Sick Statistics of Asia

Chinese Coronavirus Figures Are Not Reliable
China reports that Chinese virus cases are declining, but the data are surely tied to party propaganda.
BY JAMES PALMER

Members of a neighborhood committee wear protective masks as they control the entrance to a narrow street on Feb. 19 in Beijing. 

Pathological Lying: China Reports Decline in Virus Cases
In China, the death toll from the Chinese coronavirus has now topped 2,000, with over 70,000 cases confirmed. 

But if you follow Chinese state media, the tone is increasingly optimistic: Victory in the people’s war against the virus, led by President Xi Jinping, is coming! 

The official figures seem to bear this out: New infections outside of Hubei province, the Chinese virus epicenter, have dropped for more than 10 days straight, and the number of new cases inside Hubei has slowed to under 2,000 per day.


Most of Hubei remains under lockdown, with residents unable to leave their homes without special permission. 

Travel restrictions of varying severity have been imposed across China, from monitored movement to total quarantine. 

Taken at face value, the government’s containment strategy appears to be working. 

But that raises the question: How reliable are China’s official numbers?

Party politics. 

One suspicious element is how consistent the drop in new virus cases has been. 

While there was a jump in numbers last Thursday, it was the result of changes in testing standards in Hubei—moving nearly 15,000 cases from “suspected” to “confirmed.” 

The announcement came as Hubei’s top officials were removed from their jobs—and Xi’s close ally Ying Yong, the former mayor of Shanghai, installed as the province’s party boss. 

As often happens, the new boss wanted to blame the bad news on the old one.
Meanwhile, the central government is pushing for reopening businesses, but there is a conflict emerging. 

Local officials don’t want to be scapegoated if an outbreak emerges in their domain, and their fear is outweighing the economic damage of the virus. 

But there are reports from Zhejiang and Guangdong of lockdowns being lifted, with a monitored surveillance system that allows people to leave the house in areas previously under heavy restrictions.

Downward trend. 

The straight decline in new cases of the virus could be good news, or it could be statistical manipulation. 

Outside of Hubei, diagnostic test kits are in short supply, and other provinces haven’t switched to using the symptomatic diagnosis now accepted in Hubei. 

The kits are only being used to test people who came from Hubei and not for cases of transmission, so it’s unsurprising the numbers are dropping. 

Chinese doctors report that dozens of other hospital patients are being quarantined and treated but not officially diagnosed.

U.S.-China media wars. 

The United States made a strong move against China yesterday, reclassifying five state-run media outlets—Xinhua News Agency, the China Global Television Network, China Daily, China Radio, and People’s Daily—as operatives of Beijing. 

The designation makes their operations inside the United States subject to tighter control. 

Chinese reporters at home and abroad have always been tasked with producing neican—internal reports for the party—and effectively used for espionage on an ad hoc basis.
, the outlets’ reporters could be subject to the same travel restrictions the United States has imposed on Chinese diplomats. 

In China, Western reporters already face a system of monitoring and control that limits their visas, sees them harassed by police, and prevents them from living outside certain cities.
The U.S. move prompted immediate retaliation from Beijing, which expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters on Wednesday. (The excuse was an opinion headline that described China as “the real sick man of Asia,” a phrase that prompted state-backed outrage from the Chinese.) 

Notably, all of the expelled reporters were of Chinese descent, part of a pattern of China treating nonwhite foreign reporters—and especially those with Chinese ancestry—with more suspicion.

Missing coronavirus cases

While most of China’s southern and eastern neighbors have reported coronavirus cases, the countries along its northern border such as Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan have seen minimal numbers, with Russia only just reporting its first two cases. 

The pattern of cases may just represent the direction of travel before the Lunar New Year holiday at the start of the outbreak: Migrant workers would be returning to China from the north, while middle-class vacationers headed south.

What about North Korea? 

Meanwhile, North Korea says it doesn’t have any coronavirus cases, but the country has gone under total lockdown and cut off all transport ties to the outside world. 

North Korean state media, meanwhile, has broadcasted information about hygiene methods and protective masks. 

If the nation was suffering an outbreak, would we know?

Restaurant crisis. 

The restaurant business has been devastated by the coronavirus outbreak, despite the hardworking delivery people doing their best to keep the sector alive. 

The loss of Lunar New Year business and the closure of public spaces has devastated an industry already teetering on the edge. 

In Beijing, which is not fully locked down, only 13 percent of restaurants have stayed open throughout the outbreak. 

Jim Boyce, a longtime food and wine correspondent, has written about how badly the global wine trade will be hit. 

Back to work? 

The government is trying to encourage people to return to work, but between travel restrictions and local lockdowns it is proving effectively impossible. 

In China’s north, factory owners say they are still paying above-average wages to get staff and that the vast majority of workers still haven’t returned to the job. 

Companies that can are allowing remote work. 

Chinese schools, which look unlikely to reopen before April, have switched to online classes.

Pension burden. 

With business hurting from both the shutdowns and the government-mandated requirement to keep paying employees, 

Chinese authorities have announced that companies won’t have to pay some pension contributions and insurance fees to state-run funds for several months. 

That’s a smart move, but it raises the threat of the oncoming pension crisis.

A Moment in History: The Asian flu, 1957 and 1968The first post-World War II pandemic—the result of the mixing of avian and human influenza strains—was first detected in Singapore in 1957 but may have originated in China. 

While less lethal than the 1918 Spanish flu, the “Asian flu” pandemic killed perhaps 1 million to 2 million people worldwide. 

A decade later, it mutated into the “Hong Kong” flu: Again, it was first detected in the British colony but possibly originated in China.
Maoist China had high levels of deforestation and food insecurity, which caused people to eat previously untouched species, as well as a dire lack of medical resources. 

It was perhaps only the country’s isolation and limited freedom of movement that prevented outbreaks on the scale of SARS in 2003 or the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. 

It’s also possible that such outbreaks did occur and went unnoticed among the deaths of the era.

Taiwan's citizens battle pro-China fake news campaigns as election nears

Contest is in effect a referendum on the future of the nation’s relationship with China
By Lily Kuo and Lillian Yang
Protesters against Taiwan’s pro-China KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu during a protest in Kaohsiung.

Citizen groups in Taiwan are fighting a Russian-style influence and misinformation campaign that originated across the strait in mainland China with just weeks to go before it votes for its next president,
Taiwan goes to the polls on 11 January to decide between two main candidates, incumbent president Tsai Ing-Wen of the Democratic Progressive party (DPP) under whom ties with Beijing have become fraught, and Han Kuo-Yu of the Kuomintang party (KMT), which advocates closer engagement with China.
The contest is in large part a referendum on the future of Taiwan’s relationship with Beijing, which sees the independent nation as a renegade "province" that one day must return to the fold.
Han is Beijing’s favoured candidate while Tsai’s party has been campaigning on the slogan: “Resist China, Defend Taiwan”.
In a televised debate with her rivals for the job on Sunday, Tsai said China’s “expanding ambitions” were the biggest threat to its democracy. 

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.

Citizen groups in Taiwan say the openness of one of the freest societies in Asia is being used against it by groups in China to wage an online disinformation campaign, made more potent by their shared language, Mandarin.
A recent study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that Taiwan was the most exposed to foreign dissemination of false information.
False reports include claims Tsai’s doctorate degree was fake or that Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong kicked an elderly man when he visited Taiwan in October and met members of the DPP.
“China has multiple ways of pushing misinformation. We’ve found that content mills are no longer simply producing fake information. More and more, they are manipulating opinions,” said Jarvis Chiu, senior manager for the Institute for Information Industry, which has been assisting government efforts to prevent disinformation.
According to Chiu, an army of trolls will leave thousands of comments under a candidate’s post or a news article, shifting the focus of the debate.
Fake social media accounts also share pro-Beijing content or inflate the number of likes such content gets.
“Subliminal attacks” include repeatedly searching for one candidate’s name to influence search algorithm results.
“China won’t give up this practice. It will only increase and because it is non-military, it won’t get much global attention,” Chiu said.
The uncertain status of Taiwan, functionally independent but not internationally recognised, has been an issue in every campaign since direct elections were introduced in the 1990s following decades of martial law under the KMT.
This year, the question of how Taiwan should deal with Beijing looms even larger after years of increasingly strident rhetoric from China.
On Thursday, China sailed its new aircraft carrier, Shandong, through the Taiwan Strait in a move critics described an effort to intimidate voters.
Months of witnessing Beijing’s inflexible response to protesters in Hong Kong have cast even more doubt on the city’s “one country, two systems” framework, once touted as a possible model for Taiwan.
“There’s a sword hanging over everyone all the time,” said Shelley Rigger, a professor of east Asian politics with a focus on Taiwan at Davidson College.
“It’s exhausting to know that you’re being threatened and that the entity that is threatening you is getting more and more powerful all the time.”
In an attempt to push back against the campaign, citizen watchdog groups are manning social media, debunking rumours and trying to trace questionable content back to its source.
Prosecutors have been charging those who spread disinformation.
The party in office is trying to pass a law that would prohibit support from foreign “infiltration sources” to a political party.
“Taiwanese people have only just started understanding what is happening. It’s still the very beginning,” said Summer Chen, of Taiwan FactCheck Center which works on debunking disinformation on Facebook.
“It is a crisis and all of Taiwan needs to be researching this.”
A series of snappy Youtube tutorials educate viewers on the nature and methods of disinformation warfare.
“Taiwan has become the main laboratory for information warfare from China. If China wants to practice its methods, Taiwan is the starting point,” Puma Shen, who runs DoubleThink Labs, which monitors how false information, explains in one of the videos.
Those working on the issue say it is difficult to definitely say these attacks originated in China or link them to Chinese state actors, which makes the work of raising awareness harder.
“I believe that there is cooperation with China, but how much China knows, how much of this is from the Chinese government or people in Taiwan who are pro-China, we don’t know,” said Vivian Chen, a recent graduate studying medicine from Taipei.
China’s efforts to influence events in Taiwan stretch a long way back and go beyond online information warfare, to include traditional media, incentives for citizens or businesses who cooperate with China, group trips and donations to temples and other grassroots organisations.
Last month when Chinese defector Wang Liqiang detailed ways he had been instructed to interfere in Taiwan’s midterm elections in 2018 as well as the upcoming race, few in Taiwan were surprised.
“The story was not as shocking in Taiwan as it was in other parts of the world,” said Lev Nachman, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, studying social movements and focusing on Taiwan.
“It is not news to Taiwanese people that China has been co-opting local organisations for political influence.”
Observers say it is unlikely efforts to influence voters will affect the outcome of the race, where voters will also choose representatives for the legislature.
According to polls, Tsai is ahead of her rival, helped by months of protests in Hong Kong and concerns about Beijing, and an improved economy.

Kick Confucius Institutes Off Campus

Chinese Propaganda Has No Place on Campus
Universities can’t handle Confucius Institutes responsibly. The state should step in.
BY ANDREAS FULDA

The exasperated expression on the face of Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, at a public hearing on the influence of autocracies on U.K. universities gave it away. 

Tugendhat had just asked what could be done to address self-censorship among Chinese students in the United Kingdom or the United States. 

The evasive answers by Alexander Bustamante, the senior vice president and chief compliance and audit officer at the University of California, and Bill Rammell, the vice chancellor at the University of Bedfordshire and chair of MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities, were met with a frown and the occasional glance at the chairman’s mobile phone. 

Tugendhat, a former British Army officer and counterintelligence expert, was not having it.
Tugendhat is not the only exasperated one in this discussion. 

Over the last 15 years, one question has come up again and again: the role of Confucius Institutes, funded and run by the Chinese party-state, in extending Chinese censorship to Western universities.
Since 2004, around 550 Confucius Institutes have opened worldwide, with close to 100 in the United States and 29 in the United Kingdom. 

In recent years, however, the enthusiasm with which university leaders around the world have embraced the institutes has soured. 

Increasing numbers of them have been shut. 

That’s partially thanks to the geopolitical shift against an increasingly autocratic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping’s leadership and partially due to the institutes themselves being no more immune to the CCP’s waves of political repression than any other Chinese state institute—even abroad.
Confucius Institutes repeatedly stray from their publicly declared key task of providing Mandarin Chinese language training and venture into deep ideological territory. 

The institutes’ learning materials distort contemporary Chinese history and omit party-induced humanitarian catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) entirely. 

At Confucius Institute events, politically sensitive issues like Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen cannot be publicly discussed either. 

In 2014, a conference in Braga, Portugal, that involved both the Confucius Institute headquarters and the Taiwan-based Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange as co-sponsors was unceremoniously interrupted by Confucius Institute headquarters chief Xu Lin. 

And under the conditions of the Seven Don’t Speak directive, mainland Chinese education workers are barred from talking about universal values, freedom of speech, civil society, civil rights, the historical errors of the CCP, official bourgeoisie, and judicial independence—even when overseas.
There is an existing problem of self-censorship among China scholars. 

A recent survey revealed that in the face of increasing CCP censorship, “researchers employ several tactics in the face of such pressures. Almost half — some 48% — of respondents adapted how they describe their project in order to continue doing it, 25% changed the project’s focus, and 15% discontinued a project because of concern for sensitivity — or feasibility as the likelihood of being denied archive access in China made many projects unfeasible.”

Confucius Institutes bring another factor in: the hope of money and the fear of losing it. 

In a report by the Royal United Services Institute on China-U.K. relations, Charles Parton, a former British diplomat and security expert, pointed out that the “problem does not lie primarily with teaching staff. Often, when they meet pressure, they are not backed up by university administrators. 

A number of professors have told the author that vice-chancellors and other administrators have not supported them when they have been subject to pressures which impinge on academic freedom.”
Confucius Institutes at universities can be likened to Perry Link’s “anaconda in the chandelier”—his metaphor for the power of censorship in China. 

While the anaconda may not move, its shadow nevertheless induces fear among staff, students, and university managers alike, and they react accordingly. 

Mindful of the importance of international student recruitment, there is little appetite among university administrators to jeopardize the steady stream of fee-paying international students from mainland China.
Confucius Institutes play a double role: They are both cultural and political organizations. 

When discussing the equally controversial role of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, student groups with strong ties to the Chinese embassies, the British academic Martin Thorley recently coined the term “latent network.” 

In Thorley’s words, the “latent network is one of multiple forms of power transmission by the Party-state over the periphery. The firewall between the public and the private, typically a far more robust fixture in liberal democracies, must be more permeable in a system where a single institution rules without effective legal oversight.” 

