作者：Edward Lucas  来源：Times

For decades we have turned a blind eye to Beijing’s crimes and kidded ourselves it won’t take advantage of our weakness, says Edward Lucas

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/time-is-running-out-for-the-west-to-stop-chinas-global-takeover-gfk39wx3x

Anyone witnessing Xi Jinping’s state visit to London in 2015 would have thought that the Chinese leader came as a conqueror. Officials in distinctive blue tracksuits marshalled obedient crowds of Chinese expats to wave flags for the visiting president. But it was British police who kept the streets clear of even the tiniest murmur of dissent. When Shao Jiang, a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre, dared to hold up two sheets of A4 paper with the slogans “Democracy Now” and “End Autocracy”, he was bundled away. Along with two Tibetan exiles, he was charged not with a minor public order offence but with conspiracy. This allowed the police to search his home under anti-terrorism powers, seizing his computers. Shortly afterwards, he received a warning from Google that a “state actor” had attempted to access his accounts.

That should have been a scandal. Peaceful protest is a fundamental right in a free country. A police watchdog investigation found evidence of extraordinary pressure exerted by the Chinese authorities on the Metropolitan Police in the run-up to the visit. Indeed, during the talks, the Chinese delegation even threatened to walk out if Shao was not detained. But the arresting officer refused to answer questions about the case and it was dropped for lack of evidence.

The episode reveals a central fact about modern China. The regime in Beijing does not just seek to control its own vast country, it wants to control the way other countries behave, too. Nowhere is off limits. Recent books have highlighted Chinese pressure in Canada (Claws of the Panda by John Manthorpe) and in Australia (Silent Invasion by Clive Hamilton). Hamilton has co-authored a forthcoming book, Hidden Hand, about the way Chinese power is being exercised in Britain and Europe. Isaac Stone Fish, a leading American China-watcher, is researching the same topic in the US.

The locations differ but the tactics are always the same. China wields its economic clout to reward submissive governments and punish unhelpful ones. It offers generous inducements to friendly China-watchers and freezes out those who ask awkward questions. Anne-Marie Brady, a leading authority on the Chinese propaganda machine, is one of the few critical academics prepared to speak out. When her home and office in New Zealand were mysteriously burgled, police investigations got nowhere. When she tried to give evidence to a parliamentary committee, her testimony was cancelled on spurious procedural grounds.

It is easy to see China not just as confident, capable and determined but unstoppable. This is the contention of Has China Won?, a provocative new book by a Singaporean diplomat and commentator, Kishore Mahbubani. Written before the coronavirus outbreak, he argues that China is in many respects already ahead of the US, even if America has yet to realise it. China’s 1.3 billion people have a bigger share of global purchasing power than the US. It has a better system of government, greater global popularity and a stronger economy. On the one hand stands a plutocracy, deluded about its strengths and popularity, enfeebled by its greed, inequality and political dysfunction, and on the other a dynamic meritocracy run by brainy, patriotic long-term thinkers.

The examples he provides are striking. When China opened the longest route on its high-speed rail network, from Beijing to the southern commercial hub of Guangzhou, the service took just eight hours. Over a comparable 1,200-mile stretch in the US, between Key West in Florida and New York, the Amtrak service takes 30 hours. That was in 2012. Since then, American infrastructure has deteriorated further while China’s has soared.

China is also gaining the edge in artificial intelligence, robotics, life sciences and space technology. Unlike the US, it does not saddle itself with burdensome defence spending and foreign wars. It buys cheap “carrier-killer” missiles, each of which costs less than one thousandth of the giant warships that America believes vital for its global prestige.

The West was once admired, envied and emulated around the world for the freedom, prosperity and fairness it offered its people. Now, says Mahbubani, it has lost its soft-power advantage. The contrast between Donald Trump’s empty, bombastic “Make America Great Again” and the steely, efficient stewardship of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan for “national rejuvenation” is glaring. Social mobility — the heart of the American dream — is worse in the US than in China. Poor people in China get richer every year. In the US, the bottom half of the population has experienced stagnant wages for 30 years. For China, those same three decades have been the most prosperous and stable since 221BC. The US-led alliances that once glued the West together are fraying, while China slowly builds up a network of economic, political and security clients.

