Spies and Lies: How China Fooled the World

good morning I'm Charles edel senior advisor and Australia chair here at the center for strategic and International Studies today I'm very excited to welcome Alex joski for a talk on his new book spies and lies how China's greatest covert operations fooled the world this is actually the book launch for this as it just came out yesterday here in the United States now this is a really important book and one that examines how China's Ministry of State security has spent decades shaping foreign attitudes towards China's rise as Alex lays out in this book the reference have targeted policy makers diplomats retired officials Scholars media organizations and religious leaders around the world the book draws on Australia's experience countering foreign interference to assess why governments fail to recognize the nature of China's rise and its influence operations earlier but the larger claim that Alex advances helps answer a much larger questions how did the West get China wrong for so long for the past several decades the U.S Australia and many other countries China policy has been based on the hope that as Beijing deepened its engagement with the rest of the world it would become less authoritarian less aggressive and a more responsible stakeholder in international Affairs and that as it did so will become more powerful more prosperous and more committed to its own peaceful rise that no longer seems to be the case China indeed has become more powerful and more prosperous while simultaneously becoming more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad so how and why do we get this wrong for so long one answer might be that XI jinping's China is an Abrupt departure from what came before but another answer lies in fact that the West might have had the wall pulled over its eyes willingly by those telling us exactly what we wanted to hear now Alex's new book addresses that question and a lot of others by walking us through the Chinese Communist party's International intelligence operations exploring their impact and suggesting what lessons that holds for other countries Alex is the perfect person to have written this book he's an author and a China analyst who has worked as a senior fellow at the Australian strategic policy Institute and is known for breaking open new fields of research through meticulous Chinese language investigations grounded in authoritative and independently verifiable sources his research focuses on the Chinese Communist party's external influence and Technology acquisition efforts including intelligence and united front work if you don't know what that term means we'll explain that shortly too now a few of his prominent reports include picking flowers making honey which details the Chinese military's collaboration with foreign universities and hunting the Phoenix which focuses on the ccp's efforts to recruit Talent abroad and gain access to to foreign technology he has been invited to give testimony on the Chinese Communist party's influence efforts in front of the United States Senate and Australia's parliamentary joint committee on intelligence security and is a widely respected and sought after expert and is extremely important but little understood field I'm delighted to welcome you here today and I'm really looking forward to this important conversation Alex long preface but let's just start with a real basic question can you share a little bit uh with us about yourself and how you came to be interested in this field of influence operations thanks so much for the introduction Charlie I've had something to do with China since I was born you know I'm half Chinese I spent six years living in China as a kid and studying Chinese and then I went to University and really hated studying Mandarin Chinese I was sick of memorizing characters but I wanted to keep it up and I kind of had an interest in in the ancient world so I started studying classical Chinese and it kind of you know rebirths my interest in China and it gave me a confidence to then read Mandarin you know contemporary Chinese documents and I started reading newspaper articles about what was happening with the Chinese Communist party what it was trying to do around the world and I tried to see if I could find a way to make that relevant to My Life as a student at the Australian National University so I started looking at student organizations and how they were linked to the Chinese government and that sort of started me on a long journey of looking at how the Chinese Communist Party exerts its influence around the world so it's really a bit of an accident can we actually just stand that for a second because it's quite unusual that people start their research efforts which grow into a full field as undergraduates so you said you started this on campus in Canberra at the Australian National University looking at Chinese student groups was that at Anu itself was that just a research topic that came to you what happened there this is mainly because you know I I felt I had to get a job by just being fired as a waiter and you know the student newspaper was looking for reporters so I put in an application I had a few ideas what I could write about and they were all essentially about looking at the different ways that China mattered to the university and so I started digging into the Chinese students and Scholars Association and I was really surprised by what is that sorry is that an organization that was on anu's campus or just an organization that you had found randomly so this is a organization run by students at the Australian National University but it has counterparts at universities all around the world and this organization was coordinating closely with the Chinese Embassy and a really shocking incident to me was that the head of this Association found out that the University Pharmacy was stocking copies of the falun gong newspaper Epoch times so he barged into the pharmacy sort of shouted at the pharmacist and got her to agree to let him throw out all of the copies and stop stocking this newspaper so what you really had was nationalism backed by the Chinese Communist Party trying to change the kind of information that was available to people on on the campus of a university in the capital of Australia when I reported on this members of the student organization started sort of tracking me at events following me into the bathroom and it was really kind of exciting at the time but also puzzling and terrifying and I was sort of confused about why this was actually happening so that just told me to look closer at this whole phenomenon of Chinese Communist party influence so one really specific question then we'll kind of zoom out a little bit broader because I want to make sure that with this book which everyone should buy it's now out and available you do kind of do the 101 of this while also getting really down in the Weeds about this but for those who are new to the subject you said that the incident that sparked this that got you tailed uh you confronted when you went to the water closet the bathroom was the epoch times which was a falun Gong newspaper for those of our viewers who might not be familiar with this can you just kind of say what that is and why that might be obnoxious to the CCP so this is a newspaper published by a religious organization that is generally opposed to the Chinese Communist Party puts out negative or independent coverage of events in China and Chinese politics it's officially an outlawed organization inside China but totally legal in other countries so this Chinese student organization