Beijing plays hardball with soft power

Keep those descriptions in mind as you survey just how this campaign is taking shape.

As of February 2019, 97 U.S. universities had partnered with the Chinese to establish Confucius Institutes, billed as Chinese language and cultural learning centers. In 2014, the American Association of University Professors released a report that these pseudocultural centers were simply “an arm of the Chinese state … under the supervision of Hanban, a Chinese state agency which is chaired by a member of the Politburo and the vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China.” The report claimed that these centers “feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China … to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.” In the American imagination, universities are thought of as beacons of free inquiry, even when the reality doesn’t match the legend. Beijing’s influence game in the United States seeks to take a strength of the free world and turn it into a weakness.

That fear of nefarious influence was serious enough to warrant Senate hearings to firewall universities from Confucius Institutes and restrictions within a defense spending bill passed by Congress in 2018 specifically tailored to avoid funding these programs as a matter of national security. And that’s just a more well-known example, thanks in part to congressional attention.

On a more covert level, China steers academia through financial incentives and career manipulation. The New Republic reported last year that graduate students and professors who study China often find themselves “self-censoring” for fear of losing visa access, having their funding terminated, or, as reported at Columbia University’s Global Center in Beijing in 2015, getting their lectures mysteriously canceled. In 2009, North Carolina State University canceled a visit by the Dalai Lama due to pressure from its Confucius Institute. The school’s provost told Bloomberg, “China is a major trading partner for North Carolina.”

And when considering the sheer volume of Chinese students that come to American universities — over 350,000, five times the number from a decade ago — it’s hard not to see the threat of a brain drain when American universities, policed by the Chinese, educate their talent pool, and subsequently see an exodus of highly educated graduates return to China. It’s a commonplace fear that some self-censorship, at least among Chinese students, stems from the worry over being reported for unpatriotic behavior by their fellow Chinese classmates. Though dissidents may exist, it could be American hubris to suggest that liberal education always has a liberalizing effect. Instead, Chinese students often return to China more nationalistic.

This is a story, then, about both America’s weakened ability to influence others and China’s achievement in stepping into that vacuum.

In Hollywood, perhaps the most overt example of soft power, Chinese cash is playing a greater role in what content does, and more often does not, get made. Director Quentin Tarantino recently made waves in both countries by refusing to edit Once Upon A Time In Hollywood to satisfy Chinese censors, who objected to the film’s negative portrayal of Bruce Lee, the path-breaking martial arts actor whose parents came from Hong Kong. Tarantino’s stand is the exception rather than the rule. In 1997, Sony and Disney released favorable portrayals of the Dalai Lama and Tibet only to have their films banned in China. In 2018, China barred the release of Disney’s Christopher Robin (the internet’s comparison of President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh has been used within China as a pro-democracy rallying cry) and A Wrinkle in Time.

There is no sign of China’s cinematic influence slowing down. In the first quarter of 2018, China’s box office topped the North American box office for the first time. This summer, China’s box office take was $2.45 billion while domestic box office estimates look to total around $4.33 billion. When coupled with the fact that, as the Los Angeles Times reported, “the portion of Chinese box office generated by the major U.S. studios is 34.6% so far this year, up from 28% during the same period in 2018,” it is clear that Beijing’s influence at the ticket booth is growing. And as the reliance on Chinese revenues grows, so does the need to adhere to Chinese restrictions. After all, if a company as large as Disney will cave to censorship for access, it’s inevitable its competitor studios will follow suit.

On a broader scale, American companies are desperate for access to Chinese markets. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at Georgetown University in October, said of business with China: “I wanted our services in China because I believe in connecting the whole world, and I thought maybe we could help create a more open society … but we could never come to an agreement on what it would take for us to operate there. They never let us in.” It should be noted, however, that Forbes reported that in a meeting at the White House, Zuckerberg was so desperate to bring Facebook to China, he allegedly offered to let Xi name his unborn child. The sheer size and income increase of the Chinese middle class has made it an attractive and lucrative pool of customers.

That access doesn’t come without strings. In October, the New York Times editorial board notably criticized China for its adverse affect on free speech. The NBA has virtually put an embargo on players commenting on politics after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong pro-democracy supporters, leading to the China Basketball Association cutting ties with the team. Until abandoning the program this summer, Google (code name “Project Dragonfly”) had plans to create a censored search engine to meet China’s requirements. Ray-Ban, Marriott International, Gap, Delta Airlines, and Coach, among others, are all American companies that have issued apologies to China for their (oftentimes inadvertent) portrayal of Taiwan as separate from China. Less clear have been the countless professionals, academics, and policymakers barred from employment or advancement due to positions that run contrary to the control of China by the CCP and its subsequent influence over American corporations.

With such control and censorship, the interconnectedness of the U.S. and Chinese economies since the onset of the U.S.-China trade war between Xi and President Trump becomes that much more problematic for our geopolitical interests and our domestic values. Amusingly, even the suggestion of “decoupling” from the Chinese economy by American scholars and policymakers was met with an insistence by U.S. Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for China Chad Sbragia that deleveraging from China was “not official U.S. policy … It’s just the opposite of decoupling. It’s not to pull apart. It’s actually to in some ways deepen those relationships.” Meanwhile, American farmers are suffering from tariffs, causing Trump to relinquish on some tariff positions. At the same time Xi vowed to double infrastructure investment within country, in addition to the investments planned as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, to avoid his own domestic recession. Tariff wars escalate and recede, but all the while, the points of contact between the U.S. and China only increase even as the proverbial barriers to entry remain wholly one-sided.

A key difference between America’s 20th-century cultural expansion and China’s in the 21st is that China refuses to accept modern human rights norms, play by international law, or accept any meaningful criticism from the international community. This isn’t about fast food or movies, in other words. It’s about basic freedoms, not just in China but here in America.

It’s not, in fact, about “culture” at all: There is plenty worthwhile to import from China’s centurieslong history, but what we’re seeing is mostly the spread of Chinese Communist Party.

While there isn’t a threat of the erasure of the entirety of American culture, the slow creep of communist ideology has begun to overshadow the loftier American values that were once de rigueur in commercially successful popular culture. The old adage from Andrew Breitbart — that politics is downstream from culture — becomes a warning signal when we see the type of soft power influence China is pushing. As time goes by and the CCP seeps deeper into institutions and financial coffers globally, it’s hard not to wonder how much of the international community’s values will be substituted for those of the CCP in the years to come.

The irony is the U.S. is in the midst of a “cancel culture” debate about the social consequences of free speech while simultaneously being willingly censored abroad. And, as with “cancel culture,” if the Chinese can move enough pieces and ideas off the social chessboard, they control the game. In China, cancel culture is not played in ones or zeros but a moving metric in the form of a social credit system that controls where individuals live, work, and travel. And as Chinese soft power is imported and adopted through American acquiescence, it’s hard not to see our national security threatened, our soft power deadened, and our speech chilled in increments that seem individually negligible but which together represent a fundamental threat to America’s democratic health.

Tyler Grant is a lawyer in New York, published poet, and Washington Examiner contributor.