The Europeans are starting to wake up. The German foreign ministry and the Chancellor now see China for the challenge that it is. In Britain, the official narrative of a ‘golden era’ in UK-China relations is increasingly being called into question. A report by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published in April 2019 concludes that the China policy of recent British governments – basically, putting business interests over all others – reflects ‘an unwillingness to face the reality’ that Beijing is an ‘active challenger’ to the UK in many areas.157 Unfortunately Brexit is muddying the waters: the Independent is not alone in pointing out that the ‘fear of losing post-Brexit trade deals… is interfering with the independence of foreign policy.’158
And the realisation is spreading that, although our interests are strong, our instruments are weak, especially while Europe is disunited. Crucial years have been wasted because we were wrong about China – and they were years when our influence on the path the country was taking might have been greater than it is today.
Today, China is influencing us.
THE WORLD
How China Exerts its Influence
‘Xi Jinping Thought […] has the potential to correct and transform the existing world order.’
China Daily, 30 January 2018
In London, the Royal Court Theatre removes a play about Tibetan exiles from its programme. For fear of China, says Abhishek Majumdar, the play’s Indian author. The British Council has written to the theatre, advising that the play would coincide with ‘significant political meetings’ in China and might jeopardise the Royal Court’s ability to run projects there in the future.159
Or Stuttgart, where the German car manufacturer Daimler quotes the Dalai Lama on its Instagram channel: ‘Look at a situation from all angles, and you will become more open.’ A harmless meme, a mere calendar motto. But there is an outcry from China: the leadership there regards the Dalai Lama as a ‘wolf in monk’s clothing’. At which Daimler gives the Dalai Lama the boot, prostrates itself at Beijing’s feet and suddenly starts speaking in tongues in its public statements. Daimler regrets its ‘extreme error’, the company insists. They know they have ‘hurt the feelings of the Chinese… Taking this as a warning, we are immediately introducing concrete measures to deepen our understanding of Chinese culture and values.’ To the public, it sounded as if Daimler had adopted the language of the CCP propaganda, word for word.
Or Ankara, where the Turkish foreign minister promises ‘to introduce measures to eradicate all media reports criticising China.’
Or Cambridge, where in 2017 – at the request of the Chinese censors – the venerable Cambridge University Press removes from its websites some 300 articles containing criticism of China. CUP only reverses its decision following a huge outcry from academics all over the world.
Wait a moment: isn’t China supposed to be becoming more like the West? These days the Chinese eat at McDonald’s; they listen to Adele and Lady Gaga, they drive VWs, Audis and Mercedes. Isn’t this the wrong way round? Are we in the West now supposed to change if we want to keep trading with China? In late 2017 Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was still giving voice to the old hope: ‘Your choice is, do you participate or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be? My own view very strongly is you show up and you participate, you get in the arena, because nothing ever changes from the sideline.’160
Cook’s defence of his company’s relationship with China came after weeks of harsh criticism: Apple had bowed to pressure from Beijing and removed undesirable apps from its store that allowed users to bypass the censors. A few months later, Apple signed over its Chinese iCloud server, along with all its customer data, to a firm owned by the government of Guizhou Province – in other words, to the Chinese state. Apple, incidentally, now sells one in every three of its iPhones in China. And Google, the only Silicon Valley firm to have rejected censorship and withdrawn from China in 2010, returned in 2018. It now runs an artificial intelligence laboratory there. ‘I believe AI and its benefits have no borders,’ said Beijing-born Fei-Fei Li, Google’s head of AI at the time of the move, which did not attract particular attention in the mainstream media.161
The company only made headlines when newspapers revealed that Google had secretly been working on a search engine for the Chinese market – a search engine that would provide China’s censors and surveillance state with superior Google technology. Internally, it was called ‘Project Dragonfly’ – given what we know about the multiple, all-seeing eyes of these insects, Google engineers either possess a highly-developed sense of irony, or none whatsoever. Following angry protests from its own employees, and from American politicians, Google appears to have taken a step back from the project for the time being – though reports by The Intercept suggest that work on it has not ceased completely.162
So is the West changing China, or the other way round?
Oh, and actually they don’t listen to Lady Gaga in China any more – not since she chatted to the Dalai Lama about yoga.
Watch out, world: here comes China!
