Who lost (the information war with) China?

While the hot American debate over censorship and propaganda has centered almost entirely on Russia, the long-term competition for global goodwill is in fact with China. And so for Washington legislators focused on that competition, the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to public diplomacy has been particularly hard to figure out.

“We are losing this war badly,” the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on the CCP, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., , said in an interview. “This is craziness — it’s utter stupidity — and it’s the opposite of what we need in terms of winning the strategic competition with the Chinese Communist Party for global influence.”

To be fair, the US was already losing. A main experience of trying to counter Chinese propaganda inside State’s defunct information hub, according to four former officials there I spoke to, was of being wildly outspent. “In the grand scheme of things, we were playing at the margins,” a former top official said. One previously unreported GEC initiative, for instance, offered Associated Press subscriptions for Asian outlets to whom the Chinese government had provided free subscriptions to Xinhua, and with it a Chinese view on the news. It was funded to the tune of the low-six figures, a pittance compared to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual Chinese spending on everything from buying broadcast spectrum to hiring up African journalists to hosting trips for global media.

One of GEC’s most interesting initiatives in the Biden years was to preemptively reveal that Russian actors were planning to seed false claims of American biological testing in Africa. “There are two ways to approach propaganda — offense and active defense. You need to do both well,” James Rubin, a special envoy and coordinator of the center at the Biden State Department (who now hosts a podcast with his ex-wife, Christiane Amanpour) told me.

“The plan was in year two to do the same thing with Chinese information operations,” Rubin said.

Those plans appear to have been shelved, along with most of the funding for Radio Free Asia, whose impact on much of China may be modest — residents of big coastal cities can pick up better-produced Western TV from Hong Kong — but whose Tibetan and Uyghur-language services offered a vital link to those those communities and a major irritant to China’s ruling Communist Party. When Trump announced cuts to public broadcasting, the Chinese state-run Global Times celebrated the end of the “lie factory.”

“The Chinese government is investing massive resources in information and propaganda efforts, while the US has abandoned some of its most vital tools in this space,” said Li Qiang, a New York-based activist and Chinese government critic who founded China Labor Watch, whose funding was frozen in February but later restored. “The long-term damage to America’s global influence may not become fully apparent until a year or more from now.”

A decade ago, the Chinese tried out a new propaganda strategy, unