Chinese officials are adopting Russian disinformation tactics to sow confusion in the United States and other Western countries, according to allied sources and analysts.
“It started during the pandemic and makes the whole disinfo situation even worse,” a Baltic diplomat told the Washington Examiner.
China’s decision to spread false information that the U.S. was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic angered President Trump, sparking a new round of finger-pointing about his decision to label the contagion the “Chinese virus.” U.S. officials and nongovernmental analysts believe it could be a milestone in China’s willingness to conduct the kind of influence operations that Russia has performed to exploit divisions in Western societies.
“Previously, there was really only limited documentation and public discussion of the Chinese Communist Party’s use of bots, trolls, and other Russian-style tactics against audiences outside of China,” State Department special envoy Lea Gabrielle, Trump’s top counterpropaganda official, told reporters Wednesday. “So, we’ve now seen concerted efforts by Beijing to push conflicting theories about COVID-19 that are intended to sow doubt, to deflect blame, and to create the idea that it may not be possible to know the truth.”
Such negative propaganda directed at the U.S. breaks from China’s standard operating procedure of heavy-handedly promoting itself and its view of events, analysts say, and it might even have backfired by irritating Western societies.
“This is a change in Chinese behavior,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper, an expert in U.S.-China competition and American alliances in Asia, told the Washington Examiner. “If they keep practicing, they will figure it out. I think little by little, the communist party will get better, the propaganda will be more effective.”
At the moment, China seems to be cribbing from Russia, not only in its tactics, but in the specific messages sent. For instance, China’s allegation that the U.S. Army brought the new coronavirus to Wuhan originated in the Kremlin disinformation ecosystem.
“This theory started in Russian-sponsored channels, and the Chinese were able to capitalize on these sentiments, repeating and using the very same narratives,” disinformation expert Daniel Milo, a senior analyst at GLOBSEC in Bratislava, told the Washington Examiner. “So, in terms of using the same narratives putting the blame on the U.S. or pushing for different kinds of conspiracy theories — yes, there is coordination.”
Gabrielle offered a similar observation, noting that Russia has promoted China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic at the expense of Western allies. “They have pushed out the false narrative that the U.S. and other Western governments have used efforts to contain [the coronavirus] as part of a scheme to increase government control over their populations,” she said. “They have tried to push out false narratives that Russia and China are global leaders in containing the virus, while the EU, NATO, and the U.S. are either unwilling or incapable of addressing the problem.”
That dynamic raises the question of whether China plans to make such a torrent of disinformation a regular part of its repertoire. Beijing’s intentions aren’t clear, analysts agree, but China may feel incentives to be more responsible than Russia.
“Russia, as a declining power, has little to lose and much to gain from creating chaos,” said the German Marshall Fund’s Jessica Brandt, the lead researcher at GMF’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. “China, as a rising power, has considerably more to lose … It’s playing a reorder strategy. It seeks a world that is more conducive to its interests. And it’s interested in the kinds of fractures that make that possible, but not a total crumbling.”
Brandt’s assessment may have to count as a comforting thought in the wake of Russia’s 2016 election interference campaign. China has the financial, human, and artificial intelligence resources to dwarf Kremlin schemes, Milo warned.
“Just imagine if China could decide to create troll factories, with the millions and millions of Army officers, or just people, being paid to do the same thing as the Russians are doing. The impact could be really huge,” the GLOBSEC analyst said. “If they would decide to turn their Chinese-built AI capabilities to try to sway or just to try to use those capacities to spread different kinds of false narratives, I think we couldn’t even predict how serious the effects would be.”
