Chinese Communist Party officials are “assembling dossiers” on millions of foreign citizens as part of a wide-ranging campaign to manipulate people in Western countries, according to a senior U.S. official.
“The party’s goal, in short, is to co-opt or bully people, and even nations, into a particular frame of mind that’s conducive to Beijing’s grand ambitions,” White House deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger said Friday in a virtual lecture hosted by the United Kingdom-based Policy Exchange. “To be coaxed into such a mindset is to be seduced into submission — like taking the ‘blue pill’ in The Matrix.”
Pottinger’s address put a spotlight on a recently revealed database of 2.4 million people compiled by a Chinese company involved in “psychological warfare” against China’s targets. His remarks called attention to the so-called United Front operations that China uses to conduct “interference in our thought,” as a senior CIA official has put it.
“China’s United Front Work system is a gigantic government function with no analogue in democracies,” Pottinger said, noting that the network is “four times as large” as the U.S. diplomatic corps. “The United Front gathers intelligence about, and works to influence, private citizens overseas. The focus is on foreign elites and the organizations they run. Think of a United Front worker as a cross between an intelligence collector, a propagandist, and a psychologist.”
The database that Pottinger cited includes a wide range of “individuals and institutions China deems influential or important,” according to the American academic who discovered it, with enough granular data to inform highly specific influence operations.
“From the assembled data, it is also possible for China even in individualized meetings be able to craft messaging or target the individuals they deem necessary to target,” Fulbright University Vietnam’s Christopher Balding wrote. “Open liberal societies fail to grasp the threats embodied in Chinese authoritarian communism by ignoring non-traditional warfare and influence operations. The information warfare being touted by Zhenhua targets key institutions in democracies such as the children of politicians, universities, and key industrial sectors.”
That report adds detail to the mechanisms of the influence operations that U.S. intelligence officials regard as a key front in “a cold war” that Chinese Communist Party leaders are conducting against the United States. “No regime has more riding on its ability to influence the perceptions, policies, and priorities of foreign populations than the Chinese Communist Party,” Pottinger said.
With that in mind, Pottinger, who delivered his remarks in Mandarin for the second time this year, made a point to attempt to shape perceptions within China with an attack on Beijing’s repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
“I ask friends in China to research the truth about your government’s policies toward the Uyghur people and other religious minorities,” he said. “There is no credible justification I can find in Chinese philosophy, religion, or moral law for the concentration camps inside your borders.”
Pottinger implicitly likened China’s United Front agents to “a demon toiling in Satan’s bureaucracy” by invoking C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, quoting the diabolical functionary’s assertion that “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Public statements about China’s policies and conduct, he suggested, could have the benefit of both insulating U.S. and allied countries from foreign interference and undermining the regime in Beijing.
“Evil, properly identified and exposed, is frail — even farcical,” Pottinger said. “Calling it out in public, giving it ‘signposts,’ inoculates us against temptation and liberates us from fear. … So speak up, everyone.”