which met regularly with Chinese diplomats and coordinated with them was trying to limit the reach of of falun gong's newspaper in Australia gotcha okay so now let's use that to kind of broaden the conversation a little bit uh when you begin to talk about influence operations you talked about you know potential collaboration directly from the Chinese Embassy Chinese consulates onto a University campus in Australia to tone down what newspapers what reading materials were available to Australian students that's quite an example there but can you zoom out a little bit for us and just kind of walk us through what are influence operations who runs them who are the intended targets what are they supposed to do so the thing I saw at my University was really a pretty minor incident in the scheme of things at the same time we had Chinese Communist Party linked billionaires and business persons in Australia donating generously to both sides of Australian politics trying to seed their friends into Australian political parties as candidates or advisers to sitting politicians and this is really what got me started at looking at this broader phenomenon of influence operations they were all around me in Australia at the time but I think one misconception people have about influence operations is that they're designed to change people's mind when I've studied them I've really found that the core goal is to reinforce sentiments that are favored by the Chinese Communist party and put put down those that are that it's trying to suppress so this is different influence operations whether you're explaining it here it's different than kind of classic Cloak and Dagger Espionage right they're not necessarily recruiting people what is it that the CIA DCP is attempting to do or the MSS the ministry of State security as you lay out in the book what are they trying to do there's a whole range of agencies on on the side of the Chinese Communist party that engage in a whole range of different kinds of influence work but I've really focused on the ministry of State security and what they've really focused on in this space is using their clandestine and covert tradecraft using their political backing within China to change the way that people who engage with China have understood the country reinforce these perceptions of a China that's becoming more liberal that's reforming and what I was seeing was undercover offices of the ministry of State security setting up front organizations setting up think tanks inviting foreign Scholars inviting foreign policy makers to China and and misleading them okay so now we're beginning to get on to two really Key Parts I think of your argument I mean first is the larger million dollar question about what is the impact of all this how is this shaped how Western society's Nations governments have understood China's rise but also what it is that the MSS the ministry of State security I'm going to keep saying that just so that make sure that we understand what we're talking about and others have been trying to do and you've already said that there's a range of things from inviting people and giving special access in China to things that they are occasionally doing abroad in Australia in the United States elsewhere you know here in Washington for those who are tracking this issue on Chinese influence on Chinese interference into Democratic societies and institutions at the tip of the tongue is the united front work department is that what the ministry of State security is again we're just doing some kind of basic one-on-one are they different how do they operate differently the united front work department is one of the core agencies of the Chinese Communist Party sits directly under its Central committee's top leadership body and it's it's you know it's got a range of goals but the core thing that that you know sort of uh unifies the different kinds of activities that it's involved in is that it seeks to co-opt and manage the party's relationship with those outside of the party so this includes domestically it's in charge of all religious policy ethnic policy it manages a lot of the party's relations with non-ccp business figures but the aspect that concerns us around the world is especially how the united front work department is responsible for diaspora work so try to make sure that members of ethnic Chinese communities around the world are answering the Chinese Communist party's call and placing people sympathetic to the Chinese Communist party as representatives of these groups so in Australia we had a lot of organizations that we often all united front groups that were organizing closely with members of the united front work department were almost branches of the united front work department and mobilizing politically in Australia now the way that's different to the ministry of State security is the united front work department doesn't really specialize in covert or clandestine work it can do a little bit of that but it's at its core it's not really an intelligence agency it does that kind of a kind of special brand of influence work I'd say whether MSS comes in is it seems to hijack sit atop those networks of united front figures united front work department connected individuals okay I want to come back to the MSS and what they're doing and how it's different but first I mean if you're writing a book about intelligence agencies you know what I find really interesting about this book is it reads almost like a detective novel right it's very forensic kind of looking but it presents a question to us how do you study something that is by its nature or covert how did you go about this how did you kind of find your research it's not like or is it that the Chinese publish exactly what they're doing yeah it's kind of paradoxical you know if these really are intelligence operations how come I was able to find them mostly on the internet and I think a core part of that was the way they structure these intelligence operations was very similar to what I'd seen with the united front work department which is a much more visible part of the party's bureaucracy so that helped me kind of build a methodology for then going deeper and looking at more covert and clandestine activities but you know I did a lot of things I was buying up Memoirs I was buying up internal books published by the ministry of State security I was looking at various histories published in China news articles business records really going wide but a key feature of these operations is that they involve front groups established and run and entirely staffed in some cases by undercover officers so as soon as you recognize one of these front groups many of which were set up in the 80s and continue to operate today you can track the offices and the activities they're involved in so I started with the cultural exchange organization that was set up in 1984. I noted down the names of people who worked there and then I would just see where else they popped up you know one popped up handling a source inside the FBI one popped up giving a talk at the Press Club in Washington DC so these these forms of cover give them a strength they're they're very deep they invest heavily in them but they're also a weakness because once you identify a front group you can you can pull that thread and go very far with it that's really interesting I mean one of the things that you didn't say I mean you only alluded to this is your Chinese language skills which allowed you to kind of really go through the Memoirs too and kind of track this yes on the internet but then be able to read exactly what's being published