Rogue Nation

How The Chinese Government Works To Censor Debate In Western Democracies
By FRANK LANGFITT

Tibetans cheer on a Tibetan team at a soccer tournament in London. Fans say they were pleased and surprised that the tournament organizers didn't succumb to pressure from potential sponsors and dump the Tibetan team to avoid angering the Chinese government.

It used to be that the Communist Party focused on censoring free speech primarily inside of China. 

In recent years, though, China's authoritarian government has tried to censor speech beyond its borders, inside liberal democracies, when speech contradicts the party's line on highly sensitive political issues, such as the status of Tibet and Taiwan. 

It's part of the party's grand strategy to change the way the world talks about China.
The Chinese government has been so effective at intimidating Western businesses on this front that companies do the party's work for it. 

That's what happened in London this summer at an obscure soccer tournament modeled on the World Cup. 

The teams were drawn from a hodgepodge of minority peoples, isolated territories and would-be nations, including Tibet.
Some potential corporate sponsors were queasy.
"There were inquiries made as to whether we would consider removing Tibet from the competition," said Paul Watson, commercial director for the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or CONIFA, which ran the tournament. 

Watson spoke with one potential sponsor who was apologetic but direct.
"Look, I took this to my boss," Watson recalled the sponsor telling him. 

"It's Tibet. Can you get them out of there? I'm really sorry. It's a terrible thing to ask. We love what you do, but would you remove Tibet?"
Watson refused to dump the Tibetans, which he said cost CONIFA more than $100,000 in sponsorship money. 

Watson said no one from the Chinese government ever approached him, but they didn't have to, because the sponsors already knew the risks.
Tibet is a colony of China, but Tibetans hate Chinese rule because the Chinese are trying to destroy Tibetan spiritual and cultural identity, not only at home, but also abroad. 

Potential sponsors were worried about offending Beijing because they'd already seen how other companies were punished when they didn't follow China's official line. 

In January, authorities suspended Marriott's Chinese website after the hotel group mistakenly referred to Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau as countries. 

The next month, Mercedes-Benz was forced to apologize for quoting the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, on Instagram.
"Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open," the quote read.
Watson said potential sponsors were terrified that if they backed the tournament, they'd be in a business meeting in China a few months later, staring at a photo of their company's logo next to Tibetan soccer players and the Tibetan flag.
"It could be a deal-breaker," Watson said.

Potential sponsors urged the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, CONIFA, to drop a Tibetan team from a soccer tournament in London for fear of offending the Chinese government.

Tibetans in London who turned out to root for their team were grateful and surprised that CONIFA stood up for them.
"It's very rare these days that you see people sticking to such principles," said Pema Yoko, a former official with Students for a Free Tibet, "but the more you allow yourself to bend down to China, the more China is going to bully."
The Communist Party has spent years trying to control the country's narrative and influence how the world talks about China. 

Between the Opium War in 1840 and the Communist victory in 1949, foreign powers including Japan and the United Kingdom controlled pieces of Chinese territory during a period the party refers to as the "Century of Humiliation."
"One of the contexts for the obsessive way in which Chinese officials can sometimes think about the way that China is portrayed overseas is the fact that, from the mid-19th century to well into the 20th century, China was not in control of its own destiny," said Rana Mitter, a China scholar at Oxford University.
The recent economic boom, which vaulted China from a backward, agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse and the world's second-largest economy, changed all that.
"These days China is in a much better position to actually spread [its] narrative," said Mitter, "with, we might say, a much louder megaphone."
When groups or institutions in the West don't toe Beijing's line, the Chinese government is now more willing to use its muscle to enforce its views.
Last year, the Durham University students' union organized a debate on whether China was a threat to the West. 

Tom Harwood, then president of the union, said the school's Chinese Students and Scholars Association complained about the topic and pressed him to drop one of the speakers, Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada. 

Lin is also a human rights activist and a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation group banned by the Chinese government.

A Chinese Embassy official in London urged the Durham University students' union to drop Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada and a human rights activist, from a debate on whether China is a threat to the West.

"Actually, it got to the point where the Chinese embassy phoned up our office and started questioning us a lot about the debate, asking if we could not invite Anastasia Lin," Harwood recalled. 

"It even got to the point where one of the officials at the embassy suggested that if this debate went ahead, the U.K. might get less favorable trade terms after Brexit."
In March, the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union, a giant market of more than 500 million consumers. 

British officials are desperate to ink new free trade deals with major economies, including China. Harwood was stunned that a Chinese diplomat would suggest that the United Kingdom might pay a financial price for something as small as a college debate.
"It's just quite shocking that within an institution that was 175 years old, that's prided itself on hosting free speech, free exchange, free debate, that an outside influence was trying to change that or try and stop us hosting a speaker," said Harwood.
Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, participated in the Durham debate. 

