China received what the CCP leadership will deem as some “very good news” this week from Capitol Hill. Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, reported that the US intelligence apparatus is not prepared to deal with the threat from China. After two years of examination by his Committee, he wrote in a September 30, 2020, Foreign Affairs article that “What we found was unsettling. Our nation’s intelligence agencies are not ready – not by a long shot.” According to Schiff, the US needs a fundamental realignment of the intelligence community to counter Beijing or it will be unable to compete with China on the global stage for decades. President Xi Jinping must be happy to hear this news on the eve of the country’s October 1 National Day celebrations.
The Chinese CCP, under the leadership of Xi, is running highly-successful influence operations in many nations around the globe. It acts as if it is competing in a zero-sum game in which technology-driven totalitarianism is just one of its exports. From domestic human rights abuses at home to election interference overseas, China is revealing how it conducts 21st century warfare against those who fail to accept China as the predominant world power.
Schiff reports the good news for the intelligence community (IC) in Washington is that there is time left for the US to “significantly realign resources and personnel” to address the Chinese threat. He says there must be an improvement in the analysis of Chinese “soft” threats, including pandemics, climate change, and economic trends which can impact national security. Another specific challenge for the IC is improving its ability to manage large amounts of open source information and get it to policy makers. He also calls for improvements in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed decisions. This is an area where China has excelled in recent years, in some cases outpacing US technological advances. It is a far distance from thirty-five years ago when China was a grain-importing nation that could not feed, educate, or care for its own population.
Beijing’s well-funded influence operations are another little understood threat to the United States. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based think tank, says that before Facebook and Twitter became pervasive social media tools Beijing used cyber actors to create a “multi-pronged campaign to positively influence public opinion about China worldwide and neutralize potential threats to the regime’s carefully crafted international image. Such efforts began with relatively benign person-to-person exchanges and the cultivation of discreet relationships with influential U.S. business executives and decision makers.” Today, China’s arsenal of offensive weapons against the West includes sophisticated disinformation campaigns, coercion, threats of retaliation, and clandestine operations.
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The FDD concludes in a recent report that “In the absence of a more unified approach to China’s U.S. election meddling, as well as a concerted effort by both political parties to educate the general public about the scope of the threat, it appears all but certain that the United States will find itself facing a similar situation in 2022 and 2024, if not beyond.” There is time for liberal democracies to adjust their approach to China’s influence operations and devise appropriate, apolitical countermeasures. How much is the question.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.
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