China is waging political warfare to subvert the United States and western nations by way of intensive propaganda and disinformation operations, a panel of specialists informed Congress on Thursday.
John Garnaut, a senior fellow on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and professional on Chinese political warfare, informed a House choose committee that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shifted from protection to assault beneath Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Ideological struggle with the West is not new for the CCP, but a key development under Xi is that this struggle, which impacts the international image, reputation, and overall security of other countries, is being intensified outside of China,” Mr. Garnaut stated in a listening to of the House Select Committee on the CCP.
Miles Yu, a former State Department policymaker on China, informed the listening to that CCP disinformation aimed toward undermining western methods is “massive.”
The Chinese propaganda effort has been aided by supporters and sympathizers in elite sectors of the United States, stated Mr. Yu, now director of the China Center on the Hudson Institute.
“Former senior government officials, including Cabinet-level figures, routinely defend the CCP’s murderous acts, including the Tiananmen massacre and other egregious human rights violations,” Mr. Yu stated.
“Some of these former officials have even become registered agents for the Beijing regime and its CCP-controlled business interests in the U.S.” he added.
A 3rd panelist, Yaqiu Wang, analysis director for China at Freedom House, stated the CCP, along with its large-scale propaganda and disinformation operations, is leveraging social media and web instruments to focus on American society.
The instruments embody the usage of the Chinese-owned TikTook video app, X and China-based WeChat social media retailers.
“Beijing is not only spreading its disinformation across many more platforms, languages, and geographic audiences, it is also experimenting with tactics that are more sophisticated and harder to detect,” Ms. Wang stated.
“All Chinese social media companies, private or public, are subjected to the control of the CCP, which creates an opportunity for Chinese government censorship, surveillance, and propaganda that affect not only their China-based users, but those around the world.”
To counter Chinese propaganda, Congress ought to enact rules that mandate transparency from all social media platforms that can establish content material that has been censored, suppressed, or promoted on the request of governments, she stated.
Mr. Garnaut, the Australian professional, stated CCP propaganda is pushed by worry of western values and a drive for complete management of phrases and concepts.
The CCP “invests enormous resources in shutting down discordant voices and shaping and elevating more favorable ones,” Mr. Garnaut stated.
“This defensive war has always had a global, offensive, remit,” he added.
The instruments utilized by Beijing embody propaganda, censorship, political thought work, and worldwide public opinion wrestle, Mr. Garnaut stated.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, Wisconsin Republican and committee chairman, stated many China specialists say the Taiwan Strait will likely be a key battlefield, however China is already waging “cognitive warfare.”
“In [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s view, the war has already started on the most important battlefield: your mind,” Mr. Gallagher stated.
Mr. Xi was quoted in a handbook on army political work that “the crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas … changing the way people think is a long-term process.”
“Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend,” Mr. Xi said, noting that the realm of concepts is a “smokeless battlefield” for waging ideological warfare.
Mr. Gallagher stated the United States doesn’t actually “do propaganda here.”
“After all, there’s nowhere you can find a more scathing critique of the United States and its government than in the New York Times or Fox News on any given Wednesday,” he stated.
The chairman stated the United States must struggle again in opposition to Chinese propaganda and data warfare on the smokeless battlefield of individuals’s minds.
“On Xi’s ‘smokeless battlefield,’ TikTok is a perfect weapon, camouflaged in plain sight,” he stated.
“Make no mistake: the battle of our minds is already joined, and Congress must act with urgency to prevent the CCP from seizing the high ground.”
Mr. Yu, the previous State Department official, stated Chinese efforts in opposition to the West are tantamount to brainwashing – probably the most extreme type of Beijing propaganda.
The results of the brainwashing may be seen within the adoption of CCP key ideas and nomenclature by American social actions, together with the Black Panther radicals of the Seventies and the Revolutionary Communist Party.
“Today’s common use of the word ‘progressive’ by a significant portion of American body politic traces its intellectual origin straight to the Marxist-Leninist ‘dialectical’ categorization of people into reactionaries and progressives,” Mr. Yu stated.
“It is not from the modern legacy of the American Progressive Movement represented by William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Henry A. Wallace,” he cautioned.