He didn't think much of China's tactics.
"I thought it was pathetic," Rifkind said. 

"It's something that the Chinese very foolishly do again and again."

Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, participated in the Durham debate. Rifkind served as foreign secretary in the lead-up to the return of the then-British colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Rifkind said that a couple of decades earlier, when China was much weaker and its economy much smaller, it was easy to ignore such complaints. 

Rifkind served as Britain's foreign secretary as the country prepared to return the then-British colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997. 

At the time, the United Kingdom's economy was bigger than China's. 

When the Dalai Lama asked to meet Rifkind, about a year before the handover, he didn't hesitate.
"They spluttered," Rifkind recalled. 

"They complained. They said it was inappropriate, but nothing more than that happened because, at that time, they didn't have the diplomatic weight they have today."
Flash-forward to 2012 when then-British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama in public in London. 

China's economy was now more than three times the size of the United Kingdom's. 

Beijing responded by canceling meetings and freezing out British officials. 

In 2015, Cameron refused to meet the Dalai Lama, who told The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, "Money, money, money. That's what this is about. Where is morality?"

The Chinese government no longer just tries to punish the West for straying from the Communist Party line. 

In the past year, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has gone further, arguing that China's authoritarian system can serve as a model for others, an alternative to liberal democracy.
Jan Weidenfeld, who runs the European China Policy unit at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin-based think tank, says the party's argument runs like this: "Look at where democracy has gotten you? Lots of irrational decisions. You got Donald Trump in the White House. You've got Brexit and we've just got the better model here."
Weidenfeld says Beijing's goal is to undermine support for the Western system and wage a broader battle of systemic competition — something that would've been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Clumsy attempts to censor people — as in the case of the Durham University debate — have backfired, but China has had success pressuring businesses, as the apologies by Marriott and Mercedes-Benz show.
Benedict Rogers, deputy chair of the Conservative Party's Human Rights Commission, said the willingness of some in the West to knuckle under to the Communist Party is part of the problem. 

Rogers said that a Chinese Embassy official called a member of Parliament last year to try to prevent a conservative website from publishing an article Rogers was writing about China's repressive policies in Hong Kong on the 20th anniversary of the handover. 

Rogers said that five or 10 years ago, the embassy would've never had the guts to try that.
"China has been emboldened by our weakness over recent years," Rogers said. 

"Actually, if we'd taken a stronger stand a few years ago, they perhaps wouldn't have been doing this kind of thing now."

Europe needs to step up vigilance on China’s influence

Beijing’s authoritarian brand presents a direct challenge to liberal traditions 
By Thorsten Benner and Kristin Shi-Kupfer

Complacency with Chinese tyranny: French President Emmanuel Macron with Xi Jinping in Beijing in January

Mike Pompeo, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, said last month that Beijing’s efforts to exert influence in liberal democracies are just as concerning as those of Moscow, citing China’s “much bigger footprint”.
Indeed, China’s rapidly increasing political influencing efforts and the self-confident promotion of its authoritarian ideals present a fundamental challenge to western democracies. 
 Drawing on its economic strength and a Communist Party of China apparatus that is geared towards strategically building stocks of influence across the globe, Beijing’s efforts are bound to be much more consequential in the medium to long term than those of the Kremlin. 
Nowhere is the gap between the scale of China’s efforts and public awareness of the problem larger than in Europe.
EU member states urgently need to devise a strategy to counter China’s authoritarian advance. 
 As we detail in a new report, Beijing pursues three related goals.

• First, it seeks to weaken western unity within Europe and across the Atlantic. One aim of this is to prevent Europe from challenging China’s human rights record and its hegemonic ambitions in the South and East China seas. 
•  Second, it aims to build European support on specific issues such as market economy status and a free pass for Chinese investments. 
•  Third, Beijing pushes hard to create a more positive global perception of China’s political and economic system as a viable alternative to liberal democracies. 