as you said in Memoirs and in other words look on the MSS in particular as you begin to identify the front organizations and then the individuals and then as you said pull that string you know if they're not trying to recruit people to spy for them per se how do you know if they're successful what's the metric that you are using in some of these cases they they were trying to recruit people but they clearly played a very long-term game so I interviewed a scholar in the United States who'd been targeted by three different parts of the MSS at different points in time and it was this headquarters Bureau that I focus on the 12th Bureau of the ministry of State security that was the most patient the most cautious and actually never tried to recruit him there were provincial wings of the agency that aggressively would trade a bribe or or Honeypot him but this headquarters agency focused on trying to build up a relationship of you know Mutual Trust of of convenience of of benefit where they would invite him to China they would help him get access to people inside the Chinese government to people he might want to interview you know help reimburse his travel costs but never actually try to recruit him and there's a term that the MSS actually uses for this stage of recruitment which is sin job now in English I trans site is that is something like our hearts connect but don't show so it's sort of like I know you're an intelligence officer you know I'm an intelligence officer I'm more than I say I am but we don't actually acknowledge that we're just happy to keep it at this level where we work together but I haven't actually forced you you know as an MSS officer I haven't forced you as my foreign Target to kind of wake up to this really reality that you're involved in a foreign intelligence operation you know we are at the beginning of August we had a really good conversation here at csis with um Sophie McNeil with John Garner and John Fitzgerald about the example of Australia and what's happened in Australia Professor Fitzgerald talked about the fact that the Civil Society groups agencies of the Chinese diaspora mainly were about 10 years ahead of the Australian intelligence community in identifying that there was a problem here because they saw it within their community and again if it's quite hard sometimes to trace this and if you really have to pull that thread if you have to identify people from 1984 and then watch them popping up like where's Waldo for the next 20 to 30 years you know what's your assessment again this is somewhat broadened sweep in question but about how well Western um intelligence agencies have been able to track and monitor and in some cases counter this John Fitzgerald and John Gano are both great examples of people who started to Cotton onto this problem years before the government did and were kind of shouting into the void for many years and and they both credit their recognition of the significance of Chinese Communist party influence work to friends in the Chinese community and when I started doing this research that was that was where I went first as well because there's an incredible body of wealth and experience there um but you know Western intelligence agencies for so long were focused on other things during the Cold War it was Russia that really mattered later on it was counterterrorism that really mattered so a lot of resources that weren't going into focusing on China at the same time there wasn't the sort of political will that wasn't the recognition from the very top that China was a real problem you know it was Rising peacefully in many people's eyes it was going to become a democracy potentially it was opening up its economy they might be running some intelligence operations but it didn't really matter to a lot of people and especially intelligence operations in Chinese communities in many countries were really allowed to run deep and very extensive harming the the rights and Liberties of those people but it just wasn't viewed as a priority for many governments look I really do want to get to the punch line here which is how this influenced the Western internal narrative about China's rise but I think I want to stay on the intelligence aspect of this for a little bit more and when we talk we're going to get really kind of narrow here we're going to talk about the field of intelligence studies for a second because you just raised Russia and the Cold War and you say in the book that for a long time the intelligence Community had a grains of sand uh analogy that it used to explain what Beijing was doing in terms of intelligence operations the way that you laid out here the grains of sand was look if there are a thousand grains of sand on a beach that is the analogy for pieces of discrete intelligence that China wants to acquire the Soviets now the Russians were so good at their tradecraft were so sneaky about it right that they send like a submarine in in the middle of the night they'd have a team come out and exquisitely pick out uh you know grainfuls of sand come back sort of and they get them the Chinese so the analogy held had a totally different approach right in the broad daylight they'd send a thousand Chinese tourists who would each like grab one kernel of sand one grain of sand and bring it back now you said that was the prevailing attitude within the intelligence Community or communities right we're talking about a number of countries for a long time but you'll say that that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Chinese intelligence apparatus operates why is it wrong is this idea really was first proposed in the mid 90s and every now and then you still see it quoted in media you still see it being used by people writing about the topic of Chinese Communist Espionage but the real problem with it to me there are a couple of them one is that it really de-emphasizes the role of Chinese professional intelligence agencies like the MSS it gives this picture of a really unstructured you know web of intelligence activity that is almost a natural part of how China goes into the outside world Levering leveraging and focusing on ethnic Chinese people as amateur collectors of intelligence and there is a big focus on on using that in Chinese intelligence agencies but the past few years have really shown that China is not scared of trying to recruit people inside the Central Intelligence Agency or the state department or you know it's not just working in Chinese communities and there's an incredible number of professional Intelligence Officers working for the Chinese Communist party I've estimated that the size of the MSS including its provincial and Municipal branches will be well over a hundred thousand employees and you can add to that the ministry of public security and several Chinese Military Intelligence agencies so I think instead of assuming that these activities are uncoordinated or just driven by nationalism I'm always trying to look for the actual structure the operations the the Intel intelligence offices behind activities look those are some fairly large numbers and just to be clear the numbers that you just laid out that's for within China or is that abroad that the Chinese state has serving undercover so that would be all the employees of the ministry of State security domestic domestically mostly and then a couple overseas okay and just uh so that we know what are you basing that number on so this is based on looking for example at the number of the amount of floor space in MSS facilities uh you know looking at Shanghai identifying the site skyscraper that the Shanghai State Security