Thorley goes on to explain that “institutions within this network, though not necessarily controlled by the CCP directly in their day-to-day affairs, are dependent on CCP patronage and thus, subject to CCP direction.”
The fate of the Lyon Confucius Institute (LCI) underscores the danger that Confucius Institutes as latent networks pose. 

Following the arrival of an activist director from mainland China in the fall of 2012, an increasingly bitter conflict ensued over curriculum development. 

When LCI Chair of the Board Gregory Lee successfully resisted such attempts to introduce a CCP-style curriculum, the university’s relationship with Hanban, the Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing, ended acrimoniously, and the LCI was closed. 

Any other global university currently partnering with Confucius Institutes may in the future share Lyon’s fate.
All this points to a critical truth: The decision to host Confucius Institutes on campuses should not be devolved to universities but made by the state.
Unless they’re willing to see the CCP’s grip tighten on their own institutions, governments worldwide should move to ban Confucius Institutes from operating on university campuses. 

Critics call this McCarthyism. 

But such a state intervention would not be undermining but in fact restoring academic autonomy and freedom of speech. 

Nobody is calling for intellectual restrictions or ideological tests for staff — merely for a recognition that money is power and that the CCP is ready to use it. 

Such state intervention would also provide the necessary cover for universities to terminate their existing cooperation agreements with Confucius Institutes without being accused of picking a fight with the CCP.
Opponents of such a state intervention should bear in mind that Confucius Institutes—just like any other cultural organization operating overseas—could still register as civic groups and rent out office space off campus and continue their public relations work. 

This is how Western cultural organizations like the Goethe-Institut, British Council, and Institut Français operate globally. 

Removing Confucius Institutes from universities could be considered an overdue standardization that brings them in line with common global practice.
Following such a ban, Confucius Institutes could also merge with China Cultural Centers, another Chinese cultural organization that operates with more than 30 branches worldwide.
But governments and universities alike should make up for the limited loss of revenue by fully funding Chinese language and contemporary Chinese studies provision. 

If China matters, they should put their money where their mouth is. 

It remains the responsibility of Western educators to proactively engage Chinese students and scholars as individuals and take the lead in introducing domestic students to mainland China, rather than letting the CCP and its outlets own the China story.

Chinese Propaganda Machine

Chinese broadcaster CGTN’s Hong Kong protests coverage probed by UK watchdog

• British regulator Ofcom investigating four broadcasts by CGTN aired in August and September
• Watchdog looking at whether Chinese programmes broke rules requiring news to be presented with due impartiality

By Simone McCarthy

Coverage of the Hong Kong protests by CGTN, the overseas arm of China’s state broadcaster, is being investigated by Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator. 

Britain’s communications regulator has launched an investigation into coverage of the Hong Kong protests by the overseas arm of Chinese state broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN).
“We are investigating whether these programmes broke our rules requiring news to be presented with due impartiality,” said an Ofcom spokesperson, referring to four separate broadcasts on Hong Kong’s anti-government protests that aired in Britain on three dates in August and one in September.
The investigation brings the total number of programmes from CGTN and its Beijing-based parent company China Central Television (CCTV) under investigation to eight, according to Ofcom documents.
Media reports have linked earlier investigations, launched in May, to complaints about the network’s airing of forced confessions made by detained Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai and British private investigator Peter Humphrey. 

The programmes under investigation range in date from August 2013 to February 2018, according to Ofcom.
The latest investigation into the Hong Kong coverage comes as CGTN is set to open its London headquarters and is expanding its European footprint, part of China’s decade-long coordinated push to grow its overseas propaganda influence.
Overseas arms of China’s state propaganda have drawn criticism for coverage of the anti-government mass protests which have gripped Hong Kong and drawn global attention since the start of June, with most scrutiny focused around the networks’ social media presence.

Social media giant Twitter moved to ban advertisements from state media on its platform last month, as reports emerged that China state propaganda used the paid promotions to call into question human rights abuses in East Turkestan and promote the central government’s view on the Hong Kong protests.
Broadcast media expert and lecturer in media and communication at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University Yik Chan Chin said that compliance with overseas media regulations was a burden for many of China’s outwardly mobile media companies.
“Impartiality is not part of the requirements for domestic media in China,” Chin said, noting there would likely exist a certain amount of autonomy for the overseas branches balanced with a need to follow central guidance “to an extent”.
“But if they take global expansion seriously, they need to be aware of the local regulations and comply with them,” she said, noting that Ofcom appeared to be increasing its scrutiny of the network, which had been broadcast as CCTV in Britain before being launched as a separate international arm in 2016.

A screengrab of some of CGTN’s coverage of the Hong Kong protests. 

“It could be because the Hong Kong issue has been very prominent [in the news] and CGTN’s presence is becoming more prominent than before, so those are a couple of reasons that could have triggered the investigation,” she said.
CGTN is “shortly opening up” its London-based news office in Chiswick, originally slated for a 2018 opening, according to CGTN materials.
The London-based office is part of the CGTN mission to “provide 'objective', 'balanced', and 'impartial' news and current affairs content” while “reporting the news from a Chinese perspective”, according to CGTN Europe’s LinkedIn page.
CGTN and its British broadcasting licence-holder did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Per qualche renminbi in più

Media Quisling: Washington Post publishes special advertising section pushing propaganda for communist China

By Brian Flood

China says the U.S. can 'do more' to reduce the fentanyl demand after the U.S. says China is to blame for much of the fentanyl trafficking in the States.
Washington Post readers were treated to an eight-page “advertising supplement” on Thursday touting the achievements and talking points of the Chinese government in a section of the paper that's off-limits to Post editors.
The special section, dubbed “ChinaWatch,” came with a warning declaring, “Content in this advertising section was prepared by China Daily, and did not involve the news or opinion staff of The Washington Post.”
China Daily is owned by the Communist Party of China. 

Regular readers of the Post have seen similar sections in the past, and countries such as Russia have published similar sections in other papers, but Thursday’s version raised eyebrows as China’s ruling Communist Party has been in the news for a variety of topics amid a trade war with President Trump.
Earlier this year, the Washington Post’s own editorial board declared that China had launched a “massive campaign of cultural extermination” against Uighurs and other Muslims in the East Turkestan colony of the country. 

The Post’s editorial board described the “gross bigotry with which Chinese authorities view the Uighurs” and called for bipartisan legislation as a result.
“We have run the China Watch advertising supplement for more than 30 years. The China Watch advertising supplement has always been clearly labeled as such. Every page of each advertisement states that the supplement was prepared by China Daily and did not involve the news or opinion departments of The Washington Post. 

In addition, the layout and format of the supplements differs from our editorial content in a number of ways, including headline style, body font and column width,” a Washington Post spokesperson told Fox News. 

The newspaper did not comment on how much money it received for publishing the special section.
Media Research Center vice president Dan Gainor told Fox News he was taken aback when he saw the eight-page section in the Post.
“Are they so desperate for cash, when they are owned by one of the richest men in human history, that they have to publish propaganda for communist China?” Gainor asked.
Gainor then joked, “We’ve always called it Red China, but the Washington Post wants to make sure it’s always read.”
The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who reportedly is the richest person in the world with a net worth of over $100 billion dollars. 

