Document Text Content
ChineseInfluence&
AmericanInterests
PROMOTING CONSTRUCTIVEVIGILANCE
Report of the Working Group on
Chinese Influence Activities in the United States
Co-Chairs
Larry Diamond
Senior Fellow
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Orville Schell
Arthur Ross Director
Center on US-China Relations
Asia Society
H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N P R E S S
STANFORD UNIVERSITY | STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
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First printing 2018
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Working Group Participants
This report grew out of a series of discussions over the past year and a half at the Hoover Institution,
Sunnylands, and George Washington University in which the following scholars participated:
Robert Daly
Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars
Larry Diamond
Hoover Institution,
Stanford University
Elizabeth Economy
Council on Foreign Relations
Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.)
Stanford University
Donald Emmerson
Stanford University
Francis Fukuyama
Stanford University
Bonnie Glaser
Center for Strategic &
International Studies
Kyle Hutzler
Stanford University
Markos Kounalakis
Hoover Institution
Winston Lord
Former US Ambassador
to China
Evan Medeiros
Georgetown University
James Mulvenon
SOS International
Andrew J. Nathan
Columbia University
Minxin Pei
Claremont McKenna College
Jeffrey Phillips
The Annenberg Foundation
Trust at Sunnylands
John Pomfret
The Washington Post
Orville Schell
Center on US-China
Relations, Asia Society
David Shambaugh
George Washington University
Susan Shirk
University of California–
San Diego
Robert Sutter
George Washington University
Glenn Tiffert
Hoover Institution
Ezra Vogel
Harvard University
Christopher Walker
National Endowment
for Democracy
International Associates
Anne-Marie Brady
University of Canterbury,
New Zealand
Timothy Cheek
University of British
Columbia, Canada
John Fitzgerald
Swinburne University, Australia
John Garnaut
Former Senior Adviser to
Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull, Australia
Timothy Garton Ash
Oxford University,
United Kingdom
Francois Godement
European Council on
Foreign Relations
Bilahari Kausikan
Former Permanent
Secretary, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Singapore
Richard McGregor
Lowy Institute, Australia
Eva Pils
King’s College London,
United Kingdom
Volker Stanzel
German Council on
Foreign Relations
The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the participants in the workshop and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution
or the participant’s affiliated institutions. The convening organizations of this project have no
affiliation with the US government.
iv
Acknowledgments
This Working Group was jointly convened by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
and the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. These co-conveners
have also been assisted, financially and logistically, by The Annenberg Foundation Trust
at Sunnylands. We are grateful to each of these institutions for their support of our work,
and to Thomas Gilligan, Director of the Hoover Institution, and Ambassador David Lane,
President of The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, for their personal support
of this project. We also thank the latter two institutions, as well as the China Policy
Program of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, for
supporting and hosting meetings of the Working Group.
This report has been a collaborative effort among a group of American scholars and policy
practitioners who have spent long careers studying and engaging China, Asia more broadly,
and a wide variety of political systems around the world. Each participant also has an
abiding interest in protecting and strengthening democratic institutions in the United
States and elsewhere in the world. While different participants took the lead in drafting
particular sections of the report, each section was reviewed and contributed to by a number
of participants in what became a truly collective and collaborative research effort. Our
general findings and policy principles represent a broad—though not necessarily complete—
consensus of the Working Group Participants.
This Working Group grew out of the Task Force on US-China Relations (chaired by Susan
Shirk and Orville Schell), and we thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the
Henry Luce Foundation for their support of the Task Force. Although the two efforts share
many members in common, they are separate and distinct endeavors.
We present this report as the collective product of discussions and research among a group
of distinguished American specialists on China and US foreign affairs. It analyzes the
growing challenge posed by China’s influence-seeking activities in the United States across
a number of important sectors of American public life. However, as we note throughout the
report, these influence activities are not confined to the US. Indeed, they appear in different
forms and to different degrees in a large number of other democratic societies around the
world (in some cases more deeply than in the US). We therefore have opted to include in an
Appendix short summary reports on China’s influence activities (and the resulting national
responses) in eight other countries.