The economic and cultural conflict between the US and China might not escalate, Mahbubani concedes. And even if it does, the US may win. But China has won the first round, and has done so before many in the West realised that the competition for global supremacy was even under way. His book, out next week, certainly deserves a careful read. But his thesis is open to attack. The Chinese Communist Party has overreached abroad and is in trouble at home. The West is in a mess but its plight can be fixed.

The motto of Chinese diplomacy used to be “hide and bide”. Chinese diplomats could be choleric on occasion, particularly over issues such as Taiwan, Tibet, human rights or territorial disputes in the South China Sea. But their main aim was to project an image of China as a reliable and unthreatening partner. That era is definitely over. The new mantra is “wolf warrior diplomacy”, named after two gung-ho action movies featuring a heroic, Rambo-style Chinese adventurer. The new tone is confrontational and patronising, reflecting, as the official Global Times newspaper puts it, a changing balance of power:

The days when China can be put in a submissive position are long gone. China’s rising status in the world requires it to safeguard its national interests in an unequivocal way. When the West falls short of its ability to uphold its interests, it can only resort to a hysterical hooligan-style diplomacy in an attempt to maintain its waning dignity. As western diplomats fall into disgrace, they are getting a taste of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy”.

Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a journalist based in Berlin, got a taste of Chinese diplomacy when she moderated a UN human rights meeting in Geneva in 2018. The Chinese participants systematically disrupted the discussion, shouted talking points, intimidated witnesses and refused to identify themselves. “It really knocked me sideways,” she says. “It just didn’t let up. It was very threatening.” Since then her employer has received anonymous emails denouncing her as a racist. Closer to home a Chinese state TV correspondent, Linlin Kong, was convicted of assault after she slapped a steward at last year’s Conservative Party conference who had tried to stop her disrupting a meeting about democracy in Hong Kong. She claimed to be the victim of hypocrisy and discrimination.

China’s hold over the World Health Organisation is another case in point. The UN health body has been craven in its refusal to criticise any aspect of Chinese health policy, and in its official disdain for Taiwan. For Beijing, the status of the offshore republic is totemic: it must on no account be treated as an independent country. In a startling vignette, Bruce Aylward, a Canadian WHO official, squirmed and pretended not to hear when a journalist from Hong Kong recently dared to ask him about Taiwan’s exemplary response to the pandemic.

China has found that intimidation often works. But it is beginning to stiffen resistance. Relations with the US, which looked so promising a year ago, are icy. Though the trade war has reached an uneasy truce, American politicians are furious with China for stoking conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and for botching the original response, which enabled it to gain a foothold in Wuhan and spread abroad. The anger is bipartisan: Democrats and Republicans vie to sound more hawkish, in some cases verging on racism. As even Mahbubani notes, there is no longer any lobby in the US willing to defend détente with China. Corporate America is bruised by decades of Chinese state-sponsored intellectual property theft, the protectionist restrictions it faces in China’s domestic market‚ and competition from China’s business champions.

Even the EU, which has been jelly-like in its China policy, is stiffening up. This was meant to be the “Year of Europe” in China’s diplomatic calendar: a charm offensive to persuade European countries that co-operation would bring benefits on everything from trade (£600 billion last year) to climate change. It is turning out rather differently. The crisis sparked by the coronavirus has led to the cancellation of two summits and stalled trade negotiations. A further summit planned for September in Leipzig looks in doubt. If it happens, and if President Xi attends as promised, it threatens to be a showdown over his country’s mischief-making, not a showcase for co-operation. China’s response to the pandemic, combining public temper tantrums and politicised aid shipments, has sparked alarm bordering on fury in European capitals. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned its members to be ready for a “struggle for influence” and decried China’s “politics of generosity”.

The pandemic has exposed how much Beijing’s thuggish foreign policy has in common with its repressive approach at home. Not only are there signs of a cover-up about the origins of the virus, but the Chinese authorities bullied into silence the doctors who tried to warn about its danger. China has sprayed disinformation abroad, dodging blame, claiming credit and spreading confusion. The foreign ministry spokesman went so far as to claim that it was a US military delegation that brought Covid-19 to Wuhan.

For years the outside world has been willing to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in China: the occupation of Tibet, the cultural genocide of the Muslim Uighurs in the province of Xinjiang, the much less-noticed oppression of ethnic Mongolians, the crackdown in Hong Kong, the persecution of the underground Catholic church, and the savage treatment of dissidents. All this was regrettable, the argument went, but the bigger picture was positive, or at least tolerable. The most important thing was to play for time and not to overreact.

