An ongoing concern of the undeclared cold war between the United States and China is the covert influence the Chinese regime attempts to exert on Americans.
Too often, Americans think of Chinese influence operations as something out of a “James Bond” movie when, in reality, Beijing operates a wide variety of operations to try and frame discussions about China. How that’s done should be instructive on how China understands the United States and where it tries to influence debate.
Recently, a top aide to the New York governor, Linda Sun, was arrested for being a foreign agent for China. Despite all the warnings of individuals working with China, the reality of a top aide to a governor still seemed to shock many. One of the reasons it seemed to shock so many was the question about what the governor’s aide would provide to a hostile foreign power like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Such an aide has scant access to national security information. This is where we need to better understand what agents are providing China to understand how the CCP seeks to understand and influence us.
Sun is not charged with providing classified information to China, such as military movements or similar national security data. She is charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent working to further the interests of a foreign government. She allegedly blocked meetings between the governor and groups that were not approved by Beijing or removed mentions of Taiwan in official statements.
Why is the Chinese regime so focused on what seem like innocuous actions?
We need to understand the CCP’s actions within the broader framework of control it likes to operate from domestically. The CCP is obsessed with maintaining control and information, from the structured hierarchy of officials at the national level down to every residential complex in China.
The second-largest agency line item in Beijing’s budget is the United Front Work Department (UFDW). Larger than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UFDW is dedicated to influencing foreign countries, institutions, and individuals through various methods. While the UFDW may overlap with intelligence and security, it focuses on influencing other countries positively for China. This provides a much broader range of activities than typically might be considered under security or intelligence activities.
We see this pattern play out in other places as well. Universities with thousands of full tuition-paying Chinese students are reluctant to anger Beijing, so they back away from criticizing China or mentioning Hong Kong democracy or Uyghurs. Think tanks in the United States, worried about cyber attacks, tread lightly on China’s research for fear their research will become a target of Beijing. Simply by allowing students to attend a university or granting researchers access, the CCP exercises significant influence on the debate and discussion of China in the United States.
Most people typically think of the Chinese regime as trying to exercise a type of one-sided malign influence. However, this assumption is incorrect. The CCP, as with any other external power trying to influence discourse, cannot replicate domestic state media such as CCTV, or else it will sound stale and propagandistic. To be accepted, influencers need to sound authentic, which opens the door to criticism of China within certain bounds. The objective of influence operations is not to perfectly replicate CCP thinking but to confuse thinking and blur allegiances.
Chinese-funded universities in the United States engage in some criticism of China, just not too much, and they don’t sound like Chinese state media. U.S. firms with business interests in China lobby on behalf of Beijing, giving the CCP plausible deniability about who is pushing what agenda. The purpose is as much about creating chaos as it is denying attribution.
Beijing has referred to its efforts to influence and infiltrate the United States as a “whole-of-society” effort involving Chinese businesses, citizens, institutions, and others. In the United States, we often think of this as espionage or security efforts, but that is not the battle China is fighting. The sooner we understand that the CCP seeks to engage at all levels—from meetings and press releases to how we talk about China—the better we will be able to deal with these threats.
