Good morning everyone, and thank you to Brad [Roberts] for the kind introduction.  It’s a pleasure to be back at the Livermore Lab.

I really enjoyed being able to participate in CGSR’s event last year on information confrontation with America’s strategic competitors, and to publish a monograph on the topic as one of its Occasional Papers series. 

What I thought I’d do today after quickly recapping my earlier points about Russian and Chinese information strategy, is to expand a bit on the specific challenges presented by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) information strategy.   I’ll only be expressing my personal views here, of course, but it’s a fascinating topic and I hope you find these remarks interesting.

Russian versus Chinese Disinformation

In my paper with CGSR earlier this year, I argued that China and Russia take different approaches to strategic information warfare – two approaches that I called, respectively, the “replacement narrative” and the “wrecker’s narrative.”  So what do I mean by that?

Well, for its part, CCP propaganda tends to tell a consistent narrative about the Party and about China, and wants the rest of the world to believe that story.  As it seeks to restructure the current international system into a much more Sinocentric form – a replacement world order, if you will, which Xi Jinping has termed a “new type” of great power relations – China seeks to win acceptance of a “replacement narrative,” its vision of a “‘harmonious’ and vertically constituted system of social order centered on China as the civilizational and politico-moral leader and norm-setter for the system. 

And this “replacement” aspiration in CCP practice means that there’s an important structural difference between Russian and Chinese approaches to the idea of “truth.”

For a replacement narrative to succeed, however, there must still – in theory at least – be something called “truth,” for we are asked to accept China’s narrative as being the truth. This is quite different from Russian propaganda, for Moscow’s approach to outward-facing propaganda has no particular desire to replace the narratives of the current international order with its own version.  So it doesn’t really need there to be anything like truth.   It just seeks to undermine others’ faith in the possibility of any such truth. 

Russian propaganda is not really interested in consistency of message, and is comfortable advancing multiple, mutually-contradictory storylines at the same time, in what has been called a high-volume, multi-channel “firehose of falsehood” – a phenomenon that Mark Galeotti describes in a recent book with the Russian term infoshum, or “information noise.” The Kremlin just wants to break everyone else’s narratives and divide them against each other, on the theory that the collapse of the West’s willingness to defend its own values in the world will leave the Putin regime sufficient space in which it can do what it pleases in consolidating a kleptocratic empire behind a buffer zone of brutalized subject states. 

Of these two approaches, I suspect the Chinese one may be more conceptually straightforward to counter.  After all, a real replacement narrative needs to hang together in some basically coherent way in order to be compelling.  You can damage it by poking holes in its logic, exposing its hypocrisies, detailing its inconsistencies, and generally just exposing it – in China’s case – for the fundamentally imperialist project it is.

By contrast, it may be harder, frankly, to fight the torrent of infoshum that comes out of Russia these days, not least because it probably takes longer to develop and promulgate a corrective narrative to some nonsensical disinformation than it does to spew it out in the first place.  The danger there is always being behind the curve, playing “catch-up” with malicious falsehoods.

But either way, I think in response to these disinformation challenges, we probably need to do at least three things.  First, we need to do more to sensitize people to the fact that they are being targeted for disinformation, and the basic nature of each adversary’s effort.  To make an analogy to advertising and public relations, you may not as an individual consumer be able to “fact-check” every impressive-sounding claim that a company might make about some commercial product it is trying to sell you, but it’s really valuable to recognize that they are trying to sell you something. 

I’ll come back to this value of simple awareness that you’re being targeted in a minute, for this is a critical point.  For now, just remember that understanding what the adversary is doing is vital: manipulative “spin” is seldom as dangerous as when you don’t realize you’re being “spun.”

Second, we need to encourage and help people to become better consumers of information – that is, to be more skilled at, accustomed to, and willing to make the mental effort needed to be thoughtful listeners to information and narratives about the world.  That certainly doesn’t mean just being reflexively skeptical and trusting nothing, since that just plays into Russia’s hands. 

But it does mean being better at thinking about how and when to trust, such as being mindful of factual grounding and the credibility of sources, of logical consistency, and of the potential impact of one’s own cognitive biases.  It may also mean being at least somewhat more statistically literate, as well as more cautious – and this, too, is a really important point – about forming the kind of first judgments that often “anchor” and powerfully shape how we evaluate subsequent information.  (A little caution on the way in, as it were, can prevent lots of silliness later!)

This is hard to do really well, and no one is doing to do it perfectly.  Nevertheless, doing these things even marginally better will necessarily help make us “harder targets” for disinformation of all sorts, whether it originates abroad or at home.