Under Bezos’ control, the Post began using the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in 2017 as Trump was feuding with the media.
The Post's special “ChinaWatch” section featured glowing headlines such as “Nation puts its best sporting foot forward,” which hyped the country’s fitness initiative.
The “China Watch” section of the Post also included a look back at comments then-President Richard Nixon made in 1971 about American leaders seeking to normalize relations with China and a tidbit about China being a rapidly growing market for venture capitalists.
Gainor took specific exception with a financial story headlined, “Reforms juggernaut rolls on” that declared, “Financial services sector perks up on further opening-up, promising to stabilize China’s economic growth.”
Washington Post readers also were provided stories about Chinese tech companies, the introduction of high-speed trains across the country and a piece examining young job seekers who find success working in the communist nation’s tourism industry.
China Daily did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2013, journalist Mitch Moxley detailed his time working for China Daily in a feature for The Atlantic. 

Moxley said he spent the majority of his time writing “government-friendly puff pieces” and wasn’t allowed to criticize local issues, such as a counterfeit silk market he discovered.
“Many of the articles weren't so much arguments supported by fact, but rants supported by nothing. Many violated everything I had ever learned about journalistic ethics,” Moxley wrote.
Moxley declined comment when reached by Fox News about the Post selling space to China Daily.
This week, there have been rapid-fire developments in the trade fight between the U.S. and China. The president, after urging American businesses to abandon China, over the weekend threatened to declare a national emergency and freeze those relationships—as China imposed retaliatory tariffs on $75 billion in U.S. goods and the Trump administration announced increased tariffs on $550 billion in Chinese goods.


Steve Herman
✔@W7VOA
Eight-page supplement (from the Communist Party of #China) inside today’s @washingtonpost (owned by @amazon billionaire @JeffBezos).

25
3:04 PM - Aug 29, 2019 · Washington, DC
Twitter Ads info and privacy
50 people are talking about this.

Voice of America White House bureau chief Steve Herman tweeted an image of the section.
“Meanwhile, overseas expansion of #China Communist Party-controlled media continues,” Herman added, with a link to a Financial Times report that China’s state TV was preparing to launch in Europe despite critics labeling it propaganda.

Tech Quisling

TWITTER HELPED CHINESE PROMOTE DISINFORMATION ON REPRESSION OF UIGHURS
By Ryan Gallagher

TWITTER HELPED TO promote Chinese government propaganda and disinformation about the country’s concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony, a review of the company’s advertising records reveals.
The social media company today announced a policy change that would bar such promotion following an inquiry from The Intercept and an earlier controversy over similar propaganda related to demonstrations in Hong Kong.
In East Turkestan, a western colony of China, the United Nations has estimated that 1 million ethnic minority Muslim Uighurs — including children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people with disabilities — have been detained under the pretext of fighting extremism. 

According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities are “committing human rights abuses in East Turkestan on a scale unseen in the country in decades.”

A review of Twitter advertisements from between June and August this year showed that the social media giant promoted more than 50 English-language tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state media organization. 

The tweets deliberately obscure the truth about the situation in East Turkestan and attack critics of the country’s ruling Communist Party regime.
The Global Times paid Twitter to promote its tweets to a portion of the more than 300 million active users on the social media platform. 

The tweets appeared in users’ timelines, regardless of whether they followed the Global Times account. 

In July, amid global condemnation of the treatment of Uighurs in East Turkestan, Twitter began promoting several Global Times tweets about the region.
One of the promoted tweets, from July 11, included a embedded video in which the Global Times’ editor-in-chief claimed that people who refer to the facilities in East Turkestan as “mass detention camps” have “smeared the vocational education and training centers established to help people avoid extremism.” 

He went on to attack “European politicians and media workers,” who he claimed had “tried to defend terrorist activities in East Turkestan,” adding, “their hands are in a way soiled with the blood of the Chinese people who died in violent attacks.”
Another promoted tweet, from July 4, included a video purportedly taken in East Turkestan, in which people are seen shopping in the street and eating in restaurants to a soundtrack of piano music. 

The video describes riots in 2009 that occurred in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan, and states that residents there “now live a happy and peaceful life” because they work together to fight terrorism and extremism. 

There is no mention in the video of the mass detention camps.
Other Global Times ads promoted by Twitter follow a similar theme, presenting the region as a happy and peaceful place where no human rights abuses have occurred. 

One promoted tweet includes video of an elderly woman receiving a package of medical supplies from government officials before breaking down in tears of joy. 

The tweet claims that poverty has been alleviated in the area because local residents have “access to high-quality medical care and affordable medicines.”
Patrick Poon, China researcher for Amnesty International, said he found Twitter’s promotion of the advertisements to be “appalling.”
“This is a very important, serious issue that Twitter needs to address,” said Poon. 

“Twitter is helping to promote false allegations and government propaganda. Allowing such advertising sets an alarming precedent.”
On Monday, Twitter said that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in order to “protect healthy discourse and open conversation.”
The announcement was published three hours after The Intercept had contacted the company for comment on its promotion of the Global Times’ East Turkestan tweets. 

Earlier on Monday, TechCrunch highlighted Twitter’s promotion of tweets from a different state news entity, China Xinhua News, which portrayed largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong as violent.
Twitter’s promotion of Chinese government propaganda had appeared to contradict its own policies, which state that advertising on the platform must be “honest.” 

The advertisements also undermined statements from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that the company was working to combat “propaganda through bots and human coordination [and] misinformation campaigns.”
Like many Western technology companies, Twitter has a complex relationship with China. 

The social media platform is blocked in the country and cannot be accessed there without the use of censorship circumvention technologies, such as a virtual private network or proxy service. 

At the same time, however, Twitter generates a lot of advertising revenue in China and has a growing presence in the country.
In July, Twitter’s director in China reportedly stated that the company’s team there had tripled in the last year and was the company’s fastest growing division. 

In May, the social media giant held a “Twitter for Marketers” conference in Beijing. 

Meanwhile, Twitter was criticized for purging Chinese dissidents’ accounts on the platform – which it claimed was a mistake – and has also been the subject of a protest campaign, launched by the Chinese artist Badiucao, after it refused to publish a “hashflag” symbol to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Poon, the Amnesty researcher, said police in China have in recent months increasingly targeted human rights advocates in the country who are active on Twitter, forcing them to delete their accounts or remove specific posts that are critical of the government. 

These cases have been reported to Twitter, according to Poon, but the company has not taken any action.
“Twitter has allowed the Chinese government to advertise its propaganda while turning a deaf ear on those who have been persecuted by the Chinese regime,” Poon said. 

“We need to hear how Twitter can justify that.”

Chinese Fifth Column

FARA should apply to Confucius Institutes

BY ANDY KEISER

Under Xi Jinping's consolidated power, China is working diligently to supplant the United States as the world's top economic and military power. 

That includes a comprehensive effort to influence American K-12 and higher educational students with a favorable view of the Communist Chinese government to shape U.S. policy over the long-term.

This influence operation by a hostile foreign power, led by China's state-controlled Confucius Institutes, should trigger the Justice Department to require a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filing by the institutes and its employees.
FARA requires anyone working at the behest of a foreign government to register with the Department of Justice. 

Originally written to combat propaganda, FARA also covers lobbying and public relations. 

FARA is a content-neutral disclosure statute that is designed to expose foreign associations to help ensure transparency and accountability in public policy.
Confucius Institutes are extensions of the Chinese government, plain and simple. 

They are owned and controlled by the government in Beijing and are overseen by the Office of Chinese Language International, commonly known as Hanban, a division of the Chinese Ministry of Education.
The Chinese government spends billions of dollars annually on propaganda activities promoted through Confucius Institutes. 

