It sounded like a small admission of defeat, but one wrapped up in the best EU style: “We have very little resources to study disinformation from China,” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell told an EU parliamentary committee in early March.
In concrete terms, this means that three members of the European External Action Service’s Strategic Communications Unit are currently working on a China Desk to deal with disinformation within the EU steered from Beijing – and are confronted with an army of thousands of fake accounts, trolls and Twitter accounts loyal to the government. Marcel Grzanna took a closer look at the EU’s position in the fight against disinformation from the Far East and spoke to insiders.
Other ends are also currently lacking: microchips from Taiwan. Felix Lee and Finn Mayer-Kuckuk get to the bottom of the shortage of the small components and analyze the consequences of the “toilet paper effect” in the semiconductor sector for the German and Chinese industry.
In 2019, a light went on in Europe. As millions of people in Hong Kong took to the streets to protest growing Chinese control in the city, the European External Action Service’s (EEAS) Strategic Communications Division (StratCom Taskforce) noticed a new dimension of Chinese influence on public opinion in Europe. The information machinery “made in China”, controlled from Beijing, and directed to all parts of the world, massively increased its torque.
Virtually overnight, the number of diplomatic or patriotic accounts increased with tens of thousands of followers on the Twitter short message service. The scale and nature of the campaign set alarm bells ringing in Brussels, not least because it became clear what technical means the Chinese were using. From then on, StratCom also took a closer look at pro-Chinese communication channels. It aimed to identify networks, analyze their actions and warn of a possible influence on public opinion in EU member states – but only four years after the department had started targeting fake news and disinformation from Russia.
Why so much time passed is obvious to Didi-Kirsten Tatlow of the Asia Program of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin. “There are powerful economic interests that ensure that Europeans don’t look too closely at the Chinese. For decades, the country was perceived only as a source of growth. This attitude is very convenient, and it makes it difficult for Europeans to recognize the real role of China as their rival,” Tatlow tells China.Table.
StratCom was right on the money after the outbreak of COVID-19, as the rhetorical arsenal of the People’s Republic was further upgraded in the battle for interpretive sovereignty over the COVID-19 pandemic. Across all social media, official Chinese mouthpieces were rapidly fuelling discussions about the origin and control of the virus. When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in March 2020, the number of posts from Chinese diplomats’ tweets climbed from 9,000 to 15,000 per week.
The comments on the diplomatic online channels deliberately moved along a spectrum between official statements by the State Department and cyber-bullying. A kind of grey zone, as StratCom puts it. It was not so much classic false reporting as finger-pointing, shaping interpretations to suit Beijing’s leadership, or even suppressing narratives that displeased China – all backed by the use of a lot of money, a lot of personnel, and sophisticated technology.
The reaction to Chinese interference came very late, but at least the problem now seemed to be addressed with the necessary urgency. But how seriously does the EU really take the threat? “The EU likes to talk about how important the fight against disinformation is, most recently, especially in the context of COVID-19. One might therefore get the impression that it is on the right track. But StratCom’s work has been reduced to a purely bureaucratic matter. It is no more than the EU paying lip service to European values,” says Monika Richter, a former StratCom employee in an interview with China.Table.
In May 2020, a Czech person with Canadian and US citizenship had left StratCom after a dispute with her superiors and was hired at a private company in Washington. Internally, the 29-year-old had accused the institution of “self-censorship” after an EU report on China was modified before publication. It had initially said Beijing wanted to “deflect blame for the pandemic outbreak and improve its international image” with a global disinformation campaign, adding that both “overt and covert tactics” had been observed. After threats from the Chinese, the passage was removed. StratCom argued that, after careful consideration, it had not found sufficient evidence to uphold the passage and had therefore changed the report. Richter was told she was not an activist but an employee of the EEAS, she says.