Third, I think one of our biggest vulnerabilities to disinformation comes simply from the fact that over the last couple of generations we have lost so much confidence in ourselves.  Disinformation purveyors like the Russian propaganda apparatus aren’t nearly as good at creating divisions in their target audiences as they are at taking advantage of such divisions that exist.  But we’ve given them far too many opportunities to do that.

We make it far easier for disinformation to gain traction when we no longer have confidence in ourselves and our own role in the world, or when we already halfway believe that our fellow citizens are more of a threat to all we hold dear than are foreign tyrants who wish us ill and aim their disinformation in our direction.  To help us avoid this, we need to work through our contemporary political pathologies and rediscover both that it matters deeply who “wins” in the contemporary world’s geopolitical competitions, as well as rediscover why it matters so much who wins. 

Chinese Disinformation Narratives and the “Leverage Web”

But let me turn, if you’ll permit me, from questions of how we might be better protected against disinformation to a little deeper look specifically at the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to discourse warfare.

To me, one of the most interesting twists of the CCP’s approach is the degree to which it goes far beyond simply promulgating preferred narratives against dispreferred ones.  To supercharge the impact of its narratives, China uses the web of dependencies it cultivates with the rest of the world to reward compliance with the CCP’s vision of “harmonious” Sinocentric order and punish departures from that supposed harmony.  So it’s not just about putting a replacement narrative out there, but also about organizing a kind of training and influence program to encourage everyone to validate that narrative.

One sees this, for instance, in the PRC’s employment of economic pressures to export aspects of its own domestic censorship overseas even against foreign citizens and companies, who are increasingly penalized for saying things the CPP leaders find disagreeable.  Indeed, even entire countries can now face collective chastisement for failing to conform to Beijing’s political demands, as Australia and Lithuania have already experienced. 

The CCP, moreover, is constantly seeking to expand the web of generalized asymmetric dependency upon China that it weaponizes to these ends.  Some of this can be glimpsed in what Xi Jinping described in 2014 as China’s effort to use the Belt and Road Initiative to build ever-greater “connectivity” with the rest of the world that “involves every front, is multi-dimensional, and forms a network.”

The BRI and many other efforts of Beijing’s international engagement revolve around maximizing the number of asymmetric bilateral ties that exit between China and other countries.  As scholars such as Elizabeth Economy have noted, China prefers having many one-on-one bilateral relationships to dealing with other countries as actual groups.  This ensures that resulting ties are as lopsided as possible: big China dealing one-on-one with other countries that are generally smaller and weaker. 

This indeed does create a “network” of a sort – one that is interconnected and interdependent in profoundly unequalways.  Participants in this system are more dependent upon China than China is upon them, giving them strong incentives not to anger or displease CCP authorities, and giving Beijing powerful tools of influence and control.

This is visible, for example – and remarkably explicitly – in Xi Jinping’s “dual circulation” policy, a concept under which the CCP regime aims to make China as little dependent as possible upon foreign trade (e.g., through the expansion of domestic demand) while still maximizing the dependence of the rest of the world upon China.  As this is described in the Party’s 14^th Five-Year Plan, “dual circulation” is expected to “accelerate the cultivation of new advantages” for China, advantages which it will be able to use in both “international cooperation and competition.”

Leverage in Historical Context 

It’s worth putting this in historical context.  It is certainly not a new thing for Chinese officials to try to take advantage of economic dependency upon China for political purposes.  Nor is it even a new thing for china to do this vis-à-vis the West.

In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, for instance, the Qing Dynasty – despite its growing decrepitude – enjoyed enormous leverage over the British East India Company by virtue of the fact that Company profits from its monopoly on British tea trade with China made up a significant portion of the British Empire’s overall revenue. 

This financial dependence made the East India Company politically docile for many years, afraid to offend the Qing officials who controlled access to this trade.  As Company agents in Canton once wrote to their superiors in London in the early 1800s, for instance, their “only and invariable rule of Conduct, to be observed [in China] … was on no occasion to give offense to the Chinese government.”  In a dispute with Chinese officials in 1808, in fact, even a muscular Royal Navy flotilla backed down and gave the Qing what it demanded, worrying – as Rear Admiral William Drury recorded at the time – about “the hold they have upon us by means of our Trade” and afraid that if the British offended China, it “would exclude the English forever, from the most advantageous monopoly it possesses in the Universe.” 

That profit-focused political deference on Britain’s part faded over time – not least because the East India Company lost its monopoly on the tea trade to Britain – and by the end of the 1830s the stage was set for the Opium Wars.  But while it lasted, this sort of economic leverage was a very potent tool with which China helped keep the foreign “barbarians” in line.

