{"id":155000,"date":"2023-04-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-25T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mediaintel.asia\/?p=917273"},"modified":"2023-04-25T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T00:00:00","slug":"russia-and-china-are-waging-a-propaganda-war-against-the-us-why-are-we-silent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/2023\/04\/25\/russia-and-china-are-waging-a-propaganda-war-against-the-us-why-are-we-silent\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia and China are waging a propaganda war against the US why are we silent?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MediaIntel.Asia\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Biden administration officials, like most of their recent predecessors, defensively deny that U.S. policy is to contain, hold down, or wage a new Cold War against China.
\nBy contrast, the Chinese Communist Party continues to pursue expansionist economic, political and military goals and challenge the West at every level, especially in the informational and ideological domains. Beijing \u2014 along with its strategic allies and partners Russia, Iran and North Korea \u2014 sees the West in decline and strives to hasten its fall, just as the Soviet Union and its acolytes attempted in the original Cold War.
\nIn fact, Moscow continues to roll out and recycle some of the same disinformation and propaganda gambits it employed for the Soviet Union, such as its recent accusations of a U.S. biological warfare campaign in Ukraine. Baseless as the claims are, they divert attention, at least for some, from the actual crimes against humanity being perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine as well as Vladimir Putin\u2019s criminal actions in Russia itself, where he crushes domestic opposition to the war and his regime, often murderously.
\nWhat is missing from the West\u2019s response to the open assault of Russia and China on the rules-based international order is a sustained information counter-offensive similar to the strategic communications campaign waged by the United States and the Free World against the Soviet Union.
\nIn a series of major speeches, key national security and diplomatic officials in the Trump administration began the process of alerting the nation and the world, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it, to \u201cwhat the China threat means for our economy, for our liberty, and indeed for the future of free democracies around the world.\u201d
\nNational security adviser Robert O\u2019Brien led off the coordinated messaging in a June 2020 speech where he described the ideological roots of the China threat. \u201cThe [Chinese Communist Party\u2019s] stated goal is to [\u2026] remake the world according to the CCP. The effort to control thought beyond the borders of China is well under way. Over the past decade, the Party has invested billions of dollars into overseas propaganda operations to great effect.\u201d
\nWhile Xi Jinping has been compared to Mao Zedong, O\u2019Brien pointed to an earlier communist model. \u201cLet us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Joseph Stalin\u2019s successor.\u201d
\nIn his own speech a month later, Pompeo warned: \u201cWe must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won\u2019t get it done.\u201d
\nInstead, Pompeo invoked Richard Nixon\u2019s message prior to his presidential trip to Beijing: \u201cThe world cannot be safe until China changes. [\u2026] Our goal should be to induce change.\u201d
\nPompeo said the ideological challenge is not an easy one, because it needs to begin with an updating of Americans\u2019 own perceptions about China. \u201cWe must start by changing how our people and our partners perceive the Chinese Communist Party. We have to tell the truth. We can\u2019t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country, just like any other.\u201d
\nNational security scholars and former officials are increasingly concerned that the U.S. and Western response on the information level is not commensurate with China\u2019s threat. In a Hillop-ed in February, Evan Cooper and Robert A. Manning of the Atlantic Council wrote: \u201cThe United States has an image problem. Foreign publics have historically low approval of U.S. leadership. [\u2026] The U.S. needs to [\u2026] remedy its public diplomacy deficit, and re-engage globally both to better tell America\u2019s story and expand people-to-people, art and cultural exchanges.\u201d They called for the revival of the organization once charged with those missions, the U.S. Information Agency, which was abolished in 1999.
\nRobert Gates, secretary of Defense in the Bush and Obama administrations, recently decried the inadequacy \u2014 the virtual nonexistence \u2014 of an effective U.S information strategy. \u201cRussia and China are running rings around us,\u201d he wrote in The Washington Post. Just as with its Soviet predecessor, \u201cRussia [\u2026] has relied heavily on propaganda and disinformation to spread false narratives among its own people and those outside its borders, as well as to undermine the West\u2019s coherence and resolve.\u201d
\nAs for Russia\u2019s \u201cno-limits strategic partner,\u201d Gates wrote, \u201cChinese TV and radio broadcasts, websites and publications are readily available in the United States, but there is no reciprocity in China.\u201d
\nHe attributed part of the problem to USIA\u2019s demise and the failure to build a substitute bureaucratic structure, but he also saw a lack of vision from the top. \u201c[T]here is no government-wide international communications and engagement strategy, and certainly no sense of urgency. In short, the country that invented public relations is being out-communicated around the world by an authoritarian Russia and increasingly totalitarian China.\u201d
\nBut, he wrote, \u201cThe solution is not to re-create the USIA \u2014 the world has moved on.\u201d He called instead for fresh thinking on the challenge \u2014 \u201ca global engagement plan for strategic communications to explicitly advance U.S. national security interests.\u201d
\nThough in the past Gates has expressed little regard for the 40-year Biden record on foreign policy, this administration is well-positioned to take up the strategic communications challenge if it has the will to do so. It started on the right foot by following the Trump team\u2019s clear-eyed approach to the growing China threat and the need to strengthen the American commitment to Taiwan. It enhanced those policies by appealing to allies and partners to join in confronting the authoritarian challenges from China and Russia, by stressing human rights, and by establishing the Summit of Democracies.
\nBut its monumental Afghanistan failure seriously tarnished U.S. credibility on a broad foreign policy front. And its erratic stalemate policy on Ukraine has raised doubts about the U.S. commitment to Taiwan despite Biden\u2019s occasional ad hocremarks unmatched by formal administration statements.
\nBiden needs to state, officially and unequivocally, that the U.S. will do whatever is necessary to assure the democratic security of both Ukraine and Taiwan as front-line states in the existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.
\nJoseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.<\/p>\n

This data comes from MediaIntel.Asia's Media Intelligence and Media Monitoring Platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biden administration officials, like most of their recent predecessors, defensively deny that U.S. policy is to contain, hold down, or wage a new Cold War against China.
\nBy contrast, the Chinese Communist Party continues to pursue expansionist economi…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,144,1012,586,176,873,194,1234,249,465],"tags":[10401,10320,3472,10321,10338,3610,3544,10493,10315,2240,7655,2172,1868,10327,10350,10345,10413],"class_list":["post-155000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beijing","category-china","category-communism","category-economy","category-human-rights","category-iran","category-news-chinese-law","category-obama","category-russia","category-social-media","tag-afghanistan","tag-biden","tag-chinese","tag-communist","tag-democracy","tag-diplomacy","tag-donald-trump","tag-marxism","tag-media-intelligence","tag-military","tag-moscow","tag-national-security","tag-north-korea","tag-pacific","tag-pompeo","tag-propaganda","tag-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155003,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155000\/revisions\/155003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}