At StratCom, a department with a total of 38 employees headed by the German Lutz Güllner, three experts at the so-called China Desk are currently dealing with disinformation from the Far East. Three against thousands. The team is supported by two staff members from the EEAS country desk as well as by several external sources and data analysts. The goal is not to counter, let alone end, the hail of disinformation with narratives of their own, but to get the problem into the minds of Europeans, they say. It is likely that the team will soon be expanded to four China experts. But StratCom knows that this increase is only a drop in the ocean.
EEAS President and EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell complained at the beginning of March that there were neither sufficient financial nor human resources available to deal with China as intensively as with Russia. The department’s budget was successively increased to currently €11 million. However, in addition to Russia and China, the department also deals with the Western Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. With the money, the department needs to set up structures to monitor intelligence flows, organize exchanges with member states and buy in external analysis to gain a better understanding of the strategy and aims of damaging sources. It is said that the European Parliament will soon revisit the budget question for StratCom.
Richter believes the money argument is only a symptom of a fundamental problem. She has identified a “dramatic lack of political will“. The EU has failed to “acknowledge the serious threat of foreign authoritarian influence on European democracies”. Indeed, in 2015, the European Council of EU leaders gave the EEAS an official mandate to expose Russian propaganda and communicate it to member states through the development of its own networks. The Council still does not have a comparable mandate for China. Borrell had also referred to this.
Limited resources force StratCom to set priorities. Not every single case can be documented, which is why a patchy picture emerges. The department’s only option is to keep putting the problem on the agenda and backing it up with facts. In the end, it is up to the member states to decide how to deal with it. “There needs to be greater investment in research and analysis to understand Chinese intentions and behavior. With more funding, we would be able to counter manipulation better,” says Nad’a Kovalčíková of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a research program of the German Marshall Fund. China uses a range of numerous tools, such as disinformation, but also economic constraints imposed on other states or cyberattacks. “The EU must be able to make the connections between these different aspects to identify the underlying strategy,” says Kovalčíková.
StratCom reportedly found a clear difference between Russian and Chinese disinformation. The Russians were trying to undermine the social underbelly in the European Union. To do this, they use much more misinformation than the Chinese do. On the website euvsdisinfo.eu, StratCom documents thousands of examples since 2015. China, on the other hand, is focused on polishing up its image in the world. To this end, misinformation is less useful than manipulation in a particular context. China would also consistently suppress narratives, both in the case of COVID-19 and human rights crimes in Xinjiang, the destruction of Hong Kong’s rule of law, and also the Tibet and Taiwan issues.
In this way, Chinese propaganda succeeded in strengthening the edges of opinion spectrums and fuelling discussion about whether Beijing’s argumentation was not the right one after all. Ex-StratCom employee Richter says: “Chinese manipulation attempts seemed much less aggressive, while Russian manipulation was very conspicuous.” This is one of the reasons why StratCom has significantly more employees dealing with Russia than with China.
StratCom wants to counteract this with the Rapid Alert System. The instrument is a kind of network of experts in the member states who are in a position to use and forward tips on disinformation and their intentions in the European interest. In many of the 27 EU states, these tips would otherwise come to nothing because they lack the structures to take them up accordingly. Until three years ago, there was no such networking.
“The processing procedures in the individual EU countries are very different,” says Kovalčíková of the GMF. The Swedes show how it’s done. Well over a year before the last parliamentary election in 2018, the government had already begun preparing its citizens, media, and administration for the possibility that foreign forces might try to influence the outcome of the election. One indicator that the strategy worked was the fact that a shift to the right was avoided. Kovalčíková: “Nevertheless, a lot of work remains. Attention to the danger of influence by third countries must extend beyond the election cycle. It is crucial to permanently raise awareness of this problem among the population.”
Bernhard Weber first came to China in the early 1980s as a student at Shandong University. “At that time, it was a country with practically no cars. A city like Shanghai probably had hardly more than 500 passenger cars,” Weber recounts, to illustrate the rapid development. In the meantime, the 62-year-old is the managing director of the Chinese branch of the Baden-Württemberg International (BW-I), a state agency based in the six-million metropolis of Nanjing in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. He supports companies from Baden-Württemberg in gaining a foothold in the Chinese market.
