When people think of foreign disinformation campaigns, the textbook example that comes to mind is usually that of social media accounts run out of government-sponsored troll farms in Russia sowing fake news and division during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. When it comes to this specific tactic of disinformation, Moscow is still the undisputed global leader. Although China has begun to enter the space and conduct similar operations, both its disinformation and broader media strategy have traditionally been quite different. The nature of this strategy was the topic spoken on by Sarah Cook, the Research Director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House.
When it comes to media operations, Cook explained, Beijing is taking an increasingly aggressive approach. Major Chinese social media apps such as WeChat are increasingly aligned with and connected to the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese government is publishing more content and taking control of more outlets and platforms in foreign countries, both to disseminate positive stories about Beijing and to combat and criticize journalists and media outlets which criticize the CCP. The latter often cover human-rights abuses, treaty violations, and other behavior that casts mainland China in a bad light.
More recently, China has taken a page from Russia’s playbook and stepped into the active disinformation campaign sphere, most notably in the leadup to the 2018 Taiwanese elections but also in other countries such as the United States, which recently was the subject of a Beijing-sponsored disinformation campaign which alleged COVID-19 was a creation of the U.S. military that was brought to Wuhan.
Although Beijing’s behavior in the media and information spheres has become much more aggressive in recent years, Cook make clear that this aggression is driven by insecurity, both of the Communist Party in general and President Xi Jinping in particular. Twenty years ago, only 15-20 million mainland Chinese had Internet access. Today, 900 million of the country’s 1.4 billion population do. With that exponential increase in access to information, the government feels the pressure both to disseminate propaganda that casts it in a positive light and censor information that portrays it negatively, as well as punish the outlets and journalists who do so.
As was the case with Russia, social media platforms have recently woken up to the reality of the Chinese disinformation threat. Small steps such as labeling known CCP-connected accounts as Chinese state-affiliated media have helped users distinguish propaganda from fact and detect ulterior motives in posts, but democracies and free governments need to strike a balance between combating Chinese disinformation and censoring platforms and outlets in frequent use by the Chinese diaspora. Beijing has an increasingly active media and disinformation strategy, and it will require patience, nuance and a guarding against blunt overreach on the part of the United States and other democracies to counter it.
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