We owe a particular debt of thanks to Kyle Hutzler, an MBA student at Stanford University
with significant experience in China. His superior organizational skills and uncomplaining
vi
capacity for prodigious work contributed enormously to the coordination of our work
throughout the project. We could not have produced this report without him.
We would also like to thank Barbara Arellano and Alison Petersen at the Hoover Institution
Press for their dedicated assistance in producing, editing, and publishing this report, as well
as Laura Chang at the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society for her assistance in
helping to coordinate the project.
Finally, we would like to thank all of the Working Group participants for their generous
contributions of time and effort. None were remunerated for their contributions, and
everyone participated and contributed out of their professional and national sense of
responsibility.
Larry Diamond
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Orville Schell
Center on US-China Relations
asia Society
October 24, 2018
Contents
Policy Principles for Constructive Vigilance
Introduction 1
ix
section 1 Congress 9
section 2 State and Local Governments 19
section 3 The Chinese American Community 29
section 4 Universities 39
section 5 Think Tanks 57
section 6 Media 79
section 7 Corporations 103
section 8 Technology and Research 121
appendix I Chinese Influence Operations Bureaucracy 133
appendix II Chinese Influence Activities in Select Countries 145
Australia 146
Canada 151
France 156
Germany 160
Japan 165
New Zealand 169
Singapore and Asean 173
United Kingdom 179
appendix III Chinese-Language Media Landscape 187
Dissenting Opinion 193
Afterword 195
About the Participants 197
viii
Policy Principles for
Constructive Vigilance
The members of this Working Group seek a productive relationship between China and
the United States. To this end, and in light of growing evidence of China’s interference
in various sectors of American government and society, we propose three broad principles
that should serve as the basis for protecting the integrity of American institutions inside the
United States while also protecting basic core American values, norms, and laws.
Transparency
Transparency is a fundamental tenet and asset of democracy, and the best protection against
the manipulation of American entities by outside actors.
• American NGOs should play an important role in investigating and monitoring
illicit activities by China and other foreign actors. They should as well seek to inform
themselves about the full range of Chinese influence activities and the distinctions
between legitimate and illegitimate influence efforts.
• Congress should perform its constitutional role by continuing to investigate, report
on, and recommend appropriate action concerning Chinese influence activities in
the United States. It should update relevant laws and regulations regarding foreign
influence, and adopt new ones, to strengthen transparency in foreign efforts to
exert influence.
• Executive branch agencies should similarly investigate and publicize, when
appropriate, findings concerning these activities, with a view to promoting healthy
and responsible vigilance among American governmental and nongovernmental
actors.
• The US media should undertake careful, fact-based investigative reporting of Chinese
influence activities, and it should enhance its knowledge base for undertaking
responsible reporting.
• Faculty governance is the key to preserving academic freedom in American
universities. All gifts, grants, endowments, and cooperative programs, including
x
Confucius Institutes, should be subjected to the usual procedures of faculty
oversight.
• US governmental and nongovernmental sectors should disclose financial and other
relationships that may be subject to foreign influence.
Integrity
Foreign funding can undermine the independence of American institutions, and various
types of coercive and covert activities by China (and other countries) directly contradict
core democratic values and freedoms, which must be protected by institutional vigilance
and effective governance.
• Openness and freedom are fundamental elements of American democracy and
intrinsic strengths of the United States and its way of life. These values must be
protected against corrosive actions by China and other countries.
• Various institutions—but notably universities and think tanks—need to
enhance sharing and pooling of information concerning Chinese activities,
and they should promote more closely coordinated collective action to counter
China’s inappropriate activities and pressures. This report recommends that
American institutions within each of the above two sectors (and possibly others)
formulate and agree to a “Code of Conduct” to guide their exchanges with Chinese
counterparts.
• When they believe that efforts to exert influence have violated US laws or
the rights of American citizens and foreign residents in the United States, US
institutions should refer such activities to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.
• Rigorous efforts should be undertaken to inform the Chinese American community
about potentially inappropriate activities carried out by China. At the same time,
utmost efforts must be taken to protect the rights of the Chinese American
community, as well as protecting the rights of Chinese citizens living or studying in
the United States.