Primarily targeted to the U.S., there are more than 100 Confucius Institutes in the American universities and colleges that have opted into the programing. 

Confucius Institutes have expanded their reach to include K-12 education through an effort called "Confucius Classrooms."
The underhanded genius behind Confucius Institutes is that they operate under the benign guise of teaching Chinese language, culture and history while simultaneously ensuring that they can restrict speech, control curriculum and force educational institutions to choose Confucius Institute faculty from a pre-approved list of teachers provided by the Hanban.

According to a letter Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent last year to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Confucius Institutes "require the teaching to ignore human rights abuses, and stress that Taiwan and Tibet are part of China, among other restrictions."
Institute presence, particularly on U.S. college campuses, can also be a threat to economic and national security. 

The Chinese government can hand-pick employees at Confucius Institutes and use them as its eyes and ears or task them to steal sensitive, valuable university research. 

The transparency of a FARA filing would at least give more insight to U.S. counterintelligence professionals and to the public about the scope and scale of Confucius Institute activities.

According to Grassley's letter, a Chinese government official stated that the "Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad. It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power... using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical."
Others have taken note. 

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Tom Carper (D-Del.), released a bipartisan report in 2015 that detailed the activities of Confucius Institutes. 

Among several alarming findings, it details that since 2006 the Chinese government has given more than $158 million to fund Confucius Institutes in the U.S. 

It has veto authority over events and speakers at the institutes, and controls every aspect of their operations in the United States, including staff members pledging to protect Chinese national interests.
Grassley recently introduced the Foreign Agents Disclosure and Registration Enhancement Act of 2019 to beef up FARA enforcement and held a hearing on foreign threats to taxpayer funded research, which focused extensively on China's activities on university campuses. 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has led a series of efforts against Chinese influence and espionage operations targeting American higher education, having secured a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 prohibiting the Department of Defense from funding Confucius Institutes.
Sen. Cruz has also introduced legislation called the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act to further crack down on Confucius Institutes, which he called "the velvet glove around the iron fist of their campaigns on our campuses."
The Chinese government's desire to influence our public policy through propaganda, conduct aggressive espionage on our soil and steal our intellectual property is real and hard to overestimate. The activities occurring at Confucius Institutes to achieve China's goals undoubtedly trigger the requirements of FARA. 

The Department of Justice should take immediate action to provide the type of transparency needed to help protect our nation.

Criminal Negligence

The United States Is Not Doing Enough to Fight Chinese Influence
Beijing’s authoritarian political warfare demands a strong response.
BY THOMAS G. MAHNKEN 

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence addresses the Hudson Institute in Washington on Oct. 4. 

Earlier this month, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington that drew needed attention to China’s efforts to influence the United States. 

“Beijing has mobilized covert actors, front groups, and propaganda outlets to shift Americans’ perception of Chinese policy,” he noted. 

The remarks came on the heels of President Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly, where he called out Beijing for interfering in U.S. domestic politics.
Although new to many Americans, none of this came as a surprise to those who study Chinese influence operations abroad. 

Extensive research by enterprising and courageous scholars such as Anne-Marie Brady, Clive Hamilton, and John Garnaut has documented a pattern of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activity in New Zealand and Australia, and, more recently, reports by U.S. scholars and journalists have begun to document the influence of Chinese government-affiliated Confucius Institutes on American college campuses, Chinese funding of universities and think tanks, the distribution of CCP propaganda through U.S. news sources, and lobbying efforts by former U.S. elected officials on behalf of the Chinese government. 

These efforts have sought to shape academic, political, and public discourse in ways that favor the CCP and muzzle debate over topics such as Taiwan, Tibet, and China’s continental and maritime claims, along with the CCP’s treatment of the Chinese people and Chinese economic practices.
It has become apparent that the CCP has been active not only in the continental United States, but also in the United States’ island territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, along with the Western Pacific states that have compacts of free association with the United States—Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. 

There, the CCP has used economic power to buy political influence, to the detriment of the United States.
Exposure of this Chinese activity is welcome but by itself insufficient. 

These tactics are part of a broader strategy to strengthen the rule of the CCP at home and influence attitudes toward it abroad in ways that suit Beijing’s interests. 

As my colleagues Ross Babbage and Toshi Yoshihara and I argued earlier this year, the CCP’s tactics are part of a broader authoritarian political warfare strategy that Beijing is waging against the United States, its allies, and others. 

Its features include:

• A clear vision, ideology, and strategy.
• The use of overt and covert means to influence, coerce, intimidate, divide, and subvert rival countries in order to force their compliance.
• Strong centralized command of political warfare operations by the CCP through organizations such as the United Front Work Department.
• Capable bureaucratic instruments and implementation mechanisms.
• Tight control over the domestic population.
• Detailed understanding of targeted countries.
• Employment of a comprehensive range of instruments in coordinated actions.
• Willingness to accept a high level of political risk from the exposure of its activities.

Such campaigns are particularly difficult to counter because they exploit conceptual and bureaucratic seams in the United States and other democratic states. 

Whereas Americans tend to see a big distinction between peace and war, with peace as the norm, China’s leaders view struggle as the normal state of affairs. 

Whereas U.S. law draws boundaries between government and nongovernment actions, and between overt and covert ones, the Chinese leadership frequently ignores such distinctions. 

Identifying and responding to authoritarian political warfare is thus challenging.
More needs to be done to expose Chinese influence operations in the United States and abroad to build additional independent, nonpartisan sources of information on Chinese influence activities. 

Bringing to light such operations is a vital predicate to discussion and action.
The discussion of Chinese influence activities needs to be taken beyond elites in Washington to business leaders and to the American people. 

The public needs to understand the CCP’s efforts for what they are: an attempt by a foreign government to infringe on the sovereignty of the United States. 

Such activities ultimately pose a threat to U.S. values and institutions, whether through limiting free speech in the classroom or currying favor with business or political elites in ways that are harmful to U.S. interests.
Finally, the United States and its allies need to formulate counterstrategies to respond to Chinese influence operations. 

Any such efforts must have both defensive and offensive elements. 

On the defensive side of the coin, perhaps the most important way to reduce vulnerability is through increased transparency. 

Absent the ability to identify and expose the perpetrators, enablers, and mechanisms of manipulation, targets of political warfare may not realize they are being influenced—or, if they do, may not be able to engage in effective denial or credibly threaten serious punishment.
Defense alone is unlikely to be enough, however, and should be complemented by measures to raise the price of manipulating Western public and political opinion. 

Although authoritarian regimes might be difficult to influence and better equipped to address political warfare threats in comparison to their more open and less centralized democratic counterparts, they are arguably more fearful of those threats because of their tenuous legitimacy as well as their extreme concentration of wealth and power. 

Consequently, efforts to introduce new information into relatively closed societies—from sharing alternative perspectives on current events that differ from government-approved narratives to exposing political and economic acts of corruption—can be a method of competition that imposes significant costs on regimes that constantly worry about maintaining domestic control. 

The CCP has, for example, shown considerable sensitivity to the exposure of corruption among its leaders. 

It has also sought to exert a growing measure of control over Chinese civil society, including churches and other groups. 

Efforts, particularly by nongovernmental organizations, to provide the Chinese public with accurate sources of information may go a long way to counter the CCP’s efforts.
As the United States responds to this challenge, it needs to be careful as much as possible to achieve and maintain a political consensus in favor of action. 