The country has long been an economic superpower, though for decades it was a fairly circumspect one. Those days are gone. At the Party Congress in October 2017, Xi Jinping proclaimed a ‘new era’. He promised that China would now step ‘into the centre of the world stage’. Not content with shaping the Chinese state, China also wanted to reshape globalisation according to its own design. For the first time since Mao Zedong, China’s autocracy was advertising itself to the world as a role model, at a moment when, according to the official news agency, Xinhua, ‘Western liberal democracy is sinking into crisis and chaos’. Chinese propaganda praises the ‘Chinese path’. And China’s leader is making it the envy of all other nations once more: the whole world, says the People’s Daily, ‘feels the warmth’ of Xi Jinping’s ‘community for a common future of humanity’. The propaganda machine isn’t just glorifying Xi Jinping Thought as the ‘new communism’ at home – it is now also offering a ‘China solution to the world.’163
The competition between systems is back. Xinhua again: ‘After several hundred years, the Western model is showing its age. It is high time for profound reflection on the ills of a doddering democracy which has precipitated so many of the world’s ills and solved so few.’164 Xi Jinping has given the order ‘to strengthen China’s soft power’. The world needs to hear the ‘China story’ at long last. Yes, the Chinese lion was now waking up, said Xi on a state visit to France, alluding to Napoleon’s reported bon mot about China being a sleeping lion that shouldn’t be woken. ‘But it is peaceful, pleasant and civilised.’165
China knew that the wider world was a little suspicious – especially the countries in its immediate neighbourhood. But there was ‘no “conquest gene” in the DNA of the Chinese people,’ as Xi once said – and ever since he said it, claims of a Chinese ‘peace gene’ have featured in statements by the country’s diplomats.166 How exactly the Zhou dynasty’s few small territories around the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River three millennia ago became the vast nation we today know as China is a mystery that remains unexplained by the propaganda machine.
The CCP is now looking to exert its influence on a global scale: on business and political elites; on universities, think tanks and the media. It is meeting with surprising – and so far largely unnoticed – success. In Europe it has attracted only brief flashes of attention, as in the case of the conservative British author and civil rights activist Benedict Rogers, who campaigns against the disappearance of freedom in Hong Kong. His mother in Dorset and neighbours in London have received slanderous letters as a result of his activities, in which Rogers is vilified as an enemy of the Chinese nation. In Germany, there was some coverage when the intelligence service warned that the Chinese secret service is using social networks like LinkedIn ‘on a large scale to extract information and find intelligence sources’. The service also reported ‘a broad-based attempt to infiltrate parliaments, ministries and agencie
s.’ In summer 2018, the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed evidence that suggested China’s spies had come very close to recruiting a member of the Bundestag, the German parliament.
Just as the USA once worked to make the world a safe place for democracy, today’s China is working to make it a safe place for autocracy. Unlike Russian attempts to influence the West, which are often aimed at a general destabilisation and merely destructive, the Chinese leadership tends to focus on specific interests. At the same time, it is working on a broader strategy to build a network of pro-China opinion leaders and decision makers. The primary aim is to eradicate positions with which the Party doesn’t agree – for example, by threatening hotel chains and airlines that dare to refer to Taiwan on their websites as a country in its own right. The companies almost always cave in.
‘China is not just ‘at [Europe’s] gates’ – it is now already well within them.’ These words come from a study by the Berlin think-tanks MERICS and GPPI on the ‘authoritarian advance’ of China’s influence.167 Uneasiness about China’s behaviour is breaking out in a number of places, both inside and outside Europe. In Vancouver – the destination of many well-off Chinese emigrants – people were more than a little surprised when the mayor put on flag ceremony for the Chinese national holiday. The Chinese flag flew above city hall, while a band played the national anthem of the People’s Republic.
At the end of 2017, the first congressional hearing on China’s ‘long arm’ took place in Washington. Attempts by the Chinese government ‘to guide, buy or coerce political influence and to control discussion of “sensitive” topics’168 ubiquitous in the West, announced the Congressional Executive’s Commission on China. The heads of the CIA and FBI, too, have warned that the Chinese government has for some time been trying to increase its influence ‘on the whole of society’, and ‘to a much greater extent than the Russians’.
Nowhere is China’s influence more hotly debated today than in Australia. China is Australia’s most important trade partner. Over a million of the country’s residents have Chinese roots (out of a total population of 24 million), and half of them were born in mainland China. A recent investigation uncovered the pressure that Chinese student organisations – steered by Beijing – have been putting on university lecturers who criticise the motherland. The lecturers had broken taboos on topics like Tibet, Taiwan, or the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the student associations now demanded a change to the course and the teaching materials.169 Australia’s universities should give ‘consideration’ to ‘the feelings of Chinese classmates,’ they argued – and pointed to the substantial amount of money that China’s fee-paying students bring in every year.
Something else that emerged in this report was that Beijing had systematically forced the Australian Chinese community’s media to toe the Party line, where until a few years previously it had been vibrant and diverse. Businesspeople loyal to China had also bought influence over members of parliament in Canberra, who then parroted Chinese propaganda word for word on sensitive topics, such as China’s land-grab in the South China Sea.
