The U.S. State Department has accused China of launching a global information war by promoting "digital authoritarianism," according to a report published on Thursday by its Global Enforcement Center, which detailed the worldwide reach of Beijing's disinformation campaign.
The GEC, which last year said Beijing was amplifying Russian state media's unverified and false narratives on the Ukraine war, believes the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to build a "global information ecosystem" to spread its propaganda while facilitating censorship. The new report illustrates the expanding geography of the information manipulation efforts.
Relations between the two sides remain fraught despite high-level diplomatic engagements in recent months. The White House is preparing for a fall summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping despite their governments' myriad disagreements from trade restrictions to the merits of cooperating on the climate crisis.
This week's report highlights five features of China's disinformation, including "leveraging propaganda and censorship, promoting digital authoritarianism, exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships, pairing co-optation and pressure, and exercising control over Chinese-language media."
The State Department's examples included China's use state media, social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, and companies like Huawei and Xiaomi to manipulate information worldwide, including in France, Thailand, Lithuania and multiple African countries.
In Thailand, a Chinese company set up a local subsidiary to buy a popular news website, which was otherwise prohibited under local law.
"To work around Thai laws limiting foreign media ownership, one of the [People's Republic of China's] leading technology companies created a local subsidiary run by Thai nationals to purchase Thailand's most popular news site with 30 million active monthly users," said the report.
In 2022, the state-owned China Daily, an English-language newspaper widely circulated in the United States, purchased the Thai Enquirer news website—further expanding Beijing's influence in Thailand.
The sheer scale of China's information war has now taken a genuinely global format, which was difficult for Beijing due to language constraints.
"As of 2021, almost 100 influencers disseminated official PRC messaging in at least two dozen languages on multiple social media platforms to a combined audience of over 11 million followers in dozens of countries," the GEC found.
Chinese state media-linked journalists and influencers can now disseminate China's messaging in multiple languages, diluting Beijing's language constraints. CGTN, the international arm of China's state broadcaster CCTV, has channels that broadcast in English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Russian.
A form of a new "community of digital authoritarians" backed by Beijing has spread to 102 countries, of which Chinese information controls were most severe in 11 of those countries, according to the report.
"My stories were not seen by 1 million people. They were seen by 100 million people," one former employee of China's official news agency Xinhua told The Guardian newspaper.
Beijing has used the telecommunications company Huawei in 18 countries to help the local government facilitate internet traffic interception on some online networks, the U.S. report said of China's instrumentalization of state and private entities. These activities have allowed some authoritarian governments to thwart their domestic political opposition by intercepting their electronic communications.
Beijing's preferred narratives now reach far corners of the globe, a phenomenon without precedent, the report said. But despite its multibillion-dollar investments to shape information environments—and corresponding opinions—worldwide, its efforts have faced setbacks in democratic countries due to "resistance from local media and civil society."
On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said he "opposed advocating for 'democracy versus authoritarianism,'" a framing adopted by Biden early in his presidential campaign—and now a main battle line in an ongoing ideological confrontation. Wang promoted Beijing's idea of "a global community of shared future" instead.
The U.S. and China are currently negotiating the terms for Xi's visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which will be held in San Francisco in November. It remains unclear whether Xi will attend the APEC gathering, but Wang said the summit should "promote cooperation rather than provoke confrontation."
On Friday in Washington, Sun Weidong, China's vice foreign minister for Asian affairs, met Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs.
The Chinese Foreign Minister described the meeting as a "candid, in-depth and constructive exchange of views." The two diplomats discussed issues including Taiwan, which remains the central topic of discord between the two sides.
The ministry had not responded publicly to the GEC's report at the time of publication.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Aadil Brar is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers international security, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian ... Read more
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