• Consideration should be given to establishing a federal government office that
American state and local governments and nongovernmental institutions could
approach—on a strictly voluntary basis—for advice on how best to manage Chinese
requests for engagement and partnership. This office could also provide confidential
background on the affiliations of Chinese individuals and organizations to party and
state institutions.
Policy Principles for Constructive Vigilance
xi
• All American institutions—governmental and nongovernmental—that deal with
Chinese actors (and other potential sources of inappropriate foreign influence) should
review their oversight and governance practices and codify and exemplify best
standards of practice and due diligence.
Reciprocity
American institutions are deflected from their purpose of increasing US-China
understanding, and become distorted as one-way channels of Chinese influence, when they
are denied access to China on a basis that is reciprocal with the access Chinese institutions
are granted here.
• The asymmetry of scholarly research access is the most glaring example of the lack of
reciprocity. A whole variety of normal scholarly activities—including access to archives
and certain libraries, fieldwork, conducting surveys, and interviewing officials or
average citizens—have been cut off for American researchers in China while Chinese
enjoy all of these academic opportunities in the United States. Individually and
collectively, universities and other sectors of American democratic life should insist on
greater reciprocity of access.
• US government public diplomacy activities are heavily circumscribed in China,
while nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have encountered an increasingly
difficult environment to carry out their work. More reasonable reciprocity for US
public diplomacy efforts in China, relative to China’s activities in the United States,
should be addressed in negotiations between the two countries. In addition, this
report recommends enhanced American efforts to promote independent news and
information, and democratic ideas, through US global broadcasting and efforts to
counter disinformation.
• The US government should actively promote and protect opportunities for American
actors to operate in China.
Policy Principles for Constructive Vigilance
xii
Policy Principles for Constructive Vigilance
Introduction
For three and a half decades following the end of the Maoist era, China adhered to
Deng Xiaoping’s policies of “reform and opening to the outside world” and “peaceful
development.” After Deng retired as paramount leader, these principles continued to
guide China’s international behavior in the leadership eras of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Admonishing Chinese to “keep your heads down and bide your time,” these Party leaders
sought to emphasize that China’s rapid economic development and its accession to “great
power” status need not be threatening to either the existing global order or the interests
of its Asian neighbors. However, since Party general secretary Xi Jinping came to power in
2012, the situation has changed. Under his leadership, China has significantly expanded
the more assertive set of policies initiated by his predecessor Hu Jintao. These policies not
only seek to redefine China’s place in the world as a global player, but they also have put
forward the notion of a “China option” ( 中国方案 ) that is claimed to be a more efficient
developmental model than liberal democracy.
While Americans are well acquainted with China’s quest for influence through the projection
of diplomatic, economic, and military power, we are less aware of the myriad ways Beijing
has more recently been seeking cultural and informational influence, some of which could
undermine our democratic processes. These include efforts to penetrate and sway—through
various methods that former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull summarized as
“covert, coercive or corrupting”—a range of groups and institutions, including the Chinese
American community, Chinese students in the United States, and American civil society
organizations, academic institutions, think tanks, and media. 1
Some of these efforts fall into the category of normal public diplomacy as pursued by many
other countries. But others involve the use of coercive or corrupting methods to pressure
individuals and groups and thereby interfere in the functioning of American civil and
political life.