To further these goals, China commands a comprehensive and flexible influencing toolset in Europe, ranging from the overt to the covert and strategically deployed across three arenas: political and economic elites, media and civil society & academia. 
 Beijing uses investments in infrastructure and public utilities to create political leverage in Europe’s periphery. 
In Greece, for example, it controls the port of Piraeus, leading the government in Athens to torpedo a joint EU resolution on human rights in China in the Human Rights Council. 
In the Czech Republic, it placed an adviser in the president’s office. 
Across Europe, it buys the services of former politicians such as Philipp Roesler, the former German vice-chancellor who was hired by HNA, the Chinese conglomerate, and David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, who has signed up to lead a joint UK-China investment fund. 
Many smaller eastern and southern EU members align with China in fits of “pre-emptive obedience”. 
They try to curry favour with China and lure investment by supporting China’s political positions. 
Some illiberal governments, such as that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, do so all too happily.
They see China’s authoritarian model as attractive and a convenient source of leverage against Brussels and western EU members pushing back against their illiberalism. 
Orban has already played the China card to put pressure his EU partners who are considering reducing structural funds in response to his authoritarianism and a post-Brexit recalibration of the EU budget. 
“Central Europe needs capital to build new roads and pipelines. If the EU is unable to provide enough capital, we will just collect it in China,” Orban said in Berlin this year.
To sweeten the deal for China, Orban is gladly working to prevent a strong EU stance on China’s territorial advances in the South China Sea. 
In parallel, Beijing has invested in shaping the narrative on China.
Across central and eastern Europe, China-supported Confucius Institutes, as well as China-linked think-tanks and university scholars dominate discussions, while an increasing number of journalists go through training programmes designed and funded by the Chinese Communist party. 
In Brussels and other capitals, China funds think-tanks and pays lobbyists to project a favourable image. 
It spreads Chinese official views and creates subtle dependencies by paying for inserts in European quality newspapers. 
It uses the lure of the Chinese market to encourage self-censorship in film, art, and academic publishing. 
Springer Nature, the German group that publishes Scientific American, has removed content in China that was deemed politically sensitive by the party. 
China even went as far as demanding that Germany ensure that its visiting football teams are not met by protests about Tibet during paid friendly games on German soil. 
In part, China uses covert methods, such targeting German lawmakers and government employees via fake social media profiles. 

But most influencing comes through the front door.
Beijing takes advantage of the EU’s one-sided openness. 
Europe’s gates are wide open whereas China seeks to tightly restrict access of foreign ideas, actors and capital. 
Beijing profits from willing enablers among European political and professional classes who are happy to promote Chinese values and interests. 
They do so mostly for financial or other advantages but at times also out of genuine political conviction or convenience.
Rather than only China trying to actively build up political capital, there is also much influence courting on the part of those political elites in EU member states.
China has already made significant progress toward a more fragmented and pliant Europe that better serves its authoritarian interests. 
If Europe intends to stop the momentum of Chinese influencing efforts, it needs to act swiftly and decisively.
In responding to China’s advance, European governments need to make sure that the liberal DNA of their countries’ political and economic systems stays intact.
 Some restrictions will be necessary, but Europe should not copy China’s illiberalism.
While staying as open as possible, Europe needs to address critical vulnerabilities to Chinese authoritarian influencing through a multi-pronged strategy that integrates different branches of government, businesses, media, civil society, culture/arts as well as academia. 
 To better leverage the collective weight of EU member states, larger member states, such as Germany and France, need to take serious steps towards putting their privileged bilateral relations with China in the service of common European interests.
Complaining about the 16+1 format China uses to interact with smaller EU members in central and eastern Europe while engaging in 1+1 formats with Beijing undermines a common EU response to challenges from China. 
In addition, European governments need to invest in high-calibre, independent China expertise. Raising awareness about and responding to China’s political influencing efforts in Europe can succeed only if there is sufficient impartial expertise on China in think-tanks, universities, NGOs and media across Europe. 
 Furthermore, the EU needs to continue providing alternatives to the promises of Chinese investments in European countries.
It also needs to enable EU members and third countries in the neighbourhood to properly evaluate, monitor and prepare large-scale infrastructure projects, including those financed by China.
 The EU and its members must be able to stop state-driven takeovers of companies that are of significant public interest.
In addition to high-tech sectors as well as key parts of public infrastructure, this notably includes the media, as an institution of critical importance to liberal democracies.
 Foreign funding of political parties from outside Europe, not least from China, should be banned across the EU. 
European intelligence services urgently need to enhance co-operation on Chinese activities to arrive at a common understanding of the threat and to deliver joint responses. 
 EU members should put additional awareness-building measures in place sensitise potential targets of Chinese intelligence activities. 
In particular, decision makers and scholars should be briefed more systematically about common patterns of contact-building and approaches by Chinese intelligence agencies or related actors.
 For the wider public to get a full picture of authoritarian influencing, liberal democracies need to leverage one of the key assets of open societies: the power of critical public debate.
Implementing transparency requirements concerning collaboration with Chinese actors for media agencies, universities and think-tanks, among others, would help raise awareness of the various influencing mechanisms Chinese state actors employ. 
 “Vigilance is wise; confidence a useful adjunct,” the Economist counselled recently in a piece on China’s influence in Europe.
With the necessary defensive mechanisms in place, confidence should come more easily.

