The CCP brings a bazooka to information warfare while we debate what knife to use

It's time to play hard ball

Note: This essay was originally published in the Australian on 9 Jan, 2023. I have updated it a little with regard to the new push in the US to ban TikTok.

In early March, soon after Putin launched his “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, a friend invited me to join a WeChat group of mainly Chinese migrants in Australia. “They are talking about the war. You might be interested”, she said. 

What I didn’t expect was they were discussing it exclusively from the perspective of the Russians, by constantly sharing Chinese state media and social media posts which were in turn wholly sourced from Russian propaganda: The Nazi Ukrainian Government committed genocide in Donbas, President Zelensky has escaped to the US with stolen billions, NATO provoked Moscow into self-defense, etc. 

Shocked by how these migrants were cocooned in a Russian disinformation bubble despite living in a liberal Australia, I took screenshots of the contents and posted them on Twitter with translation, carefully masking any personal identifiable information of course. 

The tweets coincided with efforts by a group of overseas Chinese volunteers to highlight misogynist, nationalist, xenophobic and even violent posts allowed on China’s highly censored social media, in what is named “The Great Translation Movement”. Naturally Chinese state media was not amused. Dozens of articles were churned out  lambasting us as “Chinese speaking bad faith actors” and agents of the CIA plotting to smear our former homeland.

While the cheque from Langley still hasn’t arrived, my concern about Wechat’s malign influence on the Chinese Australian community grows day by day. 

Wechat started as a simple messaging and photo sharing app from the city of Shen Zhen, China’s tech hub, in 2011. Partly due to its design ingenuity, partly due to lack of foreign competition because China banned most western social media platforms, it has become the dominant mega app in China combining networking, news, entertainment, banking and e-commerce, with over 1.2 billion users. Life in China is virtually impossible without the app.

Because of its market monopoly in China, Wechat is also the most popular social media app for the 650,000 Chinese migrants here, as it is the most convenient way to stay connected to families and friends back in China. According to a recent Lowy Institute survey, Wechat is the main source of information for these migrants. 

But like every media outlet and social media platform in China, Wechat is under strict censorship by CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. No criticism of the party leadership is allowed. No discussion of any sensitive political topics, such as Xinjiang or the 1989 student protest, can take place. Even usage of keywords like Xi Jinping, democracy or Tiananmen can trigger interventions from web monitors. Recently many users found their account suspended after sharing photos of a rare public protest on a Beijing overpass during the 20th CCP Congress.

Despite the official claim of “neutrality” by Beijing, China’s state media has been pumping out pro-Moscow propaganda ever since the start of the war, in service of the CCP’s overall objective of supporting Russia, a “no limit” strategic partner of China, and undermining US and NATO led world order. As all alternative views are censored, it is no surprise that those I encountered in the Wechat group became ardent Putin supporters. 

Herein lies the problem: while Chinese state propaganda reaches the migrants ten thousand miles away unimpeded through Wechat and the web, Beijing prohibits its own citizens from accessing many western news websites such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, in addition to blocking western social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and search engine Google, Most of the Australian media sites are banned too, including the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, and the Australian. 

As Chinese state media outlets operate freely in Australia, there has been no Australian journalist on the ground in China since September 2020, when the last remaining few were withdrawn out of safety concerns after being harassed by Chinese police in apparent retaliation for Australian Federal Police raiding homes of Chinese reporters in foreign interference investigations. Chinese Australian journalist Cheng Lei and writer Yang Hengjun have languished in Chinese jails for over two years on unspecified national security charges.  

The new Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Mr Xiao Qian, has addressed the National Press Club, done many TV interviews, penned a few opinion articles in national newspapers, while Prime Minister Scott Morrison had to suffer the indignity of losing his Wechat account when either out of greed or under instruction from the Chinese Foreign Ministry the Chinese agent responsible for registering his account sold it to another business. Hundreds of Chinese diplomats, state media outlets and journalists flood western social media with pro-CCP contents, under instruction from President Xi Jinping to “tell good China story”, but our ABC’s Wechat account is only allowed to post Australian lifestyle articles.  

We think the demise of the Soviet Union proved the ultimate failure of communist ideology, but the main lesson the CCP drew was to never repeat Gorbachev's weakness in the face of western liberal values and his inability to control public opinion. The advent of the internet briefly brought hope to end the monopoly on information by dictatorships. Bill Clinton once challenged Beijing’s ability to control the internet, comparing it to “nailing jello to the wall”. Yet nailed it Xi Jinping did, with advanced technology and armies of human censors. As Xiao Qiang of UC Berkeley joked to the Economist: in the beginning Chinese people felt like A New Hope, then the Emperor Strikes Back; but there is no The Jedi Returns, instead we have The Emperor’s Got AI. 

We in the West pride ourselves on having a free and open society. To Marxists-Leninists of the CCP, suppression of dissents and promoting of party propaganda are matters of political life and death,one of the key pillars to support their hold on power. We think we live in a marketplace of ideas. The CCP is not that naive. They treat it as an information war. By building the Great Fire Wall from the global internet, and exploiting the freedom of communication in the West with billions spent on external propaganda to enhance its “international discourse power”, China is bringing a bazooka to the ideology fight, while we are still debating the legality of using the knife,for example whether to ban Wechat and Tiktok.

Let’s be clear: freedom of speech is the bedrock principle of our democracy. But the right to free expression is reserved for citizens of our society, not foreign state actors. Chinese state media operatives may insist they are real journalists no different to their western counterparts, but Xi Jinping himself couldn’t be more explicit: the role of Chinese media is to loyally serve the interest of the CCP by closely following its leadership in “thought, politics and action”. As state actors, their participation in our civil society should be regulated as all other areas of state relations, based on the fundamental diplomatic principle of reciprocity.

In June this year the China Social Media Reciprocity Act was introduced in the US Congress. The bill aimed to bar US social media platforms from hosting accounts of Chinese government officials and state media outlets unless China lifts its prohibitions on Chinese citizens from accessing contents generated by US officials and persons. 

This is a good template to start with. We should take one step further. Australia should liaise with the US and other like minded nations to form a united front and deny the privilege of reaching the western audience by Chinese state media unless equal and reciprocal access to the Chinese market can be established for western media.

Because fair is fair.

Update: The US Congress is considering a ban of TikTok at the moment, mainly due to the issue of Chinese government’s mandated access to its data. To me, the issue of data privacy is less a concern than the role Chinese owned social media platforms play in the China’s propaganda war. The West should leverage TikTok’s vast western user market to demand real change in China’s highly protected and censored domestic cyberspace: You want to make money and push your propaganda in the West? Fine, but let us do the same in China.