Unlike the issue of Russian meddling, which has become dangerously polarized, to the extent possible Chinese political interference should remain outside the realm of partisan politics. 

It is a threat that demands a nonpartisan diagnosis and bipartisan response.

Rogue Nation

President Trump is right that China uses its media to influence foreign opinion
By James Griffiths

Hong Kong -- US President Donald Trump went off topic in characteristic style at the United Nations Security Council this week, accusing China of using state media to meddle in the upcoming midterm elections.
His remarks derailed a meeting that was supposed to focus on issues of nonproliferation.

He later accused: "China is actually placing propaganda ads in the Des Moines Register and other papers, made to look like news. That’s because we are beating them on trade, opening markets, and the farmers will make a fortune when this is over!"

He was referring to an insert from the state-run China Daily placed in a recent Sunday edition of the Iowa paper, which featured stories promoting the benefit of US-China trade, warned of the potential market losses caused by a trade war, and highlighted Chinese dictator Xi Jinping's long relationship with the state, among other less news-worthy columns.
Political analysts largely agreed the insert was intended to put pressure on the White House by targeting key Republican districts that will be most affected by a drawn-out trade war with China.
"I think it's trying to maximize pressure on the administration to change its trade policies toward China by attempting to show White House and Republicans that they're going to pay a price with the mid-terms," David Skidmore, a political science professor at Drake University, told the Des Moines Register in a piece by the paper about the insert.
On Wednesday, Xi himself extolled state media's "contributions to the cause of the Party and the people," and praised television workers in "promoting in-depth integration and innovation in international communication to present a true, multi-dimensional and panoramic view of China."
Trump is thus absolutely correct that Beijing uses its media to shape foreign opinions of China.

Copies of China Daily's Africa edition. The state-run newspaper has invested heavily in targeting the continent.

Telling China's story
While it may have been a novelty to some newspaper readers in Iowa, China Daily is a major newspaper, founded in 1981 it is now published in 12 editions across Asia, Europe, Africa and the US.
Unlike most other English-language state media, like broadcaster CCTV or the Global Times, China Daily is not an offshoot of a domestic product but has always targeted foreign readers.
Today, it claims a circulation of around 800,000, with the majority of readers overseas. 

The paper's blue vending machines are ubiquitous in Washington DC and parts of New York and other US cities, and it is also often given out for free in hotels and by airlines around the world.
This reach is further extended by China Watch, which the newspaper describes as a "monthly publication distributed to millions of high-end readers as an insert in mainstream newspapers." 

These include major US and British titles, such as the Washington Post, and the UK's Daily Telegraph, giving the insert a reach of 4 million readers, according to China Daily.
By comparison, in 2016 USA Today, the top English-language daily in the world, had a circulation of around 4.1 million, while the New York Times had a circulation of 2.1 million.
China Daily did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump isn't the first to complain about China Watch. 

Critics have accused newspapers of failing to highlight to readers that it is a paid insert, or distinguish its content from their own, especially online. 

On the website of the UK's Daily Telegraph for example, branding is the same as stories produced by the paper's own journalists, except for a disclaimer in small text at the top of the page reading "this content is produced and published by China Daily, People's Republic of China, which takes sole responsibility for its contents," and a similar disclaimer at the bottom of the article.
The Daily Telegraph did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding their China Watch sections. 

A spokeswoman for the Washington Post said the section was clearly marked as not involving "the news or editorial departments of The Washington Post," adding the China Watch section differs in layout and format "from our editorial content in a number of ways, including headline style, body font and column width."
Of course, publishing something and having people read it are completely different things, as many media companies have learned to their chagrin. 

But no matter its reach, China Daily clearly has the backing of Beijing, expanding overseas staff and advertising even as other newspapers slash costs and lay off employees.

A man walks down the street as the iconic CCTV headquarters loom in the background in the central business district of Beijing on January 20, 2017.

Going out
While it was China Daily which drew President Trump's attention, it is not the most important outlet in Beijing's state media strategy. 

That title belongs to state broadcaster CCTV, and its international offshoot CGTN. (CNN has an affiliate relationship with CCTV.)
As Ying Zhu recounts in her book about the network, "Two Billion Eyes: the story of China Central Television," beginning in the early 2000s, Chinese state media was encouraged to "play in the same global pond as CNN, the BBC, and other big Western media firms."
This was influenced by then-President Jiang Zemin's call to "let China's voice broadcast to the world," a strategy which finally reached its zenith this year with the creation of Voice of China, a new super bureau combining three state-run networks, CCTV, China National Radio and China Radio International.
Of particular attention for this effort has been Africa, where CGTN, China Daily and state news agency Xinhua have all invested heavily. 

As I document in my book "The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet," this propaganda push has coincided with an increase in internet controls and censorship on the continent, actively assisted by Beijing.
Like China Daily, CGTN receives a large amount of state funding, which it has used to expand massively. 

It now broadcasts in more than 180 countries and regions around the world, and is currently building an expensive new London headquarters.
But as with its newspaper sibling, broadcasting in a country doesn't necessarily mean anyone is watching.
While accurate global viewership figures are difficult to come by, CGTN claims its English-language offerings can be seen in more than 140 million homes internationally.
By comparison, CNN International reaches more than 373 million households worldwide, while the BBC claims a global audience of 376 million.
Russian state broadcaster RT, a frequent bogeyman in US political discourse, also knocks CGTN out of the park on YouTube, where the Chinese network has around 800,000 subscribers across multiple channels, compared to RT's more than 3.3 million.
This could be down to content, while CGTN has relaxed considerably from its highly staid past, it lacks the type of slick appeal of RT, nor has it been so willing to host the type of conspiracy theorists who tend to do so well on YouTube.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has made propaganda and media control a key priority of his administration.

Attention war
Whether or not its investment in China Daily and CGTN is paying off, Beijing clearly sees great value in promoting state media overseas, building on its effectiveness as a propaganda tool at home.
This effort has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and US and Australian lawmakers especially have said they are uncomfortable with the role Chinese state media plays in their countries.
U.S. lawmakers such as Marco Rubio, chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC), have long accused Beijing of using its influence around the world to stifle debate and promote its agenda.
"Chinese government foreign influence operations, which exist in free societies around the globe, are intended to censor critical discussion of China's history and human rights record and to intimidate critics of its repressive policies," Rubio said during a hearing on the "Long Arm of China" last year.
More recently, the US Department of Justice reportedly recommended CGTN and Xinhua be forced to register as foreign agents under an act designed to police lobbyists working for overseas governments. 

This followed similar restrictions placed on RT which caused the broadcaster to lose its congressional press credentials and were widely denounced by press freedom advocates.

Chinese Colonialism: Tibet Propaganda Masks Repression

Illustrated Glossary Decodes Surveillance Systems and Abuses
"Orwell himself would be hard pressed to invent a better vocabulary of totalitarian management. But ultimately the message of the Chinese authorities’ terms for Tibetans is clear: political nonconformity will be punished, severely." -- Sophie Richardson
HRW

The Chinese term shehui zhili is normally translated into English as "social governance." The term highlights the government’s role in providing services and welfare to citizens as well as controlling them, and its cooperation with other stakeholders in society such as nongovernmental organizations and social organizations. 

