed, with the aim of reducing
these institutions’ exposure and safeguarding their integrity over the
long term. Because in today’s world autocracies and democracies are
integrated and interdependent in so many new ways, authoritarians must
be contested on multiple fronts and levels, including within democratic societies and their institutions.
Winning the “Values War”
In the last decade, the global operating environment has changed.
In crucial arenas relating to the health and integrity of democratic
systems—including the spheres of freedom of expression, the principles
that govern technology, and the way in which state-driven capital can be
leveraged for political purposes—the impact of leading authoritarian
regimes is being felt more acutely. Given China’s rapid emergence on the
world stage and its more visible authoritarian internationalism, it
seems we are approaching an inflection point.
If anything, the challenge presented by China and other
ambitious, internationalist autocratic regimes has grown in the most
recent period. At the same time, the democracies are only slowly waking
up to the fact that they have entered into an era of serious and
strategic contestation based on governance models. We have been slow to
understand the implications of this struggle over essential values. The
values war that has taken shape globally is one between autocratic
regimes, on the one hand, whose animating governance principles favor
state control, management of political expression, and privileging “rule
by law” over rule of law, versus democratic systems, on the other,
whose principles are based on open societies, free and independent
expression, and rule of law. In an era of hyperglobalization, the battle
over these fundamental values is being waged in every region and across
diverse polities. How this battle plays out will shape the character of
the world we live in.
The CCP’s efforts to speak to the world, to shape understanding,
and to subtly undercut or overtly assail the democracies should not be
underestimated. The authorities in Beijing mean to reforge the
established rules and norms of international politics. Plainly said,
they represent the leadership of the “unfree world.”
Much of the response to date to the China challenge from the
democracies has focused on the trade and military dimensions, both of
which deserve rightly deserve attention. But we must reckon with the
fact that so much of Beijing’s activity in recent years may be related
to but is distinct from these domains. In order to compete, the U.S. and
other democracies will need to address this gap.
A valuable base of experience can be found in Australia, which
has recently been facing up to the challenge of PRC sharp power
projection. As John Fitzgerald has noted, Australia is not only “on the
frontline” of China’s overseas influence efforts, but also “at the
forefront among liberal democracies in generating press, community, and
government responses in defense of its sovereignty and institutional
integrity, as well as the values—including the freedoms of speech,
assembly, and religion—that China’s influence operations place at
risk.” The experience of Australia can furnish useful lessons to other
advanced democracies now being exposed to Beijing’s brand of sharp
power.
As democratic societies move into the next stage of dealing with
sharp power—crafting workable responses—civil society’s role will be
critical. The Australian government’s efforts to combat foreign
interference, and civil society’s role in informing and shaping these
efforts, underscore the necessity of pursuing what should be understood
as a comprehensive response to the multidimensional challenge presented
by China. At a fundamental level, any response to this global challenge
also needs to consider the essential importance of democratic
development in China itself.
NED’s Response to the China Challenge
For its part, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its
associated institutes have set in motion a response to this multifaceted
challenge. NED’s programmatic approach to addressing China’s influence
around the world that threatens democratic norms, standards and
institutions is anchored in three interrelated components: developing
and accelerating the capacity of think tanks, civil society and
journalists to study and analyze Chinese influence in politics, the
economy and society; strengthening the ability of these actors,
including those working in the civic technology space, to respond
appropriately and strategically; and linking efforts at the country
level with counterparts engaged in similar work around the world.
The International Republican Institute (IRI) is directly
combating CCP malign influence in developing democracies, working with
country partners to shine a spotlight on the CCP’s influence tactics and
bolster democratic resilience to them. IRI is equipping government
officials, independent media, political parties, private enterprise, and
civil society in these countries with the tools to protect their
democratic institutions and sovereignty.
The National Democratic Institute (NDI) conducts a number of
initiatives that address China’s exertion of authoritarian influence.
This includes its work with the Asian Network for Free Elections
(ANFREL) and its country member citizen groups to among other things
address Chinese and other authoritarian disinformation campaigns that
aim to sow divisions and undermine public trust in democratic
processes. In Hong Kong, NDI has provided forums for women, youth, and
ethnic minorities to constructively participate in policy-making and
elevate their voices and priorities. NDI also has conducted a series of
missions regarding the development of Hong Kong’s constitutional and
electoral framework, the enforcement of the rule of law and civil
liberties, and prospects for Hong Kong’s democratization.