Bureau Works in you know building a model of that and calculating the floor space and then doing that in a few cases averaging that and spreading it across the country um again forensic interesting way that you go about this uh now let's begin to turn though I I know I asked this uh before but let's take this slightly differently Alex in terms of influence operations right uh from my vantage point every country tries to influence how other countries think about it is this something that's different uh in kind in scale than what other countries are trying to do we're talking about influence the perception that others hold of it I think the key thing that is really problematic about the stuff that I write about in the book is it involved some aspect of interference and not just influence and in Australia we look at interference as a kind of influence that is co-covert coercive or corrupting and all of the operations that I talk about in the book involve some sort of covert activity you have people presenting themselves as journalists as cultural exchange officials when they're actually Intelligence Officers you have them trying to bribe people you have them trying to Honeypot people this American Scholar I talked to was you know taken to a massage parlor by undercover MSS officers he was offered money by them and then he was asked you know can you pass us information back when you go to the United States so this is not normal diplomacy this is not something that's acceptable this is something that undermines and interferes in the normal operation of politics and Society can you actually go a little bit further because these three C's uh you know what distinguishes this from just normal influence efforts as you said we're talking about interference not simply influence but interference into Democratic institutions and societies are those that are covert by Nature that are tried to be kept shielded from the public those are corrupting but those that are coercive can you focus on that last one a little bit and talk about what that looks like what that means why it's problematic there's a really interesting recent series of examples of this sort of coercive influence which I think the United States prefers to use the term transnational repression for there's been a series of court cases and indictments recently especially in New York for example a former Tiananmen Square you know 1989 democracy activist from China has been running for Congress and the MSS didn't want this to happen so what they've alleged to have done is sent a team to surveil him and then the plan was first they would try to access his tax records and accuse him of fraud then they would try to Honeypot him you know send prostitutes to go after him and then failing that the plan it's alleged was to crash his car or hurt him so badly that he wasn't physically able to run for Congress anymore so this is really wielding fear and violence as a way to influence politics in a foreign country and to unders whether that's in the United States and this is not your speculation this was in an unsealed indictment that's right these are allegations at this stage but I think you know there are many other cases of operations by overseas Chinese security officers trying to force people to come back to China and harassing them scaring them overseas this has happened in Australia it's happened in the United States as well yeah okay let's let's pause on what's happening right now because I think that's a really uh that's a rich subject to discuss but let's backtrack for a little bit because we want to begin to kind of unroll this idea of unravel this idea of just what was the impact of what the MSS has been up to so if we go back say to the 9 these the early 2000s you know to what degree was our perception that China was peacefully Rising how much of that was a willful construct of the Chinese State how much of that was put forward by the MSS why why did they do that and was that deliberate so I think in the 90s there were genuine reasons to believe oh sorry in the 80s there were genuine reasons to believe China was moving towards a more democratic state it was really serious about reforming its bureaucracy reforming its political system and opening up its economy I think a lot of those dreams were decisively ended with the 1989 tiananma Massacre of students protesting for freedom and democracy um and then on top of that you had the Gulf War where China watched sort of awesome display of U.S power you had the collapse of the Soviet Union which to China was also a signal that they need to be careful about reform and opening they need to be careful about how they let Western ideas into their society without undermining ultimately the power of the Chinese Communist party yeah so in the years after that I think you know there are many people in America around the world who had good reasons to believe that China was becoming a more democratic place that it was opening up politically that it was going to reform its economy and I think the MSS seized on these ideas it recognized this and chose to amplify them back at us to reassure us that this was the direction that China was going in for many many years when actually you look at internal speeches the way the party was talking to itself and not foreigners and the message was very different so for example Jung zimin China's president from the 90s into the early 2000s he gave a secret speech to the ministry of State security in 1993 where he talked about how economic development is a good thing but it should never come at the cost of the party's power there's no point developing the economy in his words if we lose the mountains and rivers one and for us by the blood of countless Martyrs this is really incredible sort of revolutionary language and on top of that he said you know in black and white the West seeks to undermine us you know the United States does not seek does not wish to see China rise and it seeks to split us it seeks to turn us into a western democracy and we're not going to let that happen so I think it's only a natural reaction if you're thinking as an MSS officer or a member of the Chinese Communist party to try to hold off that pressure to to to manage this risk that the West is trying to undermine you and influence operations were a key part of how the MSS did this so again fascinating right that what's being said internally is very different than the face that China is presenting to the world now how coordinated is this tale of a peaceful rise as you said I mean there's a fair amount of evidence in the 90s to suggest that China is indeed Rising peacefully and that is potentially even liberalizing both economically and politically so this is not something that is a comes out of right field and is made up there's something that there's some grounding for evidence therefore right yeah that's right I think you know propaganda and influence work isn't as simple as just pushing one idea and it's creating a chorus of hawks and doves but controlling the middle ground controlling the direction of that debate and I think in the case of peaceful rise and and this idea that China would liberalize that it wouldn't challenge the existing International order you had people inside the Communist Party who didn't agree who were speaking out against it who are criticizing it but at the end of the day this was not about policy this was a propaganda slogan for reassuring the West about the direction that China said it would go in but I think rashidoshi for example has done a really good job of looking at actual authoritative strategic policy documents and