An ongoing concern of the undeclared cold war between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the covert influence the Chinese regime attempts to exert on Americans.
Too often, Americans think of CCP influence operations as something out of a James Bond movie. In reality, Beijing employs a wide variety of methods to try to frame discussions about China. Understanding these methods can teach us a lot about how the CCP sees the United States and where it tries to influence debate.
Linda Sun, a former top aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, was recently arrested and charged with spying for the Chinese regime. Despite all the warnings about CCP spies, the reality that a U.S. governor’s aide had been working undercover as a foreign agent still seemed to shock many.
Many asked what information a governor’s aide could provide to a hostile foreign power such as the CCP. Such an aide has scant access to national security information. This is where we need to better understand how the CCP seeks to influence us.
Sun is not charged with providing classified information to China, such as knowledge of military movements or similar national security data. Rather, she is charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent working to further the interests of a foreign government. She allegedly blocked meetings between Hochul and groups that were not approved by Beijing, and removed mentions of Taiwan from official statements.
Why is the Chinese regime so focused on what seem like innocuous actions?
To understand this, consider how the CCP operates domestically. The regime is obsessed with maintaining control and information, from the structured hierarchy of national officials to every residential complex in China.
The second-largest agency line item in Beijing’s budget is the United Front Work Department (UFWD). Larger than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UFWD is dedicated to influencing foreign countries, institutions, and individuals through various methods. While the UFWD may overlap with intelligence and security, it focuses on influencing other countries to view the CCP positively. This involves a much broader range of activities than what typically fall under security or intelligence operations.
We see this pattern play out in other places as well. Universities with thousands of tuition-paying Chinese students are reluctant to anger Beijing, so they avoid criticizing the regime or going against its narratives on topics such as Hong Kong democracy or the Uyghur genocide. Think tanks in the United States, worried about cyberattacks, tread lightly on China’s research for fear that Beijing will target their own work. By simply allowing students to attend a university or granting researchers access to Chinese studies, the CCP influences the debate and discussion of China in the United States.
Most people typically think of the Chinese regime as trying to exercise a one-sided malign influence. However, this assumption is incorrect. The CCP, like any other external power, cannot replicate domestic state media such as China Central Television, or else it will sound stale and propagandistic. To be accepted, influencers need to sound authentic, which means they must permit criticism of the CCP 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 the Chinese regime, 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 to create chaos as much as to deny 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 the Chinese regime is fighting. The sooner we understand that the CCP seeks to influence all areas—from meetings and press releases to how we talk about China—the better we will be able to deal with these threats.