It is important not to exaggerate the threat of these new Chinese initiatives. China has not
sought to interfere in a national election in the United States or to sow confusion or inflame
polarization in our democratic discourse the way Russia has done. For all the tensions in the
relationship, there are deep historical bonds of friendship, cultural exchange, and mutual
inspiration between the two societies, which we celebrate and wish to nurture. And it is
imperative that Chinese Americans—who feel the same pride in American citizenship as do
other American ethnic communities—not be subjected to the kind of generalized suspicion
or stigmatization that could lead to racial profiling or a new era of McCarthyism. However,
2
with increased challenges in the diplomatic, economic, and security domains, China’s
influence activities have collectively helped throw the crucial relationship between the
People’s Republic of China and the United States into a worrisome state of imbalance and
antagonism. (Throughout the report, “China” refers to the Chinese Communist Party and the
government apparatus of the People’s Republic of China, and not to Chinese society at large
or the Chinese people as a whole.) Not only are the values of China’s authoritarian system
anathema to those held by most Americans, but there is also a growing body of evidence
that the Chinese Communist Party views the American ideals of freedom of speech, press,
assembly, religion, and association as direct challenges to its defense of its own form of oneparty
rule. 2
Both the US and China have derived substantial benefit as the two nations have become
more economically and socially intertwined. The value of combined US-China trade
($635.4 billion, with a $335.4 US deficit) far surpasses that between any other pair of
countries. 3 More than 350,000 Chinese students currently study in US universities (plus
80,000 more in secondary schools). Moreover, millions of Chinese have immigrated to
the United States seeking to build their lives with more economic, religious, and political
freedom, and their presence has been an enormous asset to American life.
However, these virtues cannot eclipse the reality that in certain key ways China is
exploiting America’s openness in order to advance its aims on a competitive playing field
that is hardly level. For at the same time that China’s authoritarian system takes advantage
of the openness of American society to seek influence, it impedes legitimate efforts by
American counterpart institutions to engage Chinese society on a reciprocal basis. This
disparity lies at the heart of this project’s concerns.
China’s influence activities have moved beyond their traditional United Front focus
on diaspora communities to target a far broader range of sectors in Western societies,
ranging from think tanks, universities, and media to state, local, and national government
institutions. China seeks to promote views sympathetic to the Chinese Government,
policies, society, and culture; suppress alternative views; and co-opt key American players to
support China’s foreign policy goals and economic interests.
Normal public diplomacy, such as visitor programs, cultural and educational exchanges,
paid media inserts, and government lobbying are accepted methods used by many
governments to project soft power. They are legitimate in large measure because they are
transparent. But this report details a range of more assertive and opaque “sharp power”
activities that China has stepped up within the United States in an increasingly active
manner. 4 These exploit the openness of our democratic society to challenge, and sometimes
even undermine, core American freedoms, norms, and laws.
Introduction
3
Except for Russia, no other country’s efforts to influence American politics and society
is as extensive and well-funded as China’s. The ambition of Chinese activity in terms of
the breadth, depth of investment of financial resources, and intensity requires far greater
scrutiny than it has been getting, because China is intervening more resourcefully and
forcefully across a wider range of sectors than Russia. By undertaking activities that have
become more organically embedded in the pluralistic fabric of American life, it has gained a
far wider and potentially longer-term impact.
Summary of Findings
This report, written and endorsed by a group of this country’s leading China specialists and
students of one-party systems is the result of more than a year of research and represents
an attempt to document the extent of China’s expanding influence operations inside the
United States. While there have been many excellent reports documenting specific examples
of Chinese influence seeking, 5 this effort attempts to come to grips with the issue as a whole
and features an overview of the Chinese party-state United Front apparatus responsible for
guiding overseas influence activities. It also includes individual sections on different sectors
of American society that have been targeted by China. The appendices survey China’s quite
diverse influence activities in other democratic countries around the world.
Among the report’s findings:
• The Chinese Communist party-state leverages a broad range of party, state, and non-state
actors to advance its influence-seeking objectives, and in recent years it has significantly
accelerated both its investment and the intensity of these efforts. While many of the
activities described in this report are state-directed, there is no single institution in China’s
party-state that is wholly responsible, even though the “United Front Work Department”
has become a synecdoche for China’s influence activities, and the State Council
Information Office and CCP 6 Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission have
oversight responsibilities (see Appendix: “China’s Influence Operations Bureaucracy”).
Because of the pervasiveness of the party-state, many nominally independent actors—
including Chinese civil society, academia, corporations, and even religious institutions—
are also ultimately beholden to the government and are frequently pressured into service
to advance state interests. The main agencies responsible for foreign influence operations
include the Party’s United Front Work Department, the Central Propaganda Department,
the International Liaison Department, the State Council Information Office, the All-China
Federation of Overseas Chinese, and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with
Foreign Countries. These organizations and others are bolstered by various state agencies
such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the
State Council, which in March 2018 was merged into the United Front Work Department,
reflecting that department’s increasing power.
