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• Social Media Propaganda Campaigns Show Mixed Results
• ASPI: Inside China’s Nationwide DNA Collection Program
• Translation: “Regulations on Party Members’ Speech and Actions Outside of Work Hours”
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Social Media Propaganda Campaigns Show Mixed Results
Since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in Wuhan in January before spreading around the world, the Chinese government has increasingly utilized foreign social media networks—including several that are blocked in China—to spread its propaganda and disinformation about the origins of the virus and its own flawed response to it. Recently, the European Union named China as a source of disinformation around COVID. Chinese authorities have used a variety of tactics online to spread their message, from mass accounts on Twitter designed to amplify official accounts to personal accounts of “wolf warrior” government officials and state media Facebook pages. While more prevalent than in years past, such messaging has so far gained little traction among global social media users.
Twitter recently shut down more than 170,000 accounts which it said were linked to the Chinese government. ASPI obtained the takedown dataset from Twitter, and wrote a 62-page report analyzing the behavior of those accounts. While much of the discussion of Chinese government disinformation and propaganda campaigns focuses on coronavirus, ASPI found that the most discussed topics by the accounts removed by Twitter were Hong Kong protests and exiled tycoon Guo Wengui, followed by COVID-19 and the Hong Kong protests. From the report’s synopsis (read the full report here):
This activity largely targeted Chinese-speaking audiences outside of the Chinese mainland (where Twitter is blocked) with the intention of influencing perceptions on key issues, including the Hong Kong protests, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and, to a lesser extent Covid-19 and Taiwan.
[…] Our analysis includes a dataset of 23,750 Twitter accounts and 348,608 tweets that occurred from January 2018 to 17 April 2020 (Figure 1). Twitter has attributed this dataset to Chinese state-linked actors and has recently taken the accounts contained within it offline.
[…] Based on the data in the takedown dataset, while these efforts are sufficiently technically sophisticated to persist, they currently lack the linguistic and cultural refinement to drive engagement on Twitter through high-follower networks, and thus far have had relatively low impact on the platform. The operation’s targeting of higher value aged accounts as vehicles for amplifying reach, potentially through the influence-for-hire marketplace, is likely to have been a strategy to obfuscate the campaign’s state-sponsorship. This suggests that the operators lacked the confidence, capability and credibility to develop high-value personas on the platform. This mode of operation highlights the emerging nexus between state-linked propaganda and the internet’s public relations shadow economy, which offers state actors opportunities for outsourcing their disinformation propagation. [Source]
In Forbes, Davey Winder wrote about the action by Twitter:
The fake news network attributed by Twitter to China is, the disclosure said, a new one. It consisted of two interlinked parts: a highly engaged core network of 23,750 accounts and another 150,000 “amplifier” accounts to boost the reach of the disinformation being published. Twitter said that the core network was “largely caught early and failed to achieve considerable traction on the service.” Tweeting mostly in a variety of Chinese languages, the fake news network was engaged in a campaign to spread a geopolitical narrative that was favorable to the Communist Party of China.
The kind of fake news narratives among nearly 350,000 analyzed tweets focused on the Hong Kong political situation, but China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic also featured in the disinformation campaign. [Source]
On Facebook, the Chinese government has taken a more direct approach by posting from state media accounts (“white propaganda”) rather than through a shadow network of supporting accounts as on Twitter. For Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review, Vanessa Molter and Renee Diresta write about Facebook pages set up to spread the Chinese government’s message, which together give Beijing an audience of at least 100 million followers. They write that since January, over 33 percent of content on these pages was related to COVID-19. They also found three recurring behaviors from these pages: “focusing a significant share of coverage on positive stories, adjusting narratives retroactively, and using ads to spread messaging.”
While much of the study of state-sponsored online influence has focused on bots and subversive accounts, this essay focuses instead on the white propaganda capability of the People’s Republic of China on social media, and examines how it has been leveraged in an information conflict around the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic. Understanding how overt online propaganda properties are developed and leveraged to shape international public opinion provides us with a more complete grasp of the narrative manipulation capabilities available to well-resourced state actors, and suggests potential gaps in tech platform misinformation policies.
[…] China has extensive and well-resourced outwardly-focused state media capabilities (Brady, 2015), which it employs for its public diplomacy strategy (Chang and Lin, 2014). These channels, such as the CCP’s properties on Facebook (which is banned in China), relay the government’s messaging to other countries’ governments and citizens. Since 2003, building and buying media properties has been part of the CCP’s explicit effort to ensure that it has the capacity to “nudge” foreign governments and other entities into policies or stances favorable to the party4. In periods of unrest or crisis, these properties are put to use to propagate state messaging (Shambaugh, 2017).