That disastrous approach was the hallmark of Barack Obama’s presidency. When China picked on other western countries, America did nothing. Obama shied away from confrontation in the South China Sea, to the point where these vitally important international waters have been turned into a fortified Chinese lake. Each new transgression of international law could have been met with a firm protest from his administration and decisive countermeasures. Now it is too late: China’s military and naval presence in the disputed region is so strong that countering it is impossible, short of a full-blown military conflict.

Books like Has China Won? make the mistake of exaggerating the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the country’s economic miracle. It is far from being the omnipotent source of prosperity it claims to be. What’s more, China’s 21st-century success story seems to have flipped under Xi’s rule into a catalogue of failures. Andreas Fulda, a professor at Nottingham University, says: “Xi has lost control of Hong Kong, destroyed the US-China relationship singlehandedly, and now owns Covid-19.” On the domestic front, he adds, “there are so many unresolved issues: the health sector is underfunded, the education sector is corrupt, pension funds are plundered by corruption, and food safety is a scandal. They kick the can down the road. But if you do that with lots of issues, the cans pile up and it only takes one to explode for there to be a chain reaction.”

The West is waking up to the true cost of China-centred globalisation. Oddly, this criticism is coming more from the right than the left, where kneejerk anti-Americanism still blinds many to the obvious. The real issue is not that China is invincible but that the West is divided. Ten years ago it was possible to see how a rising China could be constrained by a strong international alliance of advanced industrialised democracies. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would bring together north America and the European Union. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would do the same for the US and its allies in eastern Asia. Though the goal was rarely stated publicly, these economic agreements were about far more than stimulating trade by reducing tariff barriers. They were the building blocks of a new global economic governance, which would have touched everything from the 5G network and the future of the internet to environmental standards and protection of intellectual property. Faced with a united western block with a comparable population — 1.3 billion — and far bigger GDP, China would have had little choice but to engage with the US-led, rules-based international order.

But TTIP and the TPP failed, stymied by anti-Americanism in Europe, missteps in Washington, public weariness with the effects of globalisation and a lack of urgency regarding China. Now we have to try again to rebuild a multilateral economic, political and security international order with enough consent and clout to contain China’s meddling. That will help channel its rise towards co-operation rather than conflict. The task is urgent. The regime in Beijing has not won yet. But unless we wake up to the danger now, it could.

Edward Lucas is a Times columnist and studies Russian and Chinese disinformation at the Centre for European Policy Analysis

来源时间：2020/4/25   发布时间：2020/4/25

旧文章ID：21478

作者：Laura Rosenberger  来源：foreignaffairs.com

Beijing Is Using New Methods to Spin the Pandemic to Its Advantage

From the first days of COVID-19’s appearance in the city of Wuhan, China’s leaders focused on control—not only of the coronavirus itself but also of information about it. They suppressed initial reporting and research about the outbreak, thereby slowing efforts to understand the virus and its pandemic potential. They called for “increased internet control” when the Politburo Standing Committee met in early February. They even sent “Internet police” to threaten people posting criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its handling of the virus.

Before long, that effort at controlling information went global. As it began to contain the outbreak within its own borders, Beijing launched an assertive external information campaign aimed at sculpting global discussion of its handling of the virus. This campaign has clear goals: to deflect blame from Beijing’s own failings and to highlight other governments’ missteps, portraying China as both the model and the partner of first resort for other countries. Some of this campaign’s elements are familiar, focused on promoting and amplifying positive narratives about the CCP while suppressing information unfavorable to it. But in recent weeks, Beijing has taken a more aggressive approach than usual, even experimenting with tactics drawn from Russia’s more nihilistic information operations playbook. That strategy aims not so much to promote a particular idea as to sow doubt, dissension, and disarray—including among Americans—in order to undermine public confidence in information and prevent any common understanding of facts from taking hold.

“BE TRANSPARENT!”     

When reports of the novel coronavirus surfaced in December, the CCP at first focused on suppressing them—most notoriously by punishing the “whistleblower doctor” Li Wenliang, who later succumbed to the virus about which he had tried to sound the alarm. (Censors were overwhelmed by the eruption of online tributes following his death, some of which invoked the song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables—a rallying cry for protesters in Hong Kong—or cited the article in the Chinese constitution that provides for freedom of expression.) But as China began to get the virus’s spread under control internally and outbreaks started outside its borders, the focus changed.