Introduction
4
• In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising
politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying
and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These
activities complement China’s long-standing support of visits to China by members
of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances China has used private citizens
and/or companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign
contributions to elections.
• On university campuses, Confucius Institutes (CIs) provide the Chinese government
access to US student bodies. Because CIs have had positive value in exposing students
and communities to Chinese language and culture, the report does not generally oppose
them. But it does recommend that more rigorous university oversight and standards
of academic freedom and transparency be exercised over CIs. With the direct support
of the Chinese embassy and consulates, Chinese Students and Scholars Associations
(CSSAs) sometimes report on and compromise the academic freedom of other Chinese
students and American faculty on American campuses. American universities that host
events deemed politically offensive by the Chinese Communist Party and government
have been subject to increasing pressure, and sometimes even to retaliation, by
diplomats in the Chinese embassy and its six consulates as well as by CSSA branches.
Although the United States is open to Chinese scholars studying American politics or
history, China restricts access to American scholars and researchers seeking to study
politically sensitive areas of China’s political system, society, and history in country.
• At think tanks, researchers, scholars, and other staffers report regular attempts by
Chinese diplomats and other intermediaries to influence their activities within the
United States. At the same time that China has begun to establish its own network
of think tanks in the United States, it has been constraining the number and scale of
American think tanks operations in China. It also restricts the access to China and to
Chinese officials of American think-tank researchers and delegations.
• In business, China often uses its companies to advance strategic objectives abroad,
gaining political influence and access to critical infrastructure and technology. China
has made foreign companies’ continued access to its domestic market conditional on
their compliance with Beijing’s stance on Taiwan and Tibet. This report documents
how China has supported the formation of dozens of local Chinese chambers of
commerce in the United States that appear to have ties to the Chinese government.
• In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent
Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It
has co-opted existing Chinese-language outlets and established its own new outlets.
State-owned Chinese media companies have also established a significant foothold
Introduction
5
in the English-language market, in print, radio, television, and online. At the same
time, the Chinese government has severely limited the ability of US and other Western
media outlets to conduct normal news gathering activities within China, much less
to provide news feeds directly to Chinese listeners, viewers, and readers in China, by
limiting and blocking their Chinese-language websites and forbidding distribution of
their output within China itself.
• Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence—
even silence—voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching
personnel to the United States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring
their relatives in China. Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a
worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the
welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to
the so-called Motherland. Such activities not only interfere with freedom of speech
within the United States but they also risk generating suspicion of Chinese Americans
even though those who accept Beijing’s directives are a very small minority.
• In the technology sector, China is engaged in a multifaceted effort to misappropriate
technologies it deems critical to its economic and military success. Beyond economic
espionage, theft, and the forced technology transfers that are required of many joint
venture partnerships, China also captures much valuable new technology through its
investments in US high-tech companies and through its exploitation of the openness
of American university labs. This goes well beyond influence-seeking to a deeper
and more disabling form of penetration. The economic and strategic losses for the
United States are increasingly unsustainable, threatening not only to help China gain
global dominance of a number of the leading technologies of the future, but also to
undermine America’s commercial and military advantages.
• Around the world, China’s influence-seeking activities in the United States are
mirrored in different forms in many other countries. To give readers a sense of
the variation in China’s influence-seeking efforts abroad, this report also includes
summaries of the experiences of eight other countries, including Australia, Canada,
France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and the UK.
Toward Constructive Vigilance
In weighing policy responses to influence seeking in a wide variety of American
institutions, the Working Group has sought to strike a balance between passivity and
overreaction, confidence in our foundations and alarm about their possible subversion,
and the imperative to sustain openness while addressing the unfairness of contending
on a series of uneven playing fields. Achieving this balance requires that we differentiate
constructive from harmful forms of interaction and carefully gauge the challenge, lest we
Introduction
6
see threats everywhere and overreact in ways that both undermine our own principles and
unnecessarily damage the US-China relationship.
The sections that follow lodge recommendations under three broad headings. The first
two, promoting “transparency” and “integrity,” are hardly controversial in the face of the