The pool of companies that Weber looks after comprises around 20 small and medium-sized enterprises. But this number could be significantly higher, as Weber thinks: “China is still a market that is very far away, especially for smaller companies. Many entrepreneurs are very conservative in this respect.” Therefore, too few still dare to take even this low-risk step of seeking advice in exploring the Chinese market.
Still, Weber can’t complain about a lack of work, even in the current pandemic. “The companies that set up shop here before the pandemic are benefiting from the fact that the economy here has hardly been affected by COVID.” And even last year, two companies took advantage of BW-I’s service and entered the China business. Weber believes that the cooperation with the companies is only a temporary solution. For example, Baden-Württemberg International provides office infrastructure and personnel management for German investors in China. This enables the entrepreneurs to start their business without any lead time and has less bureaucratic work.
In addition to day-to-day business, Weber is also responsible for representing Baden-Württemberg in the two partner provinces of Jiangsu and Liaoning. Normally, this involves maintaining contact with various government agencies as well as an annual meeting of regional government representatives. “Of course, all of that was canceled last year.”
Weber owes his path to China to his affinity for languages – and to a Japanese man he befriended in a French language course. He said to me, “You’d better learn Chinese. They’re just opening up shop, and in the future, they’ll need people from abroad who speak their language.” At the time, there were three universities offering Sinology degrees with modern Chinese. Weber got his first job in China at a joint venture of the Siemens subsidiary KWU. Weber and his family have now lived in Nanjing for 26 years. He was there even before the city got its skyscrapers and the world discovered the Chinese market. David Renke
Nowhere in the world are there more coffee shops than in Shanghai. According to a report by that’s-Mag, there are over 7,000 of them in China’s metropolis of 26 million. This means Shanghai beats London (3,233), Tokyo (3,826), and New York with 1,591 coffee shops. London remains the leader in coffee shops per capita, with 3.69 shops per 10,000 inhabitants. In Shanghai, the figure is “only” 2.85.
It sounded like a small admission of defeat, but one wrapped up in the best EU style: “We have very little resources to study disinformation from China,” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell told an EU parliamentary committee in early March.
In concrete terms, this means that three members of the European External Action Service’s Strategic Communications Unit are currently working on a China Desk to deal with disinformation within the EU steered from Beijing – and are confronted with an army of thousands of fake accounts, trolls and Twitter accounts loyal to the government. Marcel Grzanna took a closer look at the EU’s position in the fight against disinformation from the Far East and spoke to insiders.
Other ends are also currently lacking: microchips from Taiwan. Felix Lee and Finn Mayer-Kuckuk get to the bottom of the shortage of the small components and analyze the consequences of the “toilet paper effect” in the semiconductor sector for the German and Chinese industry.
In 2019, a light went on in Europe. As millions of people in Hong Kong took to the streets to protest growing Chinese control in the city, the European External Action Service’s (EEAS) Strategic Communications Division (StratCom Taskforce) noticed a new dimension of Chinese influence on public opinion in Europe. The information machinery “made in China”, controlled from Beijing, and directed to all parts of the world, massively increased its torque.
Virtually overnight, the number of diplomatic or patriotic accounts increased with tens of thousands of followers on the Twitter short message service. The scale and nature of the campaign set alarm bells ringing in Brussels, not least because it became clear what technical means the Chinese were using. From then on, StratCom also took a closer look at pro-Chinese communication channels. It aimed to identify networks, analyze their actions and warn of a possible influence on public opinion in EU member states – but only four years after the department had started targeting fake news and disinformation from Russia.
Why so much time passed is obvious to Didi-Kirsten Tatlow of the Asia Program of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin. “There are powerful economic interests that ensure that Europeans don’t look too closely at the Chinese. For decades, the country was perceived only as a source of growth. This attitude is very convenient, and it makes it difficult for Europeans to recognize the real role of China as their rival,” Tatlow tells China.Table.