Understanding the ways in which online propaganda shapes public opinion – particularly given the rising prevalence of social networks as sources of news, and the capabilities that social media offers for targeting, repetition, and audience-building – is critical to understanding how influence and manipulation play out in modern politics (Woolley & Howard, 2017). It is, however, a challenging undertaking because of the difficulty of isolating any particular account or post as the precipitating factor in shaping an opinion. A debate persists on the impact of online disinformation and misinformation even in the literature on the most widely-studied operations, such as those carried out by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA)5. [Source]
Meanwhile, users of Tik Tok, the popular video sharing app owned by China’s Bytedance, are posting pro-Chinese government messages in hopes of gaining more viewers—or to poke fun. Eva Xiao reports for the Wall Street Journal:
Glorifying China—with a wink—is emerging as an unexpected new trend on TikTok, the short video app whose already high popularity has soared during the coronavirus pandemic.
Hundreds of users have uploaded satirical pro-China clips in recent months, some hashtagged with “ilovechina” or variants like “noticemexijinping.” Many feature the use of Mandarin or include gestures like kissing a photo of Mr. Xi or saluting the Chinese flag.
Several users contacted by The Wall Street Journal say they are doing it because they think the videos can help them build audiences on the app. For some, popularity can lead to advertising partnerships, though many just want a bigger personal following. They assume TikTok, whose parent is Beijing-based Bytedance Ltd., will promote their content more widely if it pleases China. Others said they were just poking fun at China. [Source]
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ASPI: Inside China’s Nationwide DNA Collection Program
In 2017, experts began to warn that controversial DNA collection campaigns resembling ones targeting ethnic minorities in sensitive regions like Xinjiang and Tibet could be expected nationwide as Beijing expanded its use of advanced surveillance technologies to the nation. That year, the Ministry of Public Security began the nationwide DNA collection of random boys and men, part of longer running efforts to map the genetics of its entire male population for surveillance and policing purposes. A recent policy report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute documents authorities’ nationwide efforts to build this forensic database—a massive expansion of Beijing’s high surveillance capabilities—and urges Beijing to end the program’s indiscriminate application and destroy all samples obtained without proof of criminal wrongdoing. In the report’s executive summary, the authors outline the history of the program:
Like other such databases, it contains samples taken from criminal offenders and suspects. However, since 2013, In 2003, China’s Ministry of Public Security began building its own forensic DNA database. Chinese authorities have collected DNA samples from entire ethnic minority communities and ordinary citizens outside any criminal investigations and without proper informed consent. The Chinese Government’s genomic dataset likely contains more than 100 million profiles and possibly as many as 140 million, making it the world’s largest DNA database, and it continues to grow (see Appendix 3).
[…] The indiscriminate collection of biometric data in China was first reported by Human Rights Watch. Beginning in 2013, state authorities obtained biometric samples from nearly the entire population of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (3 million residents) under the guise of free annual physical exams region’s 23 million residents was collected. In 2016, a similar program was launched in Xinjiang, where data from nearly all of the region’s 23 million residents was collected.
[…] Such programs, however, were only the beginning. Starting in late 2017, Chinese police expanded mass DNA data collection to the rest of the country. Yet in contrast to the wholesale approach adopted in Tibet and Xinjiang, authorities are using a more cost-efficient but equally powerful method: the collection of DNA samples from selected male citizens. This targeted approach gathers Y-STR data—the ‘short tandem repeat’ or unique DNA sequences that occur on the male (Y) chromosome. When these samples are linked to multigenerational family trees created by the police, they have the potential to link any DNA sample from an unknown male back to a specific family and even to an individual man.
In this report, we document hundreds of police-led DNA data-collection sorties in 22 of China’s 31 administrative regions (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) and across more than a hundred municipalities between late 2017 and April 2020. Evidence suggests that, in some locations, blood collection has occurred in preschools (Figure 2) and even continued during the Covid-19 pandemic. […] [Source]
A post on ASPI’s The Strategist blog by report authors Emile Dirks and James Leibold offers local examples of compulsory DNA collection in schools, shops, and on street sides, outlines how international corporations are profiting from the program, and makes the case that it violates both domestic and international law:
The corporate world is profiting handsomely from this new surveillance program. Leading Chinese and multinational companies have provided the Chinese police with equipment and intellectual property to collect, store and analyse DNA samples. They include Chinese companies like Forensic Genomics International, Beijing Hisign Technology, AGCU Scientific and Microread Genetics, which have sold Y-STR testing kits or Y-STR databases to local public security bureaus across China.