New York – Chinese authorities are increasingly using opaque policy terms in official media to tighten repression in Tibet, Human Rights Watch said in an illustrated glossary released today.
Tibet: A Glossary of Repression explains and illustrates a dozen terms that appear benign or even positive but are in fact used to ensure total compliance and surveillance by officials of ordinary Tibetan people. 

The glossary includes terms that relate to political and social control, such as “comprehensive rectification,” “no cracks, no shadows, no gaps left,” and “every village a fortress, everyone a watchman.”
“Orwell himself would be hard pressed to invent a better vocabulary of totalitarian management,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. 

“But ultimately the message of the Chinese authorities’ terms for Tibetans is clear: political nonconformity will be punished, severely.”
These terms are used – and frequently repeated – not only to persuade populations inside and outside Tibet of the correctness of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule and its policies, but also to deter criticisms of the Party and any challenge to its rule. 

These terms – few of which are explained in a manner comprehensible to the general public – reflect a profoundly repressive approach to governance in Tibet.
In Tibetan areas within China, and particularly in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), officials have long adhered to the “stability maintenance” policy: a range of policing and administrative systems aimed at preventing, controlling, or punishing social dissent and social disorder used across China – as one way to eradicate support for the Dalai Lama. 

But when a new wave of protests in support of the Dalai Lama broke out across the Tibetan plateau in spring 2008, Party leaders commissioned researchers to develop new methods to prevent future unrest.
This led to the introduction, from 2011 onward, of new administrative and security mechanisms in the TAR, including permanent teams of cadres installed as managers in every monastery and religious institution, teams of cadres deployed for three years in every village to organize security operations and political education, and “grid system” offices set up to monitor and manage each block or group of homes in every town and many villages.
“Understanding terms like ‘social rectification’ makes clear Chinese authorities’ intentions in Tibet: that all life and daily behavior will be under surveillance, and any problematic conduct will be identified and swiftly punished,” Richardson said.

China's Belt and Road to Nowhere

Beijing’s mixture of political and economic priorities may not result in an overall Belt and Road policy formula that is workable.
By Christopher Whalen

A great deal of attention is being paid by Western media to China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, the most ambitious foreign-policy initiative yet for paramount leader Xi Jinping. 

Launched in 2013 under the slogan “One Belt, One Road,” the effort involves China spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects in countries along the old Silk Road linking it with Europe.
The ambition of Xi is immense, but it is largely driven by insecurity. 

Western media parrots China’s propaganda about the Belt and Road Initiative. 

“Its ultimate aim is to make Eurasia (dominated by China) an economic and trading area to rival the transatlantic one (dominated by America),” reports the Economist.
But in fact the motivations for China are far more simple and direct than this grandiose vision suggests. 

Viewed through the prism of China’s economic progress over the past decade, the Belt and Road program is merely a continuation of China’s massive internal investment in infrastructure—only on a larger scale.
China is spending roughly $150 billion annually to build roads, rail lines and other infrastructure in sixty-plus countries that have signed up to the scheme. 

The obvious question is whether China can support such a gigantic effort.
In 1958, Mao announced the “great leap forward,” a program grounded upon the Marxian prescription for the advancement of industrial technology which ultimately resulted in the deaths of between twenty million and forty million Chinese. 

Christopher Balding, writing for Bloomberg View, questions the financial logic of Xi’s version of the “great leap forward” of the Maoist period:
China's just-completed conference touting its Belt and Road initiative certainly looked like a triumph, with Russian president Vladimir Putin playing the piano and Chinese leaders announcing a string of potential deals and massive financial pledges. 

Underneath all the heady talk about China positioning itself at the heart of a new global order, though, lies in uncomfortable question: Can it afford to do so?
Foreign analysts often try to understand Chinese thinking and priorities using the commercial and economic logic of the West, but, in fact, asking whether China can afford the Belt and Road effort is to ask the wrong question. 

In the minds of China’s leaders, who fear political instability above all else, the real question is whether China can afford not to spend more tens of billions on infrastructure projects to keep the country’s restive population under control.
Going back to Xi’s meeting with Donald Trump earlier this year and his carefully scripted defense of free trade, the Chinese leader is clearly focused on creating new channels to absorb China’s massive overcapacity. 

“Trade is the important engine of economic development,” Xi said at a summit of world leaders in Beijing that was largely ignored by the United States, European nations and India.
But, in fact, it is investment flows, not trade, that dominates the economic relationship between the United States and China. 

The key challenge facing China is not how to generate greater trade flows, especially away from its primary partner the United States, but how to allocate investment flows given the dearth of attractive investment opportunities in China.
Just as Germany channeled its surplus savings to the nations of Southern Europe, China has been allowing its citizens to invest trillions of dollars in the United States, Canada and other nations, often focused on direct investment in companies and real estate. 

Over the past five years, for example, Chinese nationals ploughed $1 trillion into foreign real estate and other assets.
“The most important economic truth to grasp about the U.S. trade deficit is that it has virtually nothing to do with trade policy,” noted Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute in testimony before Congress two decades ago. 

“A nation’s trade deficit is determined by the flow of investment funds into or out of the country. And those flows are determined by how much the people of a nation save and invest—two variables that are only marginally affected by trade policy.”
Thus, when we look at China’s massive investment in infrastructure outside of its own borders, we see the imperative of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), namely political stability. 

Measured in economic terms, many of China’s supposed “investments” along the Silk Road don’t make a great deal of sense.
But viewed from the political perspective of employing China’s people and the accumulation of unused capacity inside the Chinese economy, the Belt and Road makes perfect sense. 

Beijing’s mixture of political and economic priorities will not necessarily result in an overall policy formula that is actually workable. 

Note for example, the November 2016 decision to impose barriers on foreign investments by private individuals and companies.
The de facto currency controls are slowing the outward flow of investment—and dollars—from China, a change that has negative implications for the value of the U.S. currency, the United States real estate market and also implies a weaker Chinese renminbi (RMB).
As we have noted in previous articles for the National Interest, the Chinese RMB has been under pressure to depreciate against the dollar. 

China’s central bank sold over $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds to provide the dollars to slow down the decline (by buying RMB). 

Indeed, over the past several years China’s massive foreign currency reserve shrank from $4 trillion to $3 trillion as the country’s nationals went on a spending spree acquiring real estate and commercial assets in the United States and other nations.
With the imposition of currency controls last year, however, China’s posture as a net investor around the world is changing. 

The propaganda headlines of the Belt and Road Initiative suggest a massive capital outflow to other nations, but, in fact, just the opposite is the case. 

Indeed, the South China Morning Post reports that Beijing's strict capital controls are delaying private investments that are part of the Belt and Road project.
First and foremost the importance of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is political, namely to show Xi Jinping in control of China’s command economy as he consolidates political power as dictator of China and the unquestioned leader of the CCP. 

Under Xi, the era of collective leadership in China is well and truly at an end.
But second—and more important—the continuing effort by China to “pump prime” internal economic activity via gargantuan infrastructure projects, both at home and abroad, reveals a basic flaw in the Chinese economy. 

Only when the political monopoly of the CCP has ended and China’s people are truly free to make economic and political choices will the country be able to provide sufficient investment opportunities at home so that desperate measures such as the Belt and Road spectacle will no longer be necessary.

U.S. Chinese Fifth Column

American Universities Are Welcoming China’s Trojan Horse
By Rachelle Peterson

China is spending an enormous amount of money trying to build goodwill overseas by building schools. 

By itself, that’s not unusual. 

