NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A s official Washington sours on China’s malign behavior, Beijing is intensifying an effort to curry favor with state and local officials across the United States.
In a previously unreported incident, the Chinese embassy in Washington attempted to invite one of Utah’s top education officials to participate in a virtual propaganda conference intended to sell American elites on the Chinese Communist Party’s narratives on its atrocities against Uyghurs in 2021.
Emails that National Review obtained through the state’s open-records process show that the Chinese embassy extended that invite to the May 2021 event to Sydnee Dickson, the top administrator of Utah’s public-school system.
Dickson, who is the Utah State Board of Education’s superintendent of public instruction, and her colleagues said in emails, from April 2021, that it was a bad idea to attend and eventually forgot about the invitation. But the incident provides an instructive look at the degree to which China is strategically targeting specific state-level officials throughout its influence work in America.
“This type of outreach is part and parcel with China’s discourse power strategy,” Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told National Review. “At its most basic level, China’s discourse powerplay seeks to alter global perceptions about Chinese autocracy and Western democracy, namely by comparing, contrasting, and consistently misrepresenting these competing visions in ways that are advantageous to China.”
Utah has historically maintained a close relationship with various Chinese-government entities, viewed as the key to productive trade ties. Local Utah educational agencies have partnered with the Beijing-backed nonprofit that runs Confucius Institute language-learning centers for their Chinese-language instruction programs.
In recent years, however, federal counterintelligence authorities have warned that activities previously thought to be normal are part of Beijing’s malign-influence campaigns. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center issued a public warning about this last year, saying that China is trying to expand support for its policies by using state and local officials to pressure Washington.
Utah’s Senator Mitt Romney told National Review that China’s quest to become a global superpower is a wake-up call that requires officials at every level of government to exercise vigilance. “It is imperative that throughout every level of government — federal, state, and local — leaders understand the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to our security. A critical part of my role as Senator from Utah is to ensure the State has the resources and information it needs to safeguard our communities from this threat,” he said in an emailed statement.
The propaganda conference, which took place on May 6, 2021, was called “Xinjiang is a wonderful land,” and the email to Dickson from the Chinese embassy’s education office in late April 2021 said the Chinese embassy in Washington and the government of the Xinjiang region would host it. The invitation email also laid out the agenda and the speaking order for the event, to include a video about Xinjiang, remarks by a top official from the region, and “Xinjiang residents on their everyday work and life.”
At the time, Beijing was furiously contesting allegations by the U.S. and others that the party is carrying out a genocide against Uyghurs, whom it has put into camps, forcibly sterilized, beaten, and otherwise tortured, according to credible reports. “This particular Xinjiang campaign builds on others China put into motion after reports came to light about Beijing’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities,” said Singleton, adding that the CCP sought to contest U.S. claims that Beijing is running “concentration camps” by referring to them as “vocational education training centers” instead.
Louisa Greve, global advocacy director at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, called the Xinjiang propaganda campaign “despicable” and said that since Chinese diplomats would have trouble publishing propaganda about the abuses in U.S. newspapers they’re turning to other avenues. “It’s very disturbing to see China targeting local officials, using economic leverage with local governments to try to whitewash a genocide,” she said.
The Chinese embassy’s event seemed to be a response to Tursunay Ziawudun, a survivor of the Chinese camp system in Xinjiang, who told the BBC in February of 2021 that she and other female detainees had been repeatedly raped and subjected to forced sterilization. In a report immediately following the embassy’s propaganda event in May, the CCP’s Global Times propaganda newspaper characterized it as a direct response to a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that featured testimony from Ziawudun. The embassy webinar took place the same morning as the hearing.
A since-deleted page on the embassy’s website provided a summary of the event, saying that “guests from U.S. think tanks, business and educational sectors, foreign and Chinese media” attended the virtual meeting.
The embassy did not respond to an email from NR requesting a list of event attendees. Dickson, however, was not among them.
She forwarded the embassy’s email to others in her office. “Wow they are trying to lay it on thick,” wrote another Utah State Board of Education official, in response. Dickson replied, writing, “My thoughts exactly,” adding that she would not respond to the embassy’s email and that she was only circulating it for their awareness, as the embassy would try to reach them too.
In response to questions from National Review last week, Dickson said that neither she nor her colleagues remembered anything about this exchange because it took place two years ago, and they regularly receive invitations to different events.
“In this case appears to me that the reaction was due to the fact that the event seemed to be focused entirely on culture, and not on topics that are specifically relevant to the field of education in Utah, like the wonderful Mandarin language programs in some of our schools for example,” she wrote in an email to NR.
She added that she was not aware of invitations to other state entities, that she didn’t respond to the invite and therefore didn’t send it to anyone else, and that she has not received other invitations from the embassy.
While Beijing cast the Washington embassy’s event as a response to Ziawudun’s testimony, it also happened to come at a pivotal time for the Utah state government’s handling of China-related matters.
A local media report in early 2021 found that the Utah state senate had declined to take up legislation regarding Chinese-government-backed Confucius Institutes and to recognize the Uyghur genocide after pro-Beijing figures in Utah wrote to lawmakers. Two years later, however, the Utah legislature did pass a law putting in place stringent new restrictions on foreign funding for foreign-language instruction in public schools.
“Uyghurs are extremely grateful to local officials who aren’t fooled, like the sponsors of the Utah bill to stop CCP influence in universities in Utah,” Greve told National Review.