Much more recently, China also had much success in persuading multiple Western governments to adopt more favorable policy positions vis-à-vis Beijing by dangling access to the Chinese market in front of foreign business leaders – and, impliedly, threatening its unavailability to those who displeased the CCP.  As one official from the Foreign Ministry put it in the early 1990s, for example, “[t]he Chinese market is a big cake.  Come early and you get a big piece.  I hope our two countries have good relations, but it takes two to tango.” 

To this day, Chinese leaders including Xi Jinping himself continue to promise that “China will continue to share its market opportunities” with the rest of the world, while carefully also reminding listeners that this munificence is conditional.  After all, Xi has said, “the world … needs China for prosperity” and those who displease Beijing will not be – as he put it in 2021 when tying Chinese tourist travel abroad to issues of regional governments’ diplomatic practices – “approved destinations” for the Middle Kingdom’s patronage.  Say the wrong thing, and it could dry up. 

So there’s a fairly long history of using economic leverage in one form or another.  But what is most interesting about such practices in recent years is how systematic they have become, for they are now based upon a remarkably clear CCP philosophy of social control.  This model of control has been pioneered and refined at home in China, where it today exists in its most grotesque and oppressive form, but it is also in some key respects increasingly being exported.

A System of Social Control

So what is this theory of social control?  Well, rather than attempt the Quixotic feat of directly controlling the details of individual behavior across a large and complex society, the CCP aims to exert what might be called “effective control” over a large and diverse society through more indirect means.  It aspires, that is, to influence large masses of people into desired patterns of behavior in the aggregate, relying as much as possible upon autonomous choices within a carefully-crafted incentive structure, rather than having to give them all detailed directions. 

This approach involves the systematic use of three things: (1) widespread monitoring and data-collection about the dynamics of and behavior in targeted audiences around the world; (2) deliberate cultivation of a web of asymmetric economic and technological dependencies upon China; and (3) the “weaponization” of this “leverage web” as an instrument of both reward and punishment with which to “train” others into habits of conformity with the Party’s ways of thinking about the world and China’s role in it.

The aim is to shape societal actors’ incentives by rewarding desirable behaviors and punishing deviant ones and a system of pervasive surveillance that gives authorities a reasonable likelihood of being able to tell who is conforming and who is not, so that such rewards or punishments can be applied to them as needed.  This incentives-based system of trained conformity does not attempt to deny or substitute specific state commands for individual human agency, but instead seeks to coopt such agency.   

The epitome of this approach inside China itself is the emerging so-called “social credit score” system, whereby – in theory – citizens’ behavior is pervasively monitored and recorded enough that people’s everyday socioeconomic privileges and opportunities can be adjusted on an ongoing basis depending upon how closely they conform to CCP expectations across a wide range of politico-social behaviors.  If one engages in anything that the CCP deems to be disharmoniously “antisocial,” for instance, one might start to have problems getting high-speed internet connections to work well, obtaining a loan, getting permission to travel, or even using public transportation or accessing social services. But the point is not to administer punishment to the offender per se.  It is to train disharmonious citizens, and all those around them, to act habitually as the authorities want. 

It is well understood that such concepts underlie how the CCP runs China, or at least how it tries to do so. What is less appreciated, however, is the degree to which the totalitarian control mechanisms of modern China are explicitly based upon complex systems thinking.  This point is drawn out quite effectively, however, in the work of Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin, and the political scientist Samantha Hoffman.  They have outlined how Chinese theories of social control draw upon older Western work in cybernetics, in order to develop a data-driven approach to “social management” that attempts to apply “a sophisticated mix of carrots and sticks” that Hoffman terms a strategy of “‘co-optation and coercion.’”

And it is, to some elementary extent, this ugly domestic system of political control is the degree that the CCP has been trying to export – by degrees – to the rest of the world. 

• Every time a Western company or celebrity faces PRC economic and commercial chastisement and is told to make a groveling apology for having “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” by saying something the CCP dislikes, the CCP is trying to establish and reinforce habits of conformity. 

• Every time a Western scholar is blacklisted and barred from doing work in China for inconvenient facts identified by his or her scholarship, the CCP is trying to train other scholars to be less impertinent. 

• Every time a Western film studio faces exclusion from Chinese markets if China or the CCP is portrayed less than favorably in a screenplay, the Party is laying down a marker about how we must all describe China in the future. 

• And every time a country faces PRC economic warfare for rejecting Beijing’s political demands, it is pressured by China to change how it teaches history to its own schoolchildren, or is punished for showing some degree of solicitude to Taiwan, the CCP is working to establish and reinforce global docility. 