Memoirs inside the Chinese Communist party and just tracing how in the 90s there was this deliberate idea of trying to reassure the West that China would go in a certain direction that it would you know a way of holding off pressure from countries like the United States but working towards a point where it would later become more confident more powerful more economic more economically developed and therefore in a position to actually show its Ambitions when hiding and biting you know doing xiaoping's famous strategic guidance of hiding our strength and biting our time would come to an end now Rush Doshi in that book China's long game is located China's Grand strategy he makes the argument I I want to pulse you on this argument although I think I might guess where you land on it uh that you know there's a school of thought that says look if you're looking at when China decided to become you know both more repressive internally but it's certainly more assertive internationally and even aggressive in how it was conducting itself not only inside other countries but also externally with its forces with the pla against others you know there there are a bunch of schools of thought right one is that this happened when Xi Jinping came to power right he fundamentally changed and turned what had been a pretty moderate approach by huge and Talon those before him and then turning away from Deng xiaoping's your time Hydra capabilities there's another school of thought and Rush puts this forward in his book that says that no this is an evolution and it's written and heart-baked into internal Chinese planning documents and the more assertive role and the larger role that it would play on the world stage doesn't start with Xi Jinping it goes way before then and doesn't even start with 2008 and then you know great financial crisis where you could see the Chinese assessing that America's day in the sun was over and now is the time for it to make a push to expand this power now again I'm curious where you stand on this is is this something that started in 2008 in 2012 is this something that as you have alluded to in a couple places stretches back to the 80s or even before then yeah I think for me when I started looking at these things in Australia I probably had the Assumption in my head that this was a Xi Jinping thing and I'd lived in China in the years before Xi Jinping and had no sense that you know this is this is the way China was going to go in but then I started really digging into you know suspected influence operatives in Australia and none of them could be traced to the sort of the the start of XI jinping's presidency or or leadership of the Chinese Communist party all of these activities you could trace back to in some cases the early 2000s in some cases decades earlier than that and with the MSS as well I think just the fact that the ministry of State security was tasking its professional influence operatives these specialists in engaging with and recruiting and misleading foreign guests to present this idea that child would rise peacefully that it was going to become a democracy just suggests that the opposite was actually the plan you know this very idea of China's peaceful rise proposed through a think tank covertly set up and run by the ministry of State security it wasn't coming from the foreign policy system of the Chinese government it was the figurehead of this idea was a man called Jung bijian who came from the propaganda system he never worked in in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the people who were around him propping him up pushing the narrative behind closed doors were these undercover MSS officers so this really was not something that was you know a serious foreign policy of China but it was an effort to reassure the West that China would go in a different direction so I land similar similarly to Russia in believing that this goes back well before sea well before Hudson Tao and probably to that period in the early 90s yeah and look I don't think we have to say how well this landed because we know that for Australia for the United States for almost every country until take your pick three four five six years ago The Narrative of and the thesis of engaging with China China so that it would continue liberalizing democratizing potentially was the prevalent notion upon which governments no less business people uh conducted their China policy but you raised that how this was reverberating around Australia and Australia really is an interesting case because when you talk in Washington as you've been doing in your time here right when many Americans look at Australia they'll begin to point to the fact that Australia in fact seemed to recognize this problem quite early potentially even earlier than the United States in some instances and has taken a series of actions to deal with to address to respond to foreign and now we should say interference not influence interference so uh look let's have like a pretty broad talk here about what has Australia done I I presume that we have a lot of people watching in Australia who don't really need to hear this but we are here in Washington so I'd like to know what Australia has done over the last couple of years to address this and get maybe some of your thoughts about what's worked really well and what has worked less well yeah I think it is Australia is a really nice demonstration of sort of the effectiveness of these influence operations just in that they were making it hard to call out influence operations people like John Fitzgerald members of the Chinese Community really were talking about these problems of united front work of MSS activity 10 years ago if not much earlier but many political parties really valued donations from these individuals who are connected to the Chinese Communist party they had close relationships with interlocutors inside the Chinese government they would go on trips to China regularly and they had this idea of peaceful rise and economic engagement with China really baked into their head so it wasn't you know some some organic process of of looking at the Chinese Communist party looking at China's Direction and and realizing we'd got it wrong it was really a shock I think when several things happened in 2017 when back benches in parliament revolted against a proposed extradition treaty with China on human rights grounds mainly and then the key thing was media really starting to shift its Vision towards this problem of interference doing a lot of fantastic investigating investigative reporting into Political donors and that sort of thing and then at the same time inside government you had people doing classified studies of the same problem of foreign interference creating the vocabulary for us to talk about this you know these concepts of united front work and foreign interference really weren't well understood or used until around 2017 and 18 in Australia so in response to that that kind of sudden recognition that this was a serious problem that we had been misunderstanding China that maybe China's intentions weren't what we thought they were Australia has really changed a lot of its China policies and in particular introduced a whole Suite of foreign interference legislation designed to really tackle this this hard issue of covert and corruptive and corrupting and coercive influence work in response Australia has been the subject of economic retaliation uh you know Banning beef and barley and wine exports and putting tariffs on other Goods Australian citizens arrested in China and now we're seeing a sort of slight you know reopening of the relationship