Seizing the fortunate timing and vacuum of global leadership, China began sending medical aid to European countries facing outbreaks (some items proved substandard or defective)—along with an aggressive messaging strategy to tout this assistance. Chinese officials and media sought to paper over their own failings and recast China as the leader in a global response to the pandemic. This tactic was particularly prevalent in Italy, the first European country to be hard hit by the virus (and which formally signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative last year). The Chinese embassy there embraced the hashtag #ForzaCinaeItalia (“Let’s Go, China and Italy”), which Italian researchers found was then heavily amplified by a network of bots on Twitter.

Yet these positive narratives about Chinese aid have been accompanied by more negative messages, focused especially on the failings of the United States. Chinese officials and media have criticized Washington’s slow response to the virus. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian tweeted: “Countries like Singapore, ROK took necessary measures & put the epidemics under control because they made full use of this precious time China bought for the world. As for whether US availed itself of this window, I believe the fact is witnessed by US &the world.” The always trolling Hu Xijin, editor in chief of Global Times (an English-language offshoot of the CCP’s People’s Daily), tweeted, “What really messed up the world is failure of the US in containing the pandemic.” A press release issued by the Chinese embassy in Paris hailed the success of China’s “dictatorship” over the United States’ “flagship of democracy,” pushing the message that Beijing’s model is superior and that it, rather than Washington, is the reliable partner to countries in need. In what could be called projection, Chinese officials and CCP media outlets have even criticized the United States for a lack of transparency about the virus’s spread. “Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!” tweeted Zhao Lijian. Notably, state media outlets have paid to promote these stories to U.S. audiences, in undisclosed political ads on Facebook and Instagram—platforms that are blocked in China.

These voices have not stopped at mere criticism. They have actively pushed disinformation about the origin of the coronavirus, including on Twitter (which is also blocked within China). The most prominent conspiracy theory—that the virus actually originated in the United States—first circulated internally in China, with the apparent assent of censors. It broke through to an external audience when Zhao Lijian tweeted an article from a known pro-Kremlin conspiracy website alleging that the virus originated in a U.S. bioweapons lab and was spread by the U.S. Army. More than a dozen Chinese ambassadors and embassies, from South Africa to France, amplified the story on Twitter, and the tweet went viral. Even after Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai disavowed it, other Chinese officials and media outlets have continued to spread it. Global Times piled on with another theory, twisting the words of an Italian scientist to suggest that the virus actually may have started in Italy.

Beyond overt information campaigns, Chinese operatives have also engaged in covert efforts to manipulate information and sow chaos—even amplifying false text messages that went viral in the United States in mid-March warning in panicked tones that Trump was about to order a two-week national quarantine. The messages caused such panic that the National Security Council took the unusual step of tweeting that they were false.

These efforts reflect changes not just in Beijing’s message but also in the mechanisms by which it is transmitted. Over the past year, the number of Chinese diplomats and embassies on Twitter has grown by more than 250 percent. On other Western social media platforms, the government has undertaken aggressive advertising to grow its audience; Chinese state media outlets, such as Global Times, CGTN, and Xinhua, represent several of the fastest-growing media pages on Facebook, according to research from Freedom House. And the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars in its foreign media presence, creating wider channels to distribute Beijing’s messages to external audiences.

INFORMATION IS POWER

Beijing has long understood that harnessing information can be a means of exercising geopolitical power. Particularly under President Xi Jinping, CCP doctrine has emphasized the importance of “discourse power”—“Beijing’s aspirations not only to have the right to speak on the international stage but also to be listened to, to influence others’ perceptions of China, and eventually to shape the discourse and norms that underpin the international order,” as Nadège Rolland of the National Bureau of Asian Research has described it. But China’s external information efforts have typically focused on promoting positive narratives (as with its COVID-19-related assistance) and suppressing criticism. China’s expulsion of reporters from The Wall Street Journal in retaliation for coverage of underreporting data on the virus’s spread and a controversially titled op-ed on its handling of the outbreak is consistent with its long-standing posture toward critical information. But new elements of China’s information strategy represent a departure from past practice—suggesting that Chinese officials see its usual approach as insufficient to the current crisis and are thus resorting to more extreme measures.

For those, Beijing seems to have looked to Moscow, which focuses less on promoting a positive image of Russia and instead aims to sow confusion and deflect blame. Russian officials, diplomats, and state media regularly promote extreme views, conspiracy theories, and doubts about democratic institutions on social media, while networks of covert accounts spread divisive or conspiratorial content without the fingerprints of the state. For example, the coordinated use of diplomatic accounts to spread disinformation—in the form of multiple, conflicting narratives meant to muddy rather than supplant the truth—has been a key part of the Kremlin’s playbook. In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by Russian-provided missiles, Russian officials pushed outlandish claims about a Ukrainian fighter jet being the real culprit or President Vladimir Putin’s jet the real target. In 2018, after Russian military intelligence’s poisoning of the former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom, they spread theories pinning the blame on everyone from the Americans to the Georgians. China’s recent promotion of known conspiracy-theory websites is another move taken from the Russian playbook. And all of this comes at a time of broader intersection between the messaging of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian state information actors: Russian and Iranian state media account for two of the top five most retweeted news outlets by Chinese officials and media.

Whether or not this more negative approach marks a permanent break from China’s previous strategy, it is part of a clear trend. During the Hong Kong protests last year, Beijing began experimenting with covert information operations on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, using false personas and pages that aimed to discredit the protesters by portraying them as violent. And Chinese officials and media have promoted conspiracy theories about both the Hong Kong protests (alleging that the United States is behind them) and the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang (sharing stories from a conspiracy site to dismiss research by “U.S.- and NATO-funded” institutions on camps in Xinjiang as “lies”). Like the Hong Kong protests, the COVID-19 information campaign may be another opportunity for Beijing to update its information arsenal.

At least some of these efforts may be intended as an internal bank shot: by sowing doubt externally about the virus’s origins, the CCP can reinforce that view within China without officially promoting it. Indeed, Beijing’s strategy is likely driven both by insecurity at home and by opportunism abroad. Through its combination of positive and negative messaging, the CCP has been able to persuade the Chinese people not only that its model is an example for the world but also that the CCP is pushing back on efforts to blame China—and ethnically Chinese people—for the virus. Racist and xenophobic tropes about the virus and anti-Chinese hate crimes—which state media have aggressively recounted to audiences within China—have only helped the CCP, allowing it to stoke nationalism, dismiss criticism of China’s handling of the virus as racism, and present itself as defending the honor of the Chinese people.

MIXED SIGNALS

This aggressive new information strategy carries risks for Beijing, and in some quarters it seems to be backfiring. Lashing out at the United States, spreading disinformation, and amplifying conspiracy sites risk undermining any positive image China has managed to develop. Simultaneously portraying itself as a responsible global provider of public goods while engaging in irresponsible behavior online sends contradictory signals.

But the strategy may nonetheless succeed if democracies around the world don’t counter it wisely with their own affirmative strategy for the ongoing information contest of which this episode is just the latest chapter. So far, Washington has if anything played into Beijing’s hands. Its bungled initial response to the novel coronavirus and failure to coordinate with allies created openings for China to present itself as a more reliable partner than the United States. The United States’ refusal to sign on to a G-7 statement because other countries would not agree to use the term “Wuhan virus” undermined a multilateral effort and gave the CCP a propaganda win.

Washington should seize the opportunity to coordinate with European allies, who are increasingly concerned about China’s play for influence. European Union High Representative Josep Borrell explicitly called out the way in which the “politics of generosity” is being weaponized for geopolitical purposes in a “struggle for influence.” French President Emmanuel Macron similarly urged Europeans not to be “intoxicated” with the narratives that China and Russia have pushed alongside their aid as a means of dividing Europeans internally. But while others in his administration have called out China’s disinformation efforts, U.S. President Donald Trump has excused them because “every country does it.”

Democracies cannot win the information contest with authoritarian regimes such as China’s by adopting their tactics. Instead, the United States needs to embrace transparency—including acknowledging its own failings and promoting accurate information—and work with its democratic partners and allies on a shared approach. China will succeed in using the pandemic to “emerge from the wreckage as more of a global leader than it began,” as Mira Rapp-Hooper has written, only if the United States lets it.

来源时间：2020/4/24   发布时间：2020/4/22

旧文章ID：21467