Among the multinational companies participating is the US-based biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific, which has boasted, ‘In China, our company is providing immense technical support for the construction of the national DNA database, and has already helped to build the world’s largest DNA database.’
[…] The genomic surveillance program violates Chinese domestic law and international human rights norms, including the UN Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, the UN International Declaration on Human Genetic Data, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. […] [Source]
Reporting on the ASPI brief at The New York Times, Sui-Lee Wee notes both an “unusual amount” of domestic opposition to the controversial program, and examples of official local pride in its application:
[…] At a session of China’s Parliament in March, two delegates to China’s political advisory body proposed that the government regulate DNA collection. One of them, Wang Ying, an official from Beijing, said that when the technology reached a certain scale, the government needed to protect the rights of users “in a timely manner.”
In 2015, Liu Bing, the deputy chief forensic physician at the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, warned in the ministry’s forensic journal that the collection of blood samples “with improper measures” could cause social instability, especially “in today’s society where the citizens’ awareness of their legal rights is increasing.”
[…] The authorities have moved quietly. Mr. Dirks, co-author of the Australian paper, said nearly all of the collection was taking place in the countryside, where there was little understanding of the implications of the program.
In rural areas, many officials show pride in their work. Officials in the city of Dongguan posted a photo showing boys in an elementary school lining up to have a teacher collect their blood. Officials in Shaanxi Province also posted online a photo of six boys gathered around a table at an elementary school watching a police officer take blood from one of their friends. [Source]
Wee’s report also goes further into the involvement of U.S.-based Thermo Fisher’s active pursuance of business on the project. The firm in 2017 designed special testing kits tailored for the Ministry of Public Security to identify specific genetic markers, and distinguish between Chinese ethnic groups. On Twitter, as in her report, Sui-Lee Wee highlighted the increased ethical danger that firms like Thermo Fisher take on when partnering with an authoritarian government:
For more on the Sharp Eyes surveillance program, see CDT’s three-part special project “Sharper Eyes: Surveilling the Surveillers.”
© Josh Rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). |
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Translation: “Regulations on Party Members’ Speech and Actions Outside of Work Hours”
Recently, screenshots of an internal Party directive outlining pilot regulations for central Party members’ behavior and speech outside of working hours circulated online. The document, issued by the Working Committee of the CCP Central Committee and National Agencies, demands that Party members from central and state agencies promote Xi Jinping’s ideological agenda while at work, and also throughout their private lives. The Party directive was leaked as photographs of a computer monitor, which don’t show the final few lines of the document. CDT has translated the screenshots:
Working Committee for the CCP Central Committee and National Agencies Document
Published by Central Working Committee (2020) #17
Notice Regarding the Issuance of “Several Regulations for the Political Speech and Activity of Central and State Agency Party Members Outside of Working Hours (Trial)”
Central and State Agencies, Various Department and Party Committees:
The “Several Regulations for the Political Speech and Activity of Central and State Agency Party Members Outside of Work (Trial)” (hereafter abbreviated as “Regulations”) has now been printed and released to you. Please earnestly follow and implement [the regulations].
Central and national organs and Party organizations of all levels must strengthen their political resolve; earnestly implement comprehensive, strict control over principal Party responsibilities; integrate the study and implementation of the “Regulations” as important content for strengthening political organs’ ideological education; strengthen daily supervision and management; keep up to date on Party members’ political words and actions outside of working hours; catch potential issues early; and nip issues in the bud. Those who cause serious harm by violating the “Regulations” shall face severe repercussions according to laws and regulations. All Party members in all central and national organs, especially Party cadres, must strengthen political awareness; strengthen self-restraint; strictly abide by Party discipline and rules; take the lead in achieving the “two maintenances”; and always act as politically sensible, honest people.
Working Committee of the CCP Central Committee and National Agencies
May 20, 2020
Several Regulations for the Political Speech and Activity of Central and National Agency Party Members Outside of Working Hours (Trial)
(May 14, 2020: Reviewed and Approved via conference of the Working Committee of the CCP Central Committee and National Agencies
May 20, 2020: Issued by the Working Committee of the CCP Central Committee and National Agencies)
Central and national agencies are first and foremost political agencies, the first phalanx in charge of putting the “two maintenances” into practice. All Party members of central and national agencies must practice clear-cut politics, hold themselves to higher standards and stricter requirements in their adherence to Party standards and rules. In the same way, Party members must strengthen self-restraint outside of work hours, self-regulate political speech and activity, and conscientiously set a good example. In accordance with the Party constitution and relevant Party laws and regulations, we hereby institute the following rules.