Sunlight v subversion: What to do about China’s infiltration?

China is manipulating decision-makers in Western democracies. The best defence is transparency.

The Economist

WHEN a rising power challenges an incumbent one, war often follows. 

That prospect, known as the Thucydides trap after the Greek historian who first described it, looms over relations between China and the West, particularly America. 

So, increasingly, does a more insidious confrontation. 

Even if China does not seek to conquer foreign lands, it seeks to conquer foreign minds.
Australia was the first to raise a red flag about China’s tactics. 

On December 5th allegations that China has been interfering in Australian politics, universities and publishing led the government to propose new laws to tackle “unprecedented and increasingly sophisticated” foreign efforts to influence lawmakers (see article). 

This week an Australian senator resigned over accusations that, as an opposition spokesman, he took money from China and argued its corner. 

Britain, Canada and New Zealand are also beginning to raise the alarm. 

On December 10th Germany accused China of trying to groom politicians and bureaucrats. 

And on December 13th Congress held hearings on China’s growing influence.
This behaviour has a name—“sharp power”, coined by the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-based think-tank. 

“Soft power” harnesses the allure of culture and values to add to a country’s strength; sharp power helps authoritarian regimes coerce and manipulate opinion abroad.
The West needs to respond to China’s behaviour, but it cannot simply throw up the barricades. 

Unlike the old Soviet Union, China is part of the world economy. 

Instead, in an era when statesmanship is in short supply, the West needs to find a statesmanlike middle ground. 

That starts with an understanding of sharp power and how it works.

Influencing the influencers
China has long tried to use visas, grants, investments and culture to pursue its interests. 

But its actions have recently grown more intimidating and encompassing. 

Its sharp power has a series of interlocking components: subversion, bullying and pressure, which combine to promote self-censorship. 

For China, the ultimate prize is pre-emptive kowtowing by those whom it has not approached, but who nonetheless fear losing funding, access or influence.
China has a history of spying on its diaspora, but the subversion has spread. 

In Australia and New Zealand Chinese money has bought influence in politics, with party donations or payments to individual politicians. 

This week’s complaint from German intelligence said that China was using the LinkedIn business network to ensnare politicians and government officials, by having people posing as recruiters and think-tankers and offering free trips.
Bullying has also taken on a new menace. 

Sometimes the message is blatant, as when China punished Norway economically for awarding a Nobel peace prize to a Chinese pro-democracy activist. 

More often, as when critics of China are not included in speaker line-ups at conferences, or academics avoid study of topics that China deems sensitive, individual cases seem small and the role of officials is hard to prove. 

But the effect can be grave. 

Western professors have been pressed to recant. 

Foreign researchers may lose access to Chinese archives. 

Policymakers may find that China experts in their own countries are too ill-informed to help them.
Because China is so integrated into economic, political and cultural life, the West is vulnerable to such pressure. 

Western governments may value trade over scoring diplomatic points, as when Greece vetoed a European Union statement criticising China’s record on human rights, shortly after a Chinese firm had invested in the port of Piraeus. 

The economy is so big that businesses dance to China’s tune without being told to.

An Australian publisher suddenly pulled a book, citing fears of “Beijing’s agents of influence”.

China's new weapon to infiltrate the West: LinkedIn

What to do?
Facing complaints from Australia and Germany, China has called its critics irresponsible and paranoid.

However, if China were being more truthful, it would point out that its desire for influence is what happens when countries become powerful.
China has a lot more at stake outside its borders today than it did. 

Some 10m Chinese have moved abroad since 1978. 

It worries that they will pick up democratic habits from foreigners and infect China itself. 

Separately, Chinese companies are investing in rich countries, including in resources, strategic infrastructure and farmland. 

China’s navy can project power far from home. 

Its government frets that its poor image abroad will do it harm. 

And as the rising superpower, China has an appetite to shape the rules of global engagement—rules created largely by America and western Europe and routinely invoked by them to justify their own actions.

Open societies ignore China’s sharp power at their peril.
Part of their defence should be practical. 

Counter-intelligence, the law and an independent media are the best protection against subversion. 

All three need Chinese speakers who grasp the connection between politics and commerce in China. The Chinese Communist Party suppresses free expression, open debate and independent thought to cement its control. 

Merely shedding light on its sharp tactics—and shaming kowtowers—would go a long way towards blunting them.

Ignoring manipulation in the hope that China will be more friendly in the future would only invite the next jab. 

Instead the West needs to stand by its own principles, with countries acting together if possible, and separately if they must. 

The first step in avoiding the Thucydides trap is for the West to use its own values to blunt China’s sharp power.