StratCom was right on the money after the outbreak of COVID-19, as the rhetorical arsenal of the People’s Republic was further upgraded in the battle for interpretive sovereignty over the COVID-19 pandemic. Across all social media, official Chinese mouthpieces were rapidly fuelling discussions about the origin and control of the virus. When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in March 2020, the number of posts from Chinese diplomats’ tweets climbed from 9,000 to 15,000 per week.
The comments on the diplomatic online channels deliberately moved along a spectrum between official statements by the State Department and cyber-bullying. A kind of grey zone, as StratCom puts it. It was not so much classic false reporting as finger-pointing, shaping interpretations to suit Beijing’s leadership, or even suppressing narratives that displeased China – all backed by the use of a lot of money, a lot of personnel, and sophisticated technology.
The reaction to Chinese interference came very late, but at least the problem now seemed to be addressed with the necessary urgency. But how seriously does the EU really take the threat? “The EU likes to talk about how important the fight against disinformation is, most recently, especially in the context of COVID-19. One might therefore get the impression that it is on the right track. But StratCom’s work has been reduced to a purely bureaucratic matter. It is no more than the EU paying lip service to European values,” says Monika Richter, a former StratCom employee in an interview with China.Table.
In May 2020, a Czech person with Canadian and US citizenship had left StratCom after a dispute with her superiors and was hired at a private company in Washington. Internally, the 29-year-old had accused the institution of “self-censorship” after an EU report on China was modified before publication. It had initially said Beijing wanted to “deflect blame for the pandemic outbreak and improve its international image” with a global disinformation campaign, adding that both “overt and covert tactics” had been observed. After threats from the Chinese, the passage was removed. StratCom argued that, after careful consideration, it had not found sufficient evidence to uphold the passage and had therefore changed the report. Richter was told she was not an activist but an employee of the EEAS, she says.
At StratCom, a department with a total of 38 employees headed by the German Lutz Güllner, three experts at the so-called China Desk are currently dealing with disinformation from the Far East. Three against thousands. The team is supported by two staff members from the EEAS country desk as well as by several external sources and data analysts. The goal is not to counter, let alone end, the hail of disinformation with narratives of their own, but to get the problem into the minds of Europeans, they say. It is likely that the team will soon be expanded to four China experts. But StratCom knows that this increase is only a drop in the ocean.
EEAS President and EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell complained at the beginning of March that there were neither sufficient financial nor human resources available to deal with China as intensively as with Russia. The department’s budget was successively increased to currently €11 million. However, in addition to Russia and China, the department also deals with the Western Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. With the money, the department needs to set up structures to monitor intelligence flows, organize exchanges with member states and buy in external analysis to gain a better understanding of the strategy and aims of damaging sources. It is said that the European Parliament will soon revisit the budget question for StratCom.
Richter believes the money argument is only a symptom of a fundamental problem. She has identified a “dramatic lack of political will“. The EU has failed to “acknowledge the serious threat of foreign authoritarian influence on European democracies”. Indeed, in 2015, the European Council of EU leaders gave the EEAS an official mandate to expose Russian propaganda and communicate it to member states through the development of its own networks. The Council still does not have a comparable mandate for China. Borrell had also referred to this.
Limited resources force StratCom to set priorities. Not every single case can be documented, which is why a patchy picture emerges. The department’s only option is to keep putting the problem on the agenda and backing it up with facts. In the end, it is up to the member states to decide how to deal with it. “There needs to be greater investment in research and analysis to understand Chinese intentions and behavior. With more funding, we would be able to counter manipulation better,” says Nad’a Kovalčíková of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a research program of the German Marshall Fund. China uses a range of numerous tools, such as disinformation, but also economic constraints imposed on other states or cyberattacks. “The EU must be able to make the connections between these different aspects to identify the underlying strategy,” says Kovalčíková.