In response to the loans, investment, and aid from non-democratic
countries, including China, into emerging democracies with poor
governance and weak rule of law – understood as “corrosive capital” –
the Center for International Private Enterprise has been working to
document how corrosive capital flows into countries, and then to work
with its private sector partners to increase resiliency, including
through strengthening policies on competition, anti-monopoly, corruption
and procurement; building awareness among key state agencies; and
increasing public debate. Chinese state-owned enterprises often take
advantage of institutional and policy weaknesses to invest without
sufficient public sector oversight, private sector consultation, or
citizen scrutiny. Once in-country, these funds further corrode
governance, exacerbate corruption, increase indebtedness, and in some
cases, have resulted in the transfer of sovereign resources.
Crafting a Response to the China Challenge
Given its corrosive impact on critical democratic institutions,
China’s authoritarian internationalism poses both a rule-of-law and a
national security challenge; authoritarian efforts that today target
democratic institutions and seek to undermine their integrity represent
what should be understood as a serious and persistent nontraditional
security threat. Any response to the challenge posed by China will first
require dispensing with the inadequate framing of this issue as a
simple choice of either shunning or engaging China, which is already
deeply integrated into the international system, across every region in
the world. Rather, it is the nature and contours of the engagement with
China that must be rethought.
The following are key steps, drawn from our Sharp Power report, which can be taken to address the Beijing’s influence efforts:
Address the evident knowledge and capacity gap on China. Throughout
many societies in which China today is deeply engaged information
concerning the Chinese political system and its foreign policy
strategies tends to be extremely limited. This places many societies at a
distinct strategic disadvantage. There often are few journalists,
editors, and policy professionals who possess a deep understanding of
China—the Chinese Communist Party, especially—and can share their
knowledge with the rest of their societies in a systematic way. Given
China’s growing economic, media, and political footprint in these
settings, there is a pressing need to build capacity to disseminate
independent information about China and its regime. Civil society
organizations should develop strategies for communicating expert
knowledge about China to broader audiences.
Shine a spotlight on authoritarian influence. Chinese
sharp power relies in part on disguising state-directed projects as
commercial media or grassroots associations, for example, or using local
actors as conduits for foreign propaganda or tools of foreign
manipulation. To respond to these efforts at misdirection, observers
need the capacity to put them under the spotlight and analyze them in an
independent and comprehensive manner.
Safeguard democratic societies against undesirable Chinese Party State influence. Once
the nature and techniques of authoritarian influence efforts are
exposed, countries should build up internal defenses. Authoritarian
initiatives are directed at cultivating relationships with the political
elites, thought leaders, and other information gatekeepers of open
societies. Such efforts are part of Beijing’s larger aim to get inside
such systems in order to incentivize cooperation and neutralize
criticism of the authoritarian regime. Support for strong, independent
civil society—including independent media—is essential to ensuring that
the citizens of democracies are adequately informed to evaluate
critically the benefits and risks of closer engagement with Beijing and
its surrogates. It is impossible to know for certain, for instance, the
degree to which intimidation from authoritarian governments has already
made scholars and publishers “sensitive-topic averse.” Exposing the
hidden pressures is a first step toward countering the censors’
insidious influence.
Reaffirm support for democratic values and ideals. If one
goal of authoritarian sharp power is to legitimize nondemocratic forms
of government, then it is only effective to the extent that democracies
and their citizens lose sight of their own principles. The Chinese
government’s sharp power seeks to undermine democratic standards and
ideals. Top leaders in the democracies must speak out clearly and
consistently on behalf of democratic ideals and put down clear markers
regarding acceptable standards of democratic behavior. Otherwise, the
authoritarians will fill the void.
Learn from democratic partners. A number of
countries, Australia especially, have already had extensive engagement
with China and can serve as an important point of reference for
countries whose institutions are at an earlier stage of their
interaction with Beijing. Given the complex and multifaceted character
of Beijing’s influence activities, such learning between and among
democracies is critical for accelerating responses that are at once
effective and consistent with democratic standards.