- Maintain a baseline line in expression of opinion. Remain committed to ensuring that the political baseline is not touched and disciplinary red lines are not crossed. Practice extreme caution in words and actions in all situations outside of work. Always maintain political diligence and discipline as a matter of practice. Do not disseminate statements that violate Party theory, guidelines, and policies. Do not create or disseminate speech that smears the image of the Party and the country. Do not make statements that deviate from the “two maintenances.” Do not engage in any form of “low-class red” or “high-end black” [forms of nationalistic online content that is easily satirized and reflects badly on the Party]. Do not disseminate so-called “inside” information or gossip based on information you have access to through work. Do not engage in unauthorized interviews with the media, especially foreign media.
- Conduct online activity with great caution. Always remember: the internet is not a lawless domain, or a “safe enclave” in which Party discipline can be broken. The same standards and requirements must be applied to both online and offline activity. Resolutely fight against words and actions that violate, distort, or reject the Party’s political line. Do not publish, share, or like any speech, articles, images, audio/video, etc. that misrepresent Party or central government policy or undermine Party unity. Do not organize or participate in online forums, groups, live broadcasts, etc. that oppose basic Party theory, political line, or strategy. You are prohibited from the unauthorized browsing or accessing of illegal or reactionary websites. Do not create or spread political rumors or other false information on online platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, or other online forums and communities.
- Maintain consistent loyalty in thought and action. Be loyal, honest, and honorable towards the Party. Be honest, and consciously carry out the original mission [of the Party]. Always maintain the true character of being a public servant. Do not act differently in front of others and behind their backs, act one way in public and another way in private. Do not act in a high-profile, positive manner at work, only to engage in irresponsible gossip in private regarding the Party line, principles and policies and the Central Party decision-making and deployment. Do not be a double-crossing two-face. Do not violate social order and moral norms. Do not say “shocking” words, maintain an arrogant attitude, or seek special treatment and privileges. Do not ignore the demands of the masses on the grounds that you are encountering them outside of working hours. Do not pass the buck or damage the Party’s relations with the masses.
- Conduct activities according to the rules. Be resolute in political conviction, maintain political determination, increase political sharpness and perception. Do not participate in rallies, marches, demonstrations or other activities that oppose Party theory and political direction. Do not engage in feudalistic superstition, hold religious beliefs, participate in cults, or use such activities to oppose the Party line, principles, or policies. Do not listen to or watch reactionary foreign radio or television programs without permission, or carry or collect reactionary books, publications, audiovisual products, electronic reading materials, etc.
- Be principled in your social interactions. Adhere to a bottom line in how you conduct yourself as a person, wield your power, and make friends. Advocate clean, tidy relationships with comrades, proper and disciplined relations between superiors and subordinates, and clean political-business relations. Consciously purify the social circles and friend groups you keep. Do not form cliques with people on the basis of hometown, school alumni, classmates, or military friends, or on the basis of once having worked in the same system or work unit. Do not call each other brothers in private, exchange flattery and favors, or engage in small private social groups. Do not organize or participate in unauthorized fellowships, alumni associations, student associations, comrade associations, etc. Do not organize dinners, socials, etc. to “pay respects to the local boss,” “set up antennas,” [make connections with higher officials] or make use of your power in the interest of others or to form private interest groups.
- Practice strict management and education at home. Emphasize household educational style. Strictly supervise family members and those around you at work. Guide them to listen to the Party, follow the Party with conviction, cultivate good morals, observe discipline, abide by the law, and practice honesty in work endeavors. Do not neglect the education and management of relatives and those who work around you. Do not ignore their politics, ideology, work, life, and other conditions. Do not be indifferent to incorrect words or actions. Do not acquiesce to, cover up for, or indulge in any way relatives and those who work around you under the banner of the central and national agencies in instances in which they wish to use their relationship with you to seek special care or obtain special benefits.
- The Working Committee of the CCP Central Committee and National Agencies is responsible for interpreting these regulations. [These regulations go into effect] starting on the day of issuance… [Remainder of text obscured or absent]. [Chinese]
Translation by Little Bluegill.
See also CDT’s recent translation of a scathing critique of Xi Jinping’s heavy-handed rule of the Party and state from former Central Party School professor Cai Xia.
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