Many nations send teachers abroad as a form of cultural and linguistic diplomacy: the Alliance Française for French, the Goethe-Institut for German, the Instituto Cervantes for Spanish, and the British Council for English.
China’s Confucius Institutes sound similar enough to these Western institutions. 

But their activities are far more pernicious. 

Though the Confucius Institutes present themselves as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, it would be more accurate to think of them as a way for China to subvert American higher education. 

And, without greater vigilance by American universities, this is precisely what they will accomplish.
Confucius Institutes operate in a fundamentally different way than their Western counterparts. Whereas Germany, France, Spain, and Britain erect their own stand-alone institutes that offer extracurricular courses, China insists on planting its Confucius Institutes inside existing colleges and universities. 

China has poured plenty of money into this effort; although Confucius Institutes only started operating in 2004, China now has 513 of them worldwide, plus another 1,074 Confucius Classrooms located in primary and secondary schools. 

That’s far more than the Goethe-Institut’s 159 schools or even the Alliance Française’s 850 outfits. And this investment is heavily targeted at the United States, which is home to more Confucius Institutes and Classrooms than any other nation — 39 percent of the total. 

And Western universities, for their part, have eagerly seized on the opportunities offered by Confucius Institutes.
But those opportunities come with plenty of strings attached. 

I’ve just completed a two-year research report on 12 Confucius Institutes in New York and New Jersey. 

I found that Confucius Institutes operate as central nodes in the deepening relationship between China and Western universities — many of which are dependent on full-tuition-paying Chinese students and desperate for funding for humanities programs. 

But Confucius Institutes also serve as a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn, and pressuring American professors to censor themselves.
These problems haven’t gone unnoticed. 

So far two American universities — the University of Chicago and Penn State — have closed their Confucius Institutes. 

They’ve been joined by Stockholm University, France’s Lyon University, and McMaster University in Canada, among others. 

McMaster took this step after a Confucius Institute teacher filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal alleging the university was complicit in discriminatory hiring practices, which forbade practitioners of the religious movement Falun Gong.
It is time for more colleges and universities to follow suit. 

Confucius Institutes have no place on campus.
Confucius Institutes are directly tied to the Chinese government. 

The Hanban (a Chinese abbreviation for the “Office of Chinese Language Council International”), inside the Ministry of Education, oversees all Confucius Institutes worldwide. 

The Hanban’s governing council is made up of the heads of 12 Chinese government ministries — including the State Press and Publications Administration (which handles state-run media and propaganda) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

The Hanban “dispatches” teachers and textbooks from China and requires universities to get its approval on all course offerings and extracurricular programs.
Imagine colleges and universities requesting permission from the U.S. government before finalizing course syllabi. 

Few if any American universities would accept such an imposition, but more than 100 are perfectly willing to cede that piece of autonomy to Beijing.
The contractual language the Hanban pushes on universities poses a more substantive threat to academic autonomy. 

The Confucius Institute constitution requires all universities to avoid “tarnish[ing] the reputation of the Confucius Institutes” — an offense punishable by revocation of the contract, immediate loss of all Hanban funds, and potential unspecified “legal action.” 

I examined eight signed contracts between American universities and the Hanban, all eight of which duplicate this language almost verbatim.
The breadth of the definition of “tarnish” is unclear. 

Would a vote by the faculty senate raising concerns about their university’s Confucius Institute count as sufficient harm to the Hanban to justify intervention from China? 

And it seems implausible that China could claim legal jurisdiction over part of a campus within another nation. 

I asked college and university administrators about these contractual requirements and never got a clear answer. 

It is clear they aren’t sure exactly what the Hanban expects of them when it comes to guarding its reputation. 

But China’s funding for Confucius Institutes is generous, and universities err on the side of respecting Hanban’s preferences.
The siting of the institutes inside college campuses, where their courses can often be taken for university credit, poses its own threat to academic integrity. 

Universities with Confucius Institutes essentially outsource their courses to China. 

Western universities diminish their own prestige by allowing the Chinese government to freeload off it. 

No other nation enjoys such direct access to a foreign classroom. 

Branches of the Alliance Française and the Goethe-Institut have no relationship to college and university credit-bearing courses and are thus made to earn their own reputations.
American colleges should also consider the values being promulgated through the Confucius Institutes’ teaching. 

The institutes have a history of presenting a whitewashed version of China. 

In its less guarded moments, the Chinese government has even admitted this intent. 

In 2009, Li Changchun, then the head of propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party and a member of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, called the Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.” 

The Confucius Institutes themselves acknowledge their role in China’s “publicity” efforts — though fail to note that in Chinese, “publicity” and “propaganda” are the same word.
The Chinese government tries to avoid touchy subjects by forbidding Confucius Institutes from discussing politics, history, and economics. 

It instructs staff to focus on themes that promote amity towards China: “enhancing understanding of the Chinese language and culture,” “deepening friendly relationships with other nations,” and developing programs that “construct a harmonious world.” 

None of these is necessarily deleterious, but taken together they leave students with a remarkably incomplete view of China. 

Frank discussion of Tibetan immolations or the labor camp system in China, for instance, is not likely to “deepen friendly relationships” between China and other countries.
The Chinese government is prepared for the fact that touchy subjects will still come up, via questions from students in class. 

For instance, Confucius Institute teachers report training from the Hanban in how to handle questions about Taiwan and Tibet; they are supposed to change the subject or, failing that, represent both as undisputed territories of China. 

The Hanban’s official maps, like all mainland cartography, depict Taiwan as a province; at a meeting of the European Association for Chinese Studies, the Confucius Institutes’ international director, Xu Lin, had all the pages from Taiwanese institutions torn out of the conference program. 

The Chinese director at the New Jersey City University Confucius Institute told me that her stock answer to questions about Tiananmen Square was to “show a photograph and point out the beautiful architecture.”
University professors told me of the pressure they felt to avoid offending China. 

Administrators feared jeopardizing the Hanban’s funding stream. 

A State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany professor found that all faculty office doors had been stripped of banners referencing Taiwan the day of a site visit by Hanban officials. 

Another professor within the SUNY system, who requested anonymity, said he would jeopardize his job if he were to question openly his university’s Confucius Institute: “This is my career and livelihood on the line.” 

Many others reported fear of losing visas to visit and conduct research in China.
The Hanban also asks Confucius Institutes to “not contravene” both local and Chinese law — with no official guidance on how to handle discrepancies between the two. 

That leaves staff uncertain of where the line lies — and erring on the side of caution. 

Every Confucius Institute contract I examined required such an adherence to Chinese law, or adherence to the Confucius Institute constitution, which itself requires all Confucius Institutes to follow Chinese law.
This lack of clarity echoes China’s own laws on speech, which American scholar Perry Link has aptly described as an “anaconda in the chandelier.” 

Chinese censorship operates like a dangerous snake suspended overhead, quiet and still, its very presence nudging passersby to move beyond its reach. 

Chinese law doesn’t spell out exactly what citizens can and can’t say; the law is vague and the enforcement selective. 

People censor themselves in an effort to avoid the anaconda — and the zone of allowed speech is gray and ever-shifting. 

In recent years in China, it has been getting narrower. 

Universities must ask if that’s something they want to get a foothold in the United States.
Confucius Institutes export the fear of speaking freely around the world. 

They permit a foreign government intimate influence over college classrooms. 

It’s time to kick them off campus.