Such external manifestations of this model of control are, of course, much different in degree than the sort of intensive, totalizing measures which the CCP tries to implement within China, and particularly against Muslim ethnic groups in the dystopian high-tech prison-province of Xinjiang.  But such outward-facing efforts are not really that different in kind – and Beijing is doing what it can to expand their reach.

To be sure, the PRC is hardly the first country to weaponize networks of interdependence.  To some extent, we ourselves do it in the United States, and we have for the last two decades quite effectively used the world’s dependence upon “hub-and-spoke” financial networks running through the U.S. banking system to give “teeth” to the economic sanctions of the sort, for instance, imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). 

Nevertheless, as they so very often do, the details matter.  The United States uses such weaponized interdependence in service of objectives such as preventing foreign companies from helping the belligerent fundamentalist theocracy in Iran from building nuclear weapons, enforcing United Nations sanctions against North Korea, combating drug smuggling, fighting human trafficking, and punishing serious human rights abuses.  In other words, I would argue, it uses this weaponization for important and even noble purposes – in trying to accomplish things that it ought to be discreditable for anyone to oppose wishing to do, even if some may perhaps resent America’s ability, as a superpower, to do them.  And our efforts are generally focused on addressing some highly concrete harm created by specific dangerous behaviors – such as punishing a country for invading and attempting to annex its neighbor.

By contrast, CCP weaponizes global dependencies upon China to build and enforce a code of speech and thought control upon the rest of humanity.  It uses this leverage to support its worldwide disinformation and propaganda campaigns, in the service of prolonging the Party’s grip on power in China and giving it more ability to dictate the terms of political discourse to the rest of the world.  This agenda is fundamentally selfish and self-aggrandizing, rather than humanitarian, and it aspires to achieve what is essentially mind control in the most sinister of ways. 

The CCP is trying to use its global leverage web to inculcate habits of “harmonious” agreement with the Party’s preferences even in matters of speech and expression.  It is trying to train us into a sort of reflexive concurrence with the Party’s replacement narrative of Sinocentric harmony, and with that narrative’s presupposition that the only reliable way to domestic or international peace and stability is for everyone to agree with or defer to the Chinese Communist Party on matters of importance. 

Nor do they really do too much to hide this, if you’re paying attention.  In the late 2000s, under Hu Jintao, CCP officials began referring to the idea of “building a harmonious world.” The idea of a “harmonious world” was unmistakably built upon claims about the “harmonious society” that the Party was said to be building in China itself, thereby signaling a desire to export CCP conceptions of political order into the international arena. 

It is quite well understood what that means.  Chinese dissidents suppressed by the Party-State, for example, have for years sometimes referred to themselves as having been “harmonized,” and political docility and conformity is unmistakably at the core of the regime-supportive “stability” that the CCP seeks to ensure in China itself, and increasingly to bring about abroad.

In fact, “harmonization” is rather explicitly an objective of Beijing’s global foreign policy.  As Xi Jinping put it in October 2021, for instance, “[c]ivilizations can achieve harmony only through communication, and can make progress only through harmonization. … Humanity should overcome difficulties in solidarity and pursue common development in harmony.” 

Such talk of harmony may sound innocuous if you’re just reading an English translation in isolation, without awareness of the overtones of such phrasings in the Chinese context, but the careful reader should make no mistake about it: we are all being told what is expected of us. 

So this bring us back to my earlier point about being aware that someone’s trying to manipulate you.

And it may be that becoming more careful and resilient consumers of information per se is not the only thing we need to do in order to armor ourselves against Chinese disinformation and against the CCP’s effort to train us into harmonious acceptance of a new, ever more Sinocentric international arena.  We also need to be more thoughtful about the full range of our engagement with the PRC, and mindful of its propensity to use economic, technological, and other entanglements as tools with which to increase what CCP officials call China’s “discourse power.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean shunning all engagement with China, any more than being more resistant to Russian disinformation requires going “cold turkey” on social media.  But engagement with China does require more care, perspicacity, and cautiousness than we have become accustomed to applying to such matters during the last few decades.

Most of us know enough, as consumers living in a modern society, to keep one hand on our wallets, as it were, when talking with a traveling salesman trying to convince us of the virtues of his wares.  But so too should people all around the world be much more wary when Chinese diplomats speak – as the continually do – about the “new type of international relations” they seek to build and the “win-win” solutions that ties to China’s development will supposedly provide to everyone, everywhere. 

Being more resistant to the manipulative political and policy distortions of the CCP’s “leverage web” starts with being aware of it.

Thanks!

-- Christopher Ford