Su Chii-cherng, the director-general of the Osaka branch of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, committed suicide on September 14, 2018. He was the victim of a Chinese disinformation attack on the government he served.
One of Beijing’s “content farms” had manufactured a news report that China had sent buses to rescue Taiwanese tourists stranded by a typhoon at the Osaka airport after Su’s office, the de facto Taiwanese consulate in the city, had failed to do so. In fact, Osaka’s Kansai Airport had sent the buses. The Taiwanese diplomat believed the fabricated report, however, and took his life over the shame of abandoning the tourists.
I had heard of China’s rescue of the Taiwanese tourists at the time but didn’t fully realize the report was false until I read Joshua Kurlantzick’s Beijing’s Global Media Offensive.
“Of all the places in the world, Taiwan is probably the one where China’s disinformation tactics have become the most sophisticated,” writes Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. The false report about the stranded tourists, as he explains, appeared both credible and damaging to Taiwan’s reputation. And the reporting was widely distributed: it was read around the world after being “laundered” by China’s Guancha.cn website and the Communist Party’s Global Times tabloid.
Beijing’s ambitions go well beyond convincing the twenty-four million people of Taiwan that they want to be annexed by Chinese communists. As Kurlantzick states at the beginning of his important book,
China increasingly and openly wants to reshape the world in its image and is using its influence and information efforts to promote this brand of technology-enabled authoritarianism . . .
China is more totalitarian than authoritarian these days, but in any event Beijing’s more assertive propaganda approach has coincided with the ascension of Xi Jinping, who became the Communist Party’s general secretary at the end of 2012. Xi, more than any other leader since Mao, has explicitly tried to export the “China model” of governance and societal organization to the entire world.
In the two decades before Xi, Beijing merely tried to burnish its image in other countries with information campaigns. Under Xi, the regime’s claims about itself have become grander and its tactics to push narratives more coercive. Moreover, the Chinese party-state under Xi has gone on the propaganda offensive, tearing down perceived adversaries and enemies, including the United States. The Chinese leadership sees information as a worldwide “battleground.”
China during this time moved from its “charm offensive”—a phrase taken from the title of Kurlantzick’s 2007 work, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World—to the use of “sharp power,” disinformation, misinformation, and other covert tactics. Beijing made the move in part because its “soft power” approach had first “stumbled” and then was “torpedoed” by its handling of covid-19.
The world, therefore, can expect more Chinese disinformation of the type that drove Su Chii-cherng to take his life. “China has come to rely more on sharp power than on soft power, and it is likely Beijing will lean even harder on sharp power in the 2020s as it improves its information and influence campaigns,” Kurlantzick writes in his comprehensive book of 367 pages of text and 138 pages of footnotes. China, unfortunately, has copied Russia’s successful influence efforts, and Beijing has proven to be a “fast learner.” Moscow and Beijing have vowed to “tell each other’s stories well,” so China is spreading Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine through its own channels. “The assault on truth” now has two large allies.
Perhaps make that two large allies and a smallish partner: China, Russia, and Iran have been “increasingly converging on disinformation narratives about the United States.” The Chinese correctly believe that the constant reinforcement of messaging over time will be effective.
China has expended considerable resources to increase what it calls “discourse power.” No other state comes close to its spending on Communist Party and state media. Chinese outlets, as a result, are giants. China Global Television Network, better known as cgtn, can claim, based on access to households, to be “the world’s biggest television network.” China Radio International is the world’s second-biggest radio broadcaster. Xinhua News Agency had 181 bureaus in early 2021 and since has opened more. “As a result,” Kurlantzick tells us, “Chinese outlets have a growing bullhorn to blast out news on issues Beijing cares about.”
