By Bill Gertz – The Washington Times – Thursday, January 30, 2025
China is subverting the United States through multibillion-dollar influence campaigns and U.S. political warfare operations inside China are needed to counter the activities, a panel of experts told Congress on Thursday.
Four specialists in Chinese influence and intelligence activities told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the operations range from recruiting university professors and corrupting American officials to cyber and internet influence operations, technology theft and coercive political activities.
The Senate hearing was one of the first of its kind by Congress to examine in detail the activities of Beijing’s United Front Work Department, a Chinese Communist Party organization engaged in aggressive political influence operations targeting a wide range of American institutions.
The activities include using Chinese business executives to shape American policies, providing paid visits to China, hiring U.S. consultants that lobby for Chinese policies, paying university professors for research, and corrupting U.S. politicians, local governments and even celebrities. The analysts urged lawmakers to rapidly increase U.S. government programs designed to identify and neutralize Beijing’s influence operations, including threatening to destabilize Chinese society.
Jennifer Lind, a professor at Dartmouth University, said China is conducting large-scale hostile influence operations against the United States to bolster its communist system, discredit democratic government and shape global norms in line with Beijing’s interests.
“A look at Chinese influence operations suggests their extent is vast,” Ms. Lind said. “The CCP conducts such operations through a massive government bureaucracy that includes agencies such as the United Work Front Department, the Propaganda Department, the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.”
Although difficult to fully estimate, Ms. Lind said Chinese funding for these activities ranges from $3 billion to $8 billion annually. Ms. Lind said the U.S. government needs to go on the offensive against China using various means to shape behavior by conducting counter-influence operations Beijing would view as intolerable.
“The U.S. government would convey privately to Beijing that if their influence operations violated the bounds of acceptable behavior, we would respond in kind: in other words, we might cross some of Beijing’s red lines,” Ms. Lind said.
China, she said, prefers that Washington wage a shadow influence conflict “far afield” — in the United States and other nations and no closer than Taiwan or Tibet. New, more aggressive American influence activities could target the Chinese people and foment domestic instability by seeking to develop popular movements against the regime.
“The CCP worries about its people mobilizing, getting ideas about democracy, and about economic and financial crises delegitimizing the regime,” Ms. Lind said. “If the United States were to push ideas about democracy, or to take steps that undermine the stability of the Chinese economy — for example, its real estate or banking sectors — that would be intolerable to the CCP.”
The goal of the operations would be to signal that the United States is ready to respond aggressively if China continues to undermine the U.S. system, she said.
Melanie Hart, a former State Department official specializing in China, also said the United States and China are engaged in ideological competition that threatens democracy and freedom.
“If China prevails, the U.S. and world will be less free, less prosperous and less safe,” Ms. Hart said. “Beijing is deploying a range of tactics to achieve its objectives.”
Myopic focus
Ms. Hart said the closing of the State Department Global Engagement Center in December removed a key tool for combating what she said was China’s “information warfare” against the United States and its democratic allies. The center, designed to counter foreign disinformation, was shut down recently after Congress declined to reauthorize its activities over concerns the center was improperly censoring domestic conservative viewpoints.
The State Department needs to be empowered to wage “full-spectrum competition” against Chinese subversion, Ms. Hart said.
“We are battling to determine which system — ours or Beijing’s — prevails,” Ms. Hart said. “The stakes are astronomical. This is not the time to keep major levers of U.S. national power on the sidelines.”
“A myopic focus on chasing [People’s Republic of China] spies leaves most of our research unprotected as [China] deploys a range of tactics, infrastructures and human capital to acquire U.S. technology and know-how that rarely involve its security services,” Mr. Stoff testified. “While I was in the government, my support to counterintelligence elements in the FBI and DoD showed that those offices prioritized criminal investigations over leveraging operational approaches to deny and disrupt PRC state-directed technology transfer activities.”
Mr. Stoff said U.S. intelligence agencies have failed to understand, track, analyze and respond to United Front Work Department operations targeting technology. Other failures include a lack of understanding of China’s massive apparatus to recruit experts and exploit U.S. federally funded research.
“The U.S. government holds a prevailing view that the Chinese Communist Party’s united front is strictly a political influence apparatus,” he said.
Peter Mattis, a former intelligence official and longtime China-watcher, told the committee that many Americans have failed to understand and counter the decades-long influence activities.
“United Front work also is a tool of political struggle,” he said. “It is not just a question of activities that we would call propaganda or public diplomacy. Nor is it limited to what we would call covert action.”
Mr. Mattis said the Chinese are subverting the U.S. government policymaking process through their operations: “We should not accept many of these activities as being legitimate actions of a foreign state inside the United States or other countries, because the nature of the party’s objectives and United Front system’s explicit role in political struggle mean that they are not acceptable for democratic societies even when they are not illegal,” he said.
Mr. Mattis said the State Department and White House must provide guidance on aggressively countering Chinese activities in the United States, including the use of political warfare.
“We should remember the American way of modern political warfare emerged from the State Department,” he said. “The American approach to political warfare has been underpinned by the idea of providing a true experience of Americans to the world and that supporting people’s hunger for truth and meaning in their lives will create better conditions for U.S. national interests to be achieved.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, Idaho Republican, said Chinese operations against the United States are increasing.
“The Chinese Communist Party has worked diligently to bring China to what it is today, and it did it the old-fashioned way; Chinese officials bribe, steal, and cheat at every opportunity to ensure that China comes out on top,” said Mr. Risch. “And we let them do it — virtually uninhibited. This has to stop.”
The hearing is aimed at developing legislative steps to close loopholes in foreign agents’ laws, restrict Chinese lobbying and increase counterintelligence against Beijing’s intelligence services, Mr. Risch said, adding that wide-ranging efforts will help “beat our authoritarian aggressors.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said concerns about Chinese influence activities are bipartisan.
“Today, China is targeting and exploiting open societies with every tool that they have,” she said. “China’s leaders have made shaping global and local public opinion a priority. They have bought up entire foreign media companies located outside China to promote pro-Beijing propaganda around the world.”
Ms. Shaheen said China is spending billions of dollars to promote Russian propaganda and said more tools like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center are needed.