Australian ministers can finally meet some of their counterparts in China but I think those core tensions in the relationship the things that caused Australia to wake up around 2017 the things that are now causing the US to economically decouple in a lot of key areas from China and and start pivoting its strategic Direction based on this new understanding that China is ambitious that it's challenging the the existing order this is I think this is going to continue in Australia you know the problems haven't gone away you know that's it's a really useful overview but you know one of the things are these are really important conversations to have because as you said Australia's woken up to the challenge in fact I believe that was prime minister turnbull's Awards which he caught a lot of flack for when he said it uh but it's woken up to the challenge and it's taken a range of actions to begin responding but you know one of the things I think is really important is as the U.S looks at Australia there are things that the U.S can learn but similarly when Australia looks at the United States uh how our justice system has handled this uh there are things that Australia can learn and frankly we would be quite remiss if we kept this conversation to just Australia in the United States there are a range of democratic countries and societies around the world and even non-democratic ones that are experiencing a similar set of challenges so look that's my preface for asking you gave us some of the things that uh and actions that the Australian government has taken where do you see if you're willing to assess areas that it's not been quite as effective as it could and where is there further territory for it to go I think there are a couple of sort of key pillars for countering foreign interference that have tried to inform Australian policy in this area so I might I might misremember some of them but I think it's it's sunlight it's legislation it's its capability and its deterrence so having all these things together the sunlight really came from media I don't think there's been that much deterrence we have legislation now to to deal with these laws that capability is still severely lacking in Australia and I think most countries you know you can't sort of suddenly pivoted resources to working on China and expect the expertise to be there I don't think there is that expectation but there probably isn't the recognition of just how far we still have to go to really rebuild our understanding of China build up a much larger community of people studying analyzing and writing scholarship on China and having enough Chinese linguists simply working inside intelligence agencies working inside government to help assess these problems that's something that we need to be investing in now because it you know could take a decade to train a good China analyst yeah no that's a really interesting point I mean during the Cold War and I'm not using the Cold War analogy here but during the Cold War the United States government understood that it needed to invest in science and technology right it trained a whole generation of Engineers and scientists but also in Americans who were fluent Russian speakers right so they could understand and watch what could happen similarly if we kind of shift the Gaze to China what are efforts looking like in Australia right now in terms of governmental investment about University resources going towards chaining that next generation of Alex joskis I don't really see much of it I'm afraid I mean mean there's there's a much greater recognition across the Australian government that this is going to be a long-term program that they need to continue pivoting resources and focusing on on the different problems and and challenges and opportunities posed by China's Direction but so much more can be done to put funding into universities put funding into think tanks help people maintain their expertise within government instead of rewarding generalists and I think kind of slightly unrelated but another thing that I think is missing in a lot of countries is serious policy and Outreach regarding ethnic Chinese communities and especially Chinese language media so I saw cases in Australia for example where our security agencies rated some properties as part of an investigation into a foreign interference plot and this was reported pretty well I think by mainstream English language media in Australia they pointed out how one of the the targets of this raid had pretty well documented connections to the Chinese Communist party and these parts of the party that are involved in influence operations and then you got Chinese language media in Australia almost entirely reliant on WeChat which is controlled and censored out of China taking these mainstream language articles mainstream media articles translating them into Chinese but then cutting out all of the references to what might have actually prompted and Justified this so as long as there's not a real change in the diversity and the freedoms of Chinese language media in countries like Australia the government is going to have a really hard time messaging its fine interference work messaging its chain Chinese China policy I'm really glad you turned the conversation to ethnic Chinese communities because this is a really important occasionally quite uncomfortable conversation right because as we shine that sunlight on Chinese State interference coming from Beijing this is in no way shape or form a broad brush that should be used to isolate to intimidate members of the Chinese diaspora within countries but that's tricky because a lot of people are very loose with their language and we know that people can very easily be riled up and that anger can be then put in a very unhelpful and counterproductive and dangerous fashion so I'm curious your thoughts to Iran I I have this conversation all the time with folks here when John Fitzgerald and John garno and Sophie McNeil were on we talked about this what can governments do we could start with the Australia's experience but curious to hear your impressions generally Alex to make sure that CCP covert operations are not negatively impacting ethnic Chinese communities but rather working to protect and shield those communities within our own countries there's so much more education that can be done around this and that's not just educating the public but I think the focus should really be on educating politicians themselves as they come out and speak about a country's you know Australia's relationship with China Australia's Chinese communities the way to actually frame that John Fitzgerald has has written a great paper for USB called mind your tongue that goes into some of these nuances of language and also talking to media and explaining to them you know what this is about trying to encourage them to not say Chinese influence but maybe Chinese Communist party influence or or PRC influence be really clear about those distinctions in language but this is really hard in a place like Australia where the government has you know deliberately decided in many cases to be cautious about talking about China and avoided it I think this has opened up a lot of the field to you know more extreme voices who want to cast it into racial terms and the government has really lost a lot of its ability to play a guiding role in this debate because of that fear of upsetting the Chinese Communist Party a fear of having a role in in sparking racial tensions but it can't step out of that debate has to be part of it and I think another thing that government governments could look to is actually