A new report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) details the growing extent to which Chinese influence operations are infiltrating the United States.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has “directed a wide-ranging effort to enhance the potency and reach of China’s overseas influence activities,” the report’s abstract states. These operations target other countries’ media, businesses, academic institutions, and political figures.
According to the report, influence operations are necessary for “regime survival” and “advancing national interests.” The CCP’s power depends, in part, on the “behavior of foreign leaders and publics.”
“Certain factors make countries more or less resilient to China’s overseas influence activities,” the report notes. “These include the presence of liberal democratic institutions, such as a free press and an independent judiciary, the extent of economic dependence on China, the prevalence of domestic corruption, and a foreign society’s familiarity with China.”
Some influence operations involve threatening political figures pushing policies countering the CCP agenda. Other political operations aim to “curry favor with sitting officials, and to harass unfriendly political figures.”
Within economic industries, “industry associations and business councils may serve as proxies for CCP interests,” the USCC report adds. In academic circles, the CCP aims to control the narrative about China and, therefore, “influence public opinion regarding the policy choices based on that knowledge.”
The USCC provided several recommendations to limit the extent of Chinese influence operations on U.S. soil, such as amending policies to require the U.S. Department of Education to disclose foreign gifts and contracts to intelligence agencies and law enforcement groups, establishing an interagency group to create a public database identifying possible Chinese-linked entities, and developing the means by which a student believed to be surveilling on behalf of a foreign country has their student visa revoked.
Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation published testimony from policy researcher Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga regarding the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts into “cyber-enabled influence operations” (IO).
The CCP has used “synthetic information,” which was described as the production of “inauthentic content based on some amount of original information,” as well as social media algorithms, to enable “precision cognitive attacks.”
The testimony referred to an article explaining that ChatGPT’s data processing ability supports “precision cognitive attacks” by creating a profile of an individual based on the data it gathers.
