This article was originally published by The Diplomat.
China has barely scratched the surface of its potential to carry out a “people’s war” on global public opinion.
2022 is bound to be a turbulent year for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as he deals with diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Winter Olympics, tries to keep the pandemic under control with his draconian zero-COVID policy, looks to revive the economy, and, most importantly, prepares for a precedent-breaking third term as China’s leader. In response to these challenges, the party-state’s enormous propaganda apparatus is ramping up its global disinformation efforts.
Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long engaged in information warfare to manipulate public opinion, hoping to win hearts and minds around the world, Beijing has recently stepped up its global efforts, showing some new patterns and characteristics unseen before.
One of them is that China’s domestic and international disinformation machinery have started to merge. A request-for-bids notification of a Shanghai local police department in 2021 cast light on this trend. According to a recent New York Times report, the Pudong branch of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau publicly asked contractors to bid for services that included setting up large quantities of fake accounts on international social media, pushing out propaganda content, creating videos, attracting followers, posting pro-China comments, and tracking China’s critics and extracting their personal information.
The Pudong branch is just one of many district-level police departments – Shanghai alone has at least another 15. There are over 300 such police departments nationwide, and several thousand county-level police departments. In the past, these local police departments didn’t do propaganda work overseas but rather focused on domestic “public opinion management.” The Pudong police notification thus signifies the breaking of a boundary – China has begun expanding its information warfare terrain by mobilizing its domestic internet army into the international arena.
This Mao Zedong-style “people’s war” on global public opinion is alarming because China’s covert propaganda operation is getting bigger by the day. Last year, Georgetown University scholar Ryan Fedasiuk found that “the militarization of China’s internet trolls” resulted in an over 20 million strong so-called volunteer internet army under the Communist Youth League (CYL). This collective could easily flood international social media platforms if it jumped the Great Firewall, as some have done in the past. This “army” consists of college students and members of the CYL, whose job is patrolling internet commentators and public opinion guides. Additionally, there are 2 million paid professional internet commentators, volunteer censors, and an unknown number of internet police. China’s propaganda machine also has over 1 million journalists and reporters tasked with the mission to “tell China’s story well.” Armed with AI and bots, China’s huge internet army could hobble global social media platforms with a large-scale flooding attack to win the CCP’s public opinion war.
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Jianli Yang is founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and the author of “For Us, The Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth.”
Nick Monaco is an expert researcher of Chinese disinformation and computational propaganda. He is chief innovation officer and director of China research at Miburo Solutions, a disinformation and influence operations research company.