the transnational oppression cases that are currently in courts in the United States these these law enforcement prosecutions targeting efforts by the Chinese Communist party to harm the rights and freedoms of Chinese Ethnic Chinese in America I think this is a really important signal in showing that countering foreign interference is not about repressing Chinese people it's about trying to make sure that the Chinese Communist party that the Chinese government isn't exerting undue influence Beyond its borders yeah no Amen to that from my corner because if we don't do this right we are relegating people of Chinese ancestry Asian ancestry to second-class citizenry within our own countries because we're now willing to protect them by looking at what is happening here look public opinion is a really interesting one here we've talked a little bit about kind of you know your assessments of intelligence work uh how that's changed governments what this looks like in kind of a particular ethnic communities and how we work to shield and protect them better but you know what's really interesting if we look at all the high profile political figures who have been targeted by the CCP both active and retired one might you know assume that everyone would be singing off a very Rosy set of you know music score about how China's rise has come up but if we look at what's happened over the last four to five years that's obviously not the case right uh public opinion attitudes towards China in Australia in the United States in Japan in South Korea have all plummeted and have tanked how do you square that with what we've been talking about is that the fact that the MSS operations have spectacularly failed are there external factors that we have to take into our analysis to explain why when this influence and interference operations have been so long standing and worked for so long we now see public opinion across a number of nations across just about every nation in the world heading in the exact opposite direction of the narrative that the MSS has been pushing I think it's so it's a really helpful question to raise for a couple reasons one it it kind of gives me a prompt to explain the different streams of work inside the Chinese Communist party and and the different focuses and what is about public opinion and then what I think is about Elite influence work and then it also points to a real weakness in how the Chinese Communist Party seeks to influence people you know outside of supporters so firstly on that question of sort of different responsibilities these MSS influence operations in united front work department operations have clearly and and in some cases explicitly have had a focus on representative individuals or Elites uh the united front work department you know official regular regulations put out by the Chinese Communist party for united front work clearly state that the focus should be on representative individuals Within These various groups like ethnic Chinese communities and religious organizations and not on the rank and file not on the masses it's the same with the MSS because so much much of its influence work was about personal relationships going undercover as a scholar you know walking into the U.S embassy in Beijing and befriending a diplomat there becoming a contact for them and then giving them misleading information about the true intentions and directions of the Chinese Communist party this is about working on individuals this is about giving privileged people people who have worked in senior positions in government getting them meetings with Jung zimin and Xi Jinping and other leaders like Lee kochang so this doesn't have much effect directly on the masses and that's why in part you're seeing such a pushback you know once this once these activities are exposed in Australia once the US has started changing its China policy and and talking about you know problems like covert like China's technology transfer operations Espionage public sentiment has really shifted against China a lot of that responsibility for public sentiment you know the opinions of the masses is the responsibility of the propaganda system in China so governing its newspapers its media and so on but I think it's really one of the most uh one of the least effective parts of CCP influence work is is its ability to affect the masses so in Hong Kong we saw Elites you know really line up behind the Chinese Communist party some spoke out against its increasing repression and authoritarianism in Hong Kong but most of them really haven't said much at all and many of them have just you know sided with the Chinese Communist party but the people of Hong Kong undeniably uh are mainly opposed to this direction opposed to the National Security Law opposed to the erosion of their autonomy and this is a real challenge for the Chinese Communist party you know they they're able to manage this in Hong Kong in part because they're able to impose a Security State on the place but in a country like the Solomon Islands in other Pacific island nations in Australia it's so much harder for them to actually have success there so in a way public opinion is going to be on the side of of us as we're competing with China in many countries but the thing that governments still struggle to fight back against is this Elite influence work that is prevalent in in a lot of countries around the world now it's a really important point because thus far our conversation has really been relegated to Australia to the United States a little bit but as you open up the aperture I think what you're suggesting is we need to actually be looking globally at this phenomenon and that it has different levels of impact at different states is that right yeah um you know look before we leave I mean we we have this terrific Studio that we're here I mean if you look over here we see your book floating it's not really here because it's a blue screen for us but that means that we don't have anyone here in the audience with us but that hasn't stopped lots of people from not only registering but from uh flinging questions here so I thought we would just take a question or two before we wrap things here Alex and thanks for being so game for having a pretty broad-ranging conversation here Josh Rogan from The Washington Post uh sent this question in which I just wanted to read to you you write about two prominent Americans who have a significant contact with MSS influence officials Chaz Freeman and John thorden what do these examples tell us about broader MSS strategy to influence Western policy making and how widespread do you think these in influence operations are today so in the case of Chess Freeman that's that's almost the opening of the book he was an assistant secretary at the Pentagon he had been one of Nixon's interpreters during the 1972 presidential trip to China so he's been a key figure in the history of U.S China relations so it really shocked me to see actual photos of him with the very undercover MSS officers I was studying for this book he was introducing one of these MSS officers at a speech that he gave at the the Press Club in in Washington DC and and a testament to just how much influence the the broad networks these MSS officers built up when Chaz Freeman was introducing this officer he he said he needs no introduction he's well known to many of you in the audience back in 2001 and working with this this MSS front organization I think unwittingly you know these were undercover officers who are hiding the fact that or MSS he helped organize Congressional staffer delegations to go to China putting them in the