There was an almighty uproar, which grew louder when the Australian author and academic Clive Hamilton revealed that a major publisher, Allen & Unwin, had cancelled the publication of a new book he had written criticising China. The manuscript was ready, but the publisher pulled out, fearing complaints from the Chinese figures named in its pages. No threats were ever made, says Hamilton. The fear of China alone – the ‘shadow it now casts over Australia’ – was enough.170 In the eyes of many Australians, the publisher’s move proved exactly what the author had set out to argue – namely ‘that a powerful, authoritarian foreign state can suppress criticism of it abroad, and so smooth the path for its ongoing campaign to shift this country into its orbit.’ The book finally came out with another publisher, but the concerns it aired remain as pressing as ever.171
In an address to the national parliament, a representative of ASIO, the Australian intelligence service, called the ‘extent of the threat’ from China’s activities ‘extreme’. There have also been warning voices in neighbouring New Zealand. There, the public debate began when its secret service revealed that a Chinese-born MP, Yang Jian, had once taught future Chinese spies at an army school in Luoyang. The New Zealand sinologist Anne-Marie Brady is the author of Magic Weapons, one of the most detailed studies to date of China’s attempts to exert overseas influence.172 She believes that ‘China’s covert, corrupting and coercive political influence activities in New Zealand are now at a critical level.’173
After her ground-breaking report was published, Brady experienced what she described as a campaign of intimidation. Her house and office in Christchurch were broken into several times, the intruders clearly looking for her computer, mobile phone and USB stick. She received anonymous phone calls and threatening letters (‘You are the next’). Someone broke into her garage and her car was found to have been tampered with.174
Today Australia and New Zealand. Tomorrow Europe? China’s efforts to influence the rest of the world aren’t all in the form of covert operations. But ‘soft power’, which relies on the natural charisma radiated by a nation and its culture, somehow isn’t working for China. ‘Why is China so… uncool?’ asked Foreign Policy magazine in March 2017.175 Well, when was the last time the world saw a cool dictatorship? There’s only so many points a nation can score with the invention of gunpowder and paper.
A survey carried out by the Pew Research Center found that in many African and Latin American countries the majority of people have a positive image of China. In the USA and Europe, those numbers are considerably smaller; the Germans in particular are notoriously sceptical. Ultimately, though, this doesn’t matter, a US-educated economist at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua university tells me: ‘We simply buy our influence. We’ve got enough money. Look at all the people who are already saying what we want to hear. And in the future, we’ll be even richer.’
In reality, Beijing employs a mixture of enticements and threats, recruitment and infiltration. As early as 2015, the American sinologist David Shambaugh estimated that China was spending around 10 billion dollars a year on such image-and influence-boosting initiatives – far more than the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan put together.176 It’s a collective effort, by no means confined to the diplomats: universities, think-tanks, friendship societies and secret services are all in on the act, as well as Chinese companies that trade globally (including private companies). And of course, the Party and its multifarious departments are never far away.
One of the most interesting of these organisations resides in the heart of Beijing. West of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where a portrait of Mao still greets you, lies the Zhongnanhai (Middle and Southern Seas) complex, which is forbidden to outsiders. It is the part of the old imperial garden that Mao’s revolutionaries selected as their seat of government, immediately after the Revolution. This is China’s Kremlin – and just next door, at 135 Fuyou Street, are the offices of the United Front: the organ through which the Party plans to bring Chinese people living abroad into line.
The United Front is an invention of Lenin’s, and has been a staple of communist regimes all over the world. Traditionally its task has been to subsume new social groups, to neutralise troublemakers, to reel in persons of influence and turn them into mouthpieces for the Party line. In China, the United Front looks after the eight political parties permitted for form’s sake (as in the GDR, for instance) to exist outside the Communist Party. It also brings ethnic minorities, religious groups, and celebrities into the system. Billionaire entrepreneurs, pop stars and starlets, along with the odd Tibetan, Mongolian or Uighur – always clad in splendid traditional dress – are invited to ‘political consultative conferences’, whose primary purpose is to applaud the leadership. Now and then the guests may also make suggestions, but they have no real power or influence. The bosses of the new internet companies and start-ups are also regularly summoned to United Front seminars, where they a
re instructed in patriotism and ‘revolutionary traditions’.
During the decades of reform and opening up, China’s United Front steadily lost influence and became a siding in which to park comrades who had earned an easy job. Now Xi Jinping has awoken the United Front from its slumber. He is calling it, as Mao once did, a ‘magic weapon’ in the CCP’s fight for influence. Today, according to Anne-Marie Brady, the organisation ‘has taken on a level of significance not seen in China since the years before 1949.’177 One passage from a United Front handbook that fell into the hands of the Financial Times reads: ‘Enemy forces abroad do not want to see China rise and many of them see our country as a potential threat and rival, so they use a thousand ploys and a hundred strategies to frustrate and repress us.’178 Fortunately, though, the United Front is ‘a big magic weapon which can rid us of 1,000 problems in order to seize victory.’ As a strategy for operations on foreign soil, the China United Front Course Book recommends the usual mixture of charm and intimidation. It encourages functionaries to appear friendly, pleasant and winning, in order to ‘unite all forces that can be united’. At the same time, they must stop at nothing to build an ‘iron Great Wall’ against all ‘enemy forces.’
For decades, the United Front preferred to operate in secret, but in 2018 the Party decided that there was no longer any need for it to hide behind other government agencies. The State Administration for Religious Affairs and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office have been swallowed up, and the United Front now operates in its own name. Xi Jinping has declared overseas work to be a priority. At the start of 2018, he created a new steering committee, forging a direct link between the United Front and the Party leadership, and thereby signalling its central role in his future plans.
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