President Joe Biden’s China policy is by now abundantly clear: Keep former President Donald Trump’s tough measures in place and rally allies to do the same — in part, by Biden’s consistent appealing to shared democratic values.
The strategy has borne some initial fruits. Last month, after Beijing traded sanctions with Brussels over the persecution of minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the European Parliament voted to freeze the ratification of a controversial investment deal between Europe and China.
But how far do shared values go? After all, the United States was working with like-minded nations all along as China rose from a backward economy to the biggest threat to the liberal world order. Even on values ground, our allies today are not on the same page. Unless U.S. policymakers come up with a more sophisticated strategy than “America is back,” as Biden declared, the alliance of liberal democracies against China may be short-lived.
Take a look at China’s propaganda operations to influence the free press overseas.
As the tip of the iceberg, between 2009 and 2012, former President Hu Jintao’s administration invested $7 billion to sugarcoat the content of China’s state media outlets for foreign audiences. One product of that initiative is the English-language China Global Television Network, which now broadcasts in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Since registering with the Foreign Agent Registration Act two years ago, the network has disclosed nearly $100 million of spending in the U.S. alone.
These operations, which are probably legal, unveil not only China’s ambitions but also the value of the press, free or otherwise, in other countries. Economists have a term for it: “revealed preferences.” If a grocer willingly sells me a gallon of milk for a few bucks, the good is worth less than that to the store, but more than that to me. While a beautified image is vital to the Chinese regime’s quest for global dominance, its generous financial offerings will inevitably be seen as a bargain by some. It’s a win-win for the regime and willing media.
Its first successes came in developing countries across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where media cooperation deals with China have been forged in conjunction with lucrative infrastructure projects since the early 2000s. As documented in a 2010 report by the National Endowment for Democracy, because many media outlets in those countries were resource-poor, China was able to push through rosy narratives by donating broadcasting equipment and providing free content that often comes with money. The fact that China’s media presence in those markets continues to grow suggests that those on the receiving end are, at the least, not unhappy takers.
Developed countries, including America and its key allies, are not immune to China’s disinformation operations. China Daily, the regime’s English-language mouthpiece, has been placing its “China Watch” segment as paid advertisements that look like news in media outlets around the world. According to a European Council on Foreign Relations report, the ads are seen in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In America, as disclosed by the China Daily’s FARA filing last year, “China Watch” made its way into major U.S. newspapers at the cost of $19 million over four years.
We should not dismiss the risk of Chinese disinformation fracturing America’s alliance with like-minded nations. Not long after the coronavirus outbreak started last year, the People’s Daily, China’s flagship newspaper, pushed a story globally that suggested the virus was brought to China by the U.S. military. It ran in the New Zealand Herald before being taken down after “further review.” Finland’s Helsinki Times ran and defended the story, stating that Western media are sometimes “extremely one-sided and biased” and that it’s beneficial to “hear both sides.”
Friendly audiences have the freedom to side with China. That’s why working with our allies to counter a Chinese regime so intertwined with the world is easier said than done. America may be back, but are its allies still there?
Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.
