NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} commission of U.S. government experts warned today about a “small but growing” amount of evidence that China is seeking to influence America’s elections, in a report released a day ahead of an expected meeting between President Biden and Chinese general secretary Xi Jinping.
The panel was created by Congress to report on the national-security risks posed by Washington’s trade relationship with the People’s Republic. It issues a report with findings and recommendations every year.
One of the risks detailed at length in the annual report released today is the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive interference in the U.S. and other democracies. “This year, China’s government continued to aggressively seek to influence foreign policymakers and interfere with civic life overseas,” the commission’s report states, before describing revelations that China’s government set up a secret police station in Manhattan.
The commission recommended that Congress pass new laws to strengthen universities’ disclosure of foreign gifts, subject those gifts to government review, overhaul lobbying-disclosure rules to strengthen provisions on China-related donations, and create a database that would allow Americans seeking to enter into partnerships with Chinese entities to conduct due diligence on their prospective counterparts’ ties to Beijing.
Notably, the report pointed to Chinese election-influence attempts as one example of China’s foreign meddling.
“There is a small but growing amount of evidence that actors associated with China’s Party-state have sought to influence electoral processes in the United States as well as in allied and partner countries, though the operations that have been exposed do not appear to have impacted the outcomes,” the report states. “Efforts to fund candidates perceived as friendly to Beijing during elections or to bombard the public with disinformation that undermines confidence in certain candidates, the government, or the integrity of the election at large are all consistent with the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s definition of election influence.”
U.S. intelligence officials have previously said that while China considered but did not end up interfering in the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security warned ahead of the 2022 midterms that China’s efforts were focused on candidates with policy views that it opposed.
More recently, Martin Estrada, the federal government’s top prosecutor for the central district of California, told a congressional committee in October that “we have the People’s Republic of China trying to influence our election, trying to target some of our individuals” in the state, according to Politico. Estrada made the comment in passing during a meeting on a different topic and did not elaborate on what he meant.
The USCC report did not attempt to describe the scope of China’s election-influence efforts, but it did provide two recent examples of this alleged influence, both of which targeted the November 2022 election cycle.
The first of these was the use of several networks of inauthentic social-media accounts, including one that posted messages “discouraging Americans from voting, impugning the productivity of U.S. lawmakers, and highlighting instances of politically motivated violence as evidence that U.S. democracy had purported to fail.” The USCC said that there’s no evidence that these efforts shaped the outcomes of the 2022 elections but that experts say they pointed to China’s adoption of techniques used in previous Russian and Iranian election-influence efforts.
The USCC report also noted the arrest last year of Qiming Lin, a Chinese citizen whom the Justice Department charged with working on behalf of the Ministry of State Security to harass a U.S. congressional candidate. That candidate, Xiaong Yan, was a leader at the Tiananmen Square protests and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. According to court documents, Lin asked a private investigator to assault Yan or to orchestrate a car crash that would prevent him from standing for election.
“While there is no evidence the scheme had any impact on the election’s outcome, Mr. Yan claims the scheme ‘successfully’ sank his race,” the USCC report stated, referring to comments Yan made in an interview with NR last year.
The USCC also warned that Beijing tries to cultivate allies in foreign countries whose private interests are aligned with its own, such as local business groups that push for policies that benefit China. It noted the recent efforts of Party-linked organizations to convince Americans to more aggressively lobby their own government on agriculture and trade.
“The Party-state’s attempts to influence every level of government raise legitimate questions about whether state and local leaders have the knowledge, support, and resources they need to properly evaluate outreach from China,” the report stated, adding that Chinese intelligence services are often embedded within operations conducted by the Party’s influence arm, the United Front Work Department, and those operations may involve “dangerous espionage and harassment.”
More broadly, the commission said that Party leaders are increasingly focused on war preparedness and that recent diplomatic outreach by the Biden administration has done nothing to shift the Party from its aggressive trajectory as it tries to create a new China-centric world order.
“China now appears to view diplomacy with the United States primarily as a tool for forestalling and delaying U.S. pressure over a period of years while China moves ever further down the path of developing its own economic, military, and technological capabilities,” the report stated.