StratCom reportedly found a clear difference between Russian and Chinese disinformation. The Russians were trying to undermine the social underbelly in the European Union. To do this, they use much more misinformation than the Chinese do. On the website euvsdisinfo.eu, StratCom documents thousands of examples since 2015. China, on the other hand, is focused on polishing up its image in the world. To this end, misinformation is less useful than manipulation in a particular context. China would also consistently suppress narratives, both in the case of COVID-19 and human rights crimes in Xinjiang, the destruction of Hong Kong’s rule of law, and also the Tibet and Taiwan issues.
In this way, Chinese propaganda succeeded in strengthening the edges of opinion spectrums and fuelling discussion about whether Beijing’s argumentation was not the right one after all. Ex-StratCom employee Richter says: “Chinese manipulation attempts seemed much less aggressive, while Russian manipulation was very conspicuous.” This is one of the reasons why StratCom has significantly more employees dealing with Russia than with China.
StratCom wants to counteract this with the Rapid Alert System. The instrument is a kind of network of experts in the member states who are in a position to use and forward tips on disinformation and their intentions in the European interest. In many of the 27 EU states, these tips would otherwise come to nothing because they lack the structures to take them up accordingly. Until three years ago, there was no such networking.
“The processing procedures in the individual EU countries are very different,” says Kovalčíková of the GMF. The Swedes show how it’s done. Well over a year before the last parliamentary election in 2018, the government had already begun preparing its citizens, media, and administration for the possibility that foreign forces might try to influence the outcome of the election. One indicator that the strategy worked was the fact that a shift to the right was avoided. Kovalčíková: “Nevertheless, a lot of work remains. Attention to the danger of influence by third countries must extend beyond the election cycle. It is crucial to permanently raise awareness of this problem among the population.”
Bernhard Weber first came to China in the early 1980s as a student at Shandong University. “At that time, it was a country with practically no cars. A city like Shanghai probably had hardly more than 500 passenger cars,” Weber recounts, to illustrate the rapid development. In the meantime, the 62-year-old is the managing director of the Chinese branch of the Baden-Württemberg International (BW-I), a state agency based in the six-million metropolis of Nanjing in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. He supports companies from Baden-Württemberg in gaining a foothold in the Chinese market.
The pool of companies that Weber looks after comprises around 20 small and medium-sized enterprises. But this number could be significantly higher, as Weber thinks: “China is still a market that is very far away, especially for smaller companies. Many entrepreneurs are very conservative in this respect.” Therefore, too few still dare to take even this low-risk step of seeking advice in exploring the Chinese market.
Still, Weber can’t complain about a lack of work, even in the current pandemic. “The companies that set up shop here before the pandemic are benefiting from the fact that the economy here has hardly been affected by COVID.” And even last year, two companies took advantage of BW-I’s service and entered the China business. Weber believes that the cooperation with the companies is only a temporary solution. For example, Baden-Württemberg International provides office infrastructure and personnel management for German investors in China. This enables the entrepreneurs to start their business without any lead time and has less bureaucratic work.
In addition to day-to-day business, Weber is also responsible for representing Baden-Württemberg in the two partner provinces of Jiangsu and Liaoning. Normally, this involves maintaining contact with various government agencies as well as an annual meeting of regional government representatives. “Of course, all of that was canceled last year.”
Weber owes his path to China to his affinity for languages – and to a Japanese man he befriended in a French language course. He said to me, “You’d better learn Chinese. They’re just opening up shop, and in the future, they’ll need people from abroad who speak their language.” At the time, there were three universities offering Sinology degrees with modern Chinese. Weber got his first job in China at a joint venture of the Siemens subsidiary KWU. Weber and his family have now lived in Nanjing for 26 years. He was there even before the city got its skyscrapers and the world discovered the Chinese market. David Renke
Nowhere in the world are there more coffee shops than in Shanghai. According to a report by that’s-Mag, there are over 7,000 of them in China’s metropolis of 26 million. This means Shanghai beats London (3,233), Tokyo (3,826), and New York with 1,591 coffee shops. London remains the leader in coffee shops per capita, with 3.69 shops per 10,000 inhabitants. In Shanghai, the figure is “only” 2.85.
