The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2020 39 Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian tweeted two manufactured conspiracy theories—that Patient Zero was an American soldier who visited Wuhan to participate in the Octo- ber 2019 Military World Games, and that the virus broke loose from the U.S. Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Secretary expressed “strong U.S. objections” over China’s efforts to “shift blame” for the virus to the United States, and he told the director of the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Communist Party of China, Yang Jiechi, that this was not the time to “spread disinfor- mation and outlandish rumors.” After the Secretary and the White House started using the terms “China virus” and “Wuhan virus,” Chinese reactions departed from the usual measured phrases of diplomacy. Another Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, tweeted that Secretary Pompeo should “stop lying through your teeth.” The Chinese party-state is now using all its information tools to advance three propaganda lines. First, it was China’s—mean- ing the Chinese Communist Party’s—superior system of gover- nance that brought the medical crisis to a quick end. Second, the resolute Chinese response “bought enough time” for other nations to respond. (This narrative theme has two bonuses—to mute domestic anger over how the Chinese government and the Communist Party suppressed early evidence of the disease outbreak, and to shine light on American delays.) Third, China is pushing the narrative that it is the global leader against the pandemic and is generously sending aid to other nations still grappling with it. China’s domestic and inter- national media sing these same three songs. In China’s foreign ministry and at its embassies, a new generation of “Wolf Warrior” diplomats (taking their label from the Chinese action films) assertively spread them on social media. For years the Russian media have seeded a general “info- demic” on infectious diseases. The New York Times recently summed up how President Putin has “spread disinformation on issues of personal health for a decade.” EUvsDisinfo has docu- mented how state-funded Russian broadcasting networks, RT and Sputnik, have spread conspiracy theories. Public Messaging, Hidden Disinformation These dueling interpretations, narratives and accusations have at least been attributed. Alas, there are other nasty things going on. In February, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center shared its analysis of “the full Russian ecosystemof official statemedia, proxy news sites, and social media personas” with themedia. Agence France Presse’s Feb. 22 report provided details: “Thou- sands of Russia-linked social media accounts” are engaged in “a coordinated effort to spread alarm.” Russian “claims that have been circulating in recent weeks include allegations that the virus is a U.S. effort to ‘wage economic war on China,’ that it is a biological weaponmanufactured by the CIA or part of a Western-led effort ‘to push anti-China messages.’ U.S. individuals including …Bill Gates …have also been falsely accused of involvement in the virus.” Since August 2019, ProPublica has tracked more than 10,000 suspected “fake,” “hijacked” and “zombie” Twitter accounts “involved in a coordinated influence campaign with ties to the Chinese government.” The wide-ranging report by Jeff Kao and Mia Shuang Li revealed the use of social media, fake profile photos and usernames, “changed handles,” bots, hacking of accounts, disinformation, an “interlocking group of accounts,” conspiracy theories, spamming, use of contractors and “a chorus of approving comments from obviously fake accounts.” Edward Wong, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes of The New York Times provided more details: “Intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across platforms … the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones.” Strategic Designs The Chinese and Russian informational offensives draw from the same model—the use of internal and external propaganda in the 20th-century communist party-state. (The role of the Comin- tern in shaping the Communist Party of China in the 1920s is too often forgotten.) Understanding the two nations’ strategic designs andmethods is a necessary first step for public diplomacy. During the Cold War, the Soviet party-state launched many hostile “active measures” campaigns that trafficked in crude lies: the AIDS virus was created at the U.S. Army laboratory at Fort Detrick and was engineered as an “ethnic weapon”; the 1978 mass suicides at Jonestown, Guyana, were a CIA plot; Americans adopted children from Central America in order to harvest their body parts; among others. The Kremlin’s continuing use of “active measures” also draws on centuries of Russian military thinking on deception— maskirovka . The Center for European Policy Analysis reports that Russia uses “disinformation, incitement to violence and hate speech to destroy trust, sap morale, degrade the information space, erode public discourse and increase partisanship.” Oscar Jonsson of the Stockholm Free World Forum adds that Rus- sian leaders conceive information warfare as having two parts: information-technical and information-psychological, perhaps parallel to “cyber” and “influence” in American thinking. From the time of Sun Tzu, China has had its own history