Yet China’s media organs are not as dominant as they look. Yes, cgtn’s English-language page has more than 117 million Facebook followers, and no other media company has more. That does not translate into influence, however, because the presence of Chinese outlets on social media is “inorganic.” For one thing, “the amount of real, authentic engagement seems low,” Beijing’s Global Media Offensive notes. Most of the content “generates few comments in response, raising suspicions about how many real followers they have.” Investigations reveal that Facebook followers come from “click farms.”
cgtn needs all the help it can get because, among other things, the network has an insoluble dilemma. It could appeal to foreign audiences with certain propaganda narratives, but those narratives are, in the words of James Palmer as quoted by Kurlantzick, “anathema to the people the station answers to back home.” Palmer, who once worked for a Chinese state media organ in Beijing, tells us that avoiding “political errors” is more important to media officials than anything else.
In general, it would seem that China has two successful state media models to choose from: Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Russia’s RT, once known as Russia Today.
Qatar has allowed Al Jazeera to produce “a high degree of excellent reporting” without interference except on a few subjects, notably Israel and Saudi Arabia. For the most part, the Qatari government has little interest in the general state of the world. China’s regime, however, wants to control the storylines about everything and therefore imposes tight controls on all subjects. Scratch Al Jazeera as a model for China.
RT has been popular because it is “disruptive, hypercontrarian, controversial.” China has increasingly employed Russia’s “flamethrower approach,” but this effective tactic has only limited utility for an ambitious Beijing. China wants to be seen by the world as “a different type of power from the United States and other leading democracies,” because, it argues, it understands “developing states’ needs” and is sensitive to their “political and cultural norms.” Therefore, “going full crazy, Kremlin style” is not in the cards for Chinese leaders, Kurlantzick perceptively writes.
China, therefore, has no successful model to follow. Most of its media efforts are failures, and only Xinhua News Agency is successful, in large part because this official outlet often plays it straight with content-sharing deals, which give some but not much propaganda benefit for the Communist Party.
As Beijing’s Global Media Offensive continually points out—the book is repetitious—China’s media efforts are undermined by Xi Jinping’s aggressive policies and tactics. Chinese propaganda cannot sell a narrative that people do not want to buy and which they suspect is not true.
Yet America has a dilemma too: “Washington is undercutting its promotion of global internet freedom by presiding over declining online openness at home.” Kurlantzick cites a Freedom House study showing American internet freedom declining for three straight years, the result of surveillance by law enforcement and the spread of disinformation by both foreign and domestic actors. Yet he does not answer a crucial question: wouldn’t the scrubbing of disinformation, especially that created by Americans themselves, reduce that prized openness? The recent effort of the Biden administration to create a Disinformation Governance Board, for instance, almost certainly would have run afoul of the First Amendment and was in any event extremely disturbing. Democracies like America have yet to resolve competing factors. Kurlantzick, after raising the crucial issue, should have done more than merely dismiss the matter as democracies suffering from “self-inflicted wounds.”
So what should America and free societies do in the face of China’s media blitz? Chinese media outlets will only learn and improve, and Kurlantzick in his final chapter offers recommendations. Many of them are sound. He wisely urges democracies to focus their energies on countering what Beijing is doing well and not bother trying to capitalize on its many failures.
One of Beijing’s most important failures occurred in Taiwan, where recent Chinese efforts have begun to fall flat. Kurlantzick chronicles how China engineered the phenomenal rise of the Kuomintang’s Han Kuo-yu, an “undistinguished” politician. Aided by favorable Chinese publicity, Han came out of nowhere in 2018 to win the mayor’s seat in Kaohsiung, a traditional stronghold of the Democratic Progressive Party, and that victory propelled him to the nomination of his party in the 2020 presidential election.
“Beijing often puts out clunky, unnuanced false media reports, many of which are easily traced back to China and, when exposed, wind up alienating the citizens of the place Beijing was trying to influence,” Kurlantzick writes. “China has built a giant influence and information apparatus but currently wields it clumsily and often poorly.”
China’s maneuverings in Taiwan were in fact exposed and created a backlash in the election, leading to the result that Beijing did not want: the ignominious failure of Han and the landslide reelection of Tsai Ing-wen in 2020.
A little more than a year after the tragic death of Su Chii-cherng, Beijing suffered a historic defeat in Taiwan—largely at its own hands.
