While kinetic warfare is raging in Ukraine, China is conducting a different type of warfare from inside corridors of nondescript government office buildings in cities around the country. Beijing uses sophisticated messaging tactics to “drown out critical narratives by both flooding the international information environment to limit access to content that contradicts Beijing’s official line, and by creating an artificial appearance of support for PRC policies,” according to a State Department report released on Thursday. China is actively manipulating and attempting to dominate global discourse on sensitive issues that include the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, Taiwan independence, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the United States, in general. One of its most egregious campaigns involves discrediting independent sources reporting on the Uyghur genocide and China’s other crimes against humanity. Beijing seeks to amplify its preferred narrative on Xinjiang by employing sophisticated AI-generated images to create the appearance of authenticity of fake user profiles. The reports notes that Beijing works to silence dissent by “engaging in digital transnational repression, trolling, and cyberbullying.”
It floods conversations to drown out messages it perceives as unfavorable to its interests on search engines and in social media feeds. By flooding information ecosystems with counternarratives, conspiracy theories, and unrelated news items Beijing can effectively suppress narratives detailing its atrocities in Xinjiang. It is so successful that many people don’t question Beijing’s “astroturfing,” or “inauthentic posts,” to create the false illusion of widespread grassroots support. The State Department points to positive stories manufactured by the government about Xinjiang and the Uyghur population, claiming the people there live “simple happy lives” and have experienced economic gains due to CCP policies. It says that in mid-2021, more than 300 pro-PRC inauthentic accounts posted thousands of videos of Uyghurs appearing to deny abuse in the region and claiming they were “very free.” The NY Times says that officials in Xinjiang created pro-Beijing videos, which first appeared on PRC-based platforms and then spread to YouTube and Twitter, in order to manipulate public opinion.
Increasingly sophisticated tools create composite images that cannot be traced using a reverse image search, making it harder to determine whether the account is inauthentic, according to the report. It adds that some of the accounts consistently denied China’s atrocities in Xinjiang and falsely asserted that the body of overwhelming and objective independent evidence of the atrocities is simply a fabrication of the United States and its allies.
Trolling campaigns aimed at the Chinese diaspora communities harass them into silence and self-censorship. Beijing poisons the information highway with bad-faith arguments. “Trolling campaigns frequently evolve into threats of death, rape, or assault; malicious cyber-attacks,” according to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The most aggressive PRC “messengers,” according to the report, often go on the offensive, creating “false equivalencies” with the actions of other countries to distract from international criticism of PRC behavior. China denies claims made by independent media outlets and internationally renowned think tanks. When accused of subjecting the Uyghurs to forced labor, it inundates its diplomatic accounts and CCP-affiliated media with suspected bot networks about the mechanized cotton harvesting process in Xinjiang, suggesting that the Xinjiang cotton industry has no need for forced labor. This type of messaging allows Beijing to avoid responding to reports regarding the authorities’ transfer of an estimated 100,000 Uyghurs out of Xinjiang in what the State Department calls “coercive labor placements,” or factories, elsewhere in the PRC. Stories coming out of the government falsely refer to a multicultural society living in harmony. They stand in contrast to the reality of Beijing’s extensive surveillance of the Uyghurs, which includes Chinese CCP officials living in Uyghur homes for at least six weeks a year despite Uyghur objections.
“Despite these efforts to distract from the situation in Xinjiang, independent media outlets, academics, and human rights activists have published multiple eyewitness accounts and verifiable data that the PRC has imprisoned an estimated one million people and that credible evidence exists of torture, forced sterilization, and other abuses,” the report says. China’s is waging a major AI information war. Analytics firm Miburo Solutions identified more than “200 third-country influencers affiliated with PRC state media creating social media content in at least 38 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian with an average reach of 309,000 followers.” It found that the Chinese government uses influencers to advance its narratives regarding Xinjiang by obscuring state media employees’ affiliations and by orchestrating pro-PRC Western influencers’ tours of Xinjiang. It also uses false fact sheets to claim that the Uyghur internment camps are vocational education and training centers that “fully guaranteed the trainees’ personal freedom and dignity.” Amnesty International has published first-hand accounts calling China’s allegation false, saying that the minority population is subject to regular interrogation, torture, and other mistreatment.
In 2022 China is reaching out to influencers around the western world to get help in reaching young international audiences who can be more easily inculcated into China’s insidious misinformation and propaganda campaigns. The State Department report is a long-overdue step in outing the CCP’s methods of operation.
Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.
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