hands of this covert MSS organization chess free sorry John Thornton who John who Josh also asked about is another really interesting case that I look at in the book he got incredible access when he visited China recently Wendy Sherman and John Kerry were really given sort of second-rate access in meetings when they visited China John Kerry was taken on a tour of xinjiang where whether you know human rights abuses he was given a meeting with a member of China's pilot Bureau standing committee and he also met with John B Jin who was the figurehead of this long-running MSS operation to promote the idea of China's peaceful rise so the very same MSS officer who Chas Freeman was introducing to the Press Club this guy who was also one of the handlers of Katrina young and MSS sorry an FBI asset he was also in meetings with Jung BGN John Thornton together as part of this operation to promote the idea of China's peace will rise so I think one thing that these two cases have in common is that MSS officers undercover presenting themselves as Scholars or cultural exchange officials were able to work with friends in in America to to persuade them that China was going in a more peaceful direction that it was liberalizing that it wasn't a serious threat that U.S policy shouldn't be built around that understanding and also help them get access within China so they were really helpful they were opening doors they were you know giving privileged insights into what what they were claiming was the direction of the Chinese Communist party but this is something that has really misled the west and in the case of John Thornton is quite interesting because for many years he's acted as a as a kind of back Channel between the White House and Chinese leaders and I think it's no coincidence that you know he's had this relationship unwittingly with undercover officers of the MSS got you a record question that wasn't John Kerry who went to xinjiang oh sorry John Thornton okay just to be clear on that but uh can you actually ask answer if you don't mind second part of the question too which is how widespread do you think those influence operations are today still I think these are incredibly widespread they're not going away one one Former Intelligence officer in the United States I interviewed for the book said that there are literally hundreds of cases that they came across of suspected Chinese Intelligence Officers or analysts trying to befriend get close to have a relationship with American politicians and this is not just Congress but this goes down to the sub-national level media reported for example on on one member of Congress who allegedly uh you know had had an advisor and a staffer who was an MSS asset Dianne Feinstein's driver allegedly in another case that an MSS asset was having relationships with with U.S politicians so this isn't a problem that's gone away I think as U.S China relations have gotten worse as tensions have grown this only makes covert and clandestine work more important [Music] um final question for you here too uh this is from uh Dimitri sevastopolo from the financial times he has given the growing U.S scrutiny on the MSS partially from your work partially more broadly too Alex and the attention that they're getting the MSS that is do we expect do you expect a shift in the way that the MSS operates or the same will same as we've seen before do you expect any shifts to their tradecraft to how they engage the MSS has already spent many years I think calibrating and changing its operations to manage the threat of you know U.S counterintelligence and and its Ambitions to do better intelligence work in the United States so around 2010 the MSS reorganized some of its bureaus and set up for the first time a unit focused on U.S clandestine operations after the arrest in 2018 of the of an MSS officer who was ex-druded from Belgium and is now in prison in the United States that really caused the MSS to pull back and strictly limit overseas travel for its officers they've already responded to these activities in a way that suggests they're becoming more careful they're using better trade craft they're trying to better coordinate their operations but not that their Ambitions have changed in any way and I think a really key thing to look out for is third countries so as it becomes harder for you know Federal politics in the United States to get influence by the MSS that you'll see two things you'll see as we've seen in Australia influence efforts targeting all those interest interest groups that are around the government you know key business figures sub-national government universities ways of influencing government that are less protected and then you'll see operations in third countries so if China has trouble running operations and targeting the United States it might try to do it in in places like Thailand where it's a much more favorable operating environment and it'll also be competing with the United States for influence in a lot of these countries we've seen so much attention on the Solomon Islands recently you know rumors of a Chinese military base being built in Cambodia in in Guinea in Africa so this is a real Global struggle for influence this is something where governments are just learning how to counter influence and interference in their own countries but at the same time it's it's something that matters to foreign policy it matters to engagement around the world it's something that should be integrated into how the United States and other countries think about competition with China in the Pacific for example look I want to sadly wrap the conversation here because I know that you have to go and hopefully talk about this book much more broadly but I think one of the things that I wanted to return to as we conclude out is the fact that uh you know one of the four pillars of Australia's approach you said is sunlight recognizing what is happening make sure that doesn't stay in the dark but so that we can talk about it we can debate about it we can say where we've got it right and where we are doing more harm than good here and your book is a tremendous tremendous effort in that category so thank you for that no less for kind of peeking around the corner about what comes next that these are Nimble these are fluent and if they're not succeeding at the federal level here in the United States in Australia or in other places you should expect to see it pushed out Beyond those primary National foreign policy decision makers to those groups those business people those State officials who surround them but also an intensification of efforts in third countries where the battle for influence is going on and what I think I really take away from this conversation Alex and from reading your spectacular book I keep saying this because I want people to buy the book and read it themselves um is that if you're talking about China if you're talking about competition with China and you don't have Chinese influence operations and interference efforts at the top of your list you're missing a large part of the conversation and what must be necessary as part of our response to that so thanks very much for coming in here to csis good luck with the rest of the book tour and we'll continue this conversation thanks so much for having me thank you [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 192,269

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics, technology, military, DOD, cybersecurity, innovation, artificial intelligence, human-machine interaction

Id: Fjp3eXwiTes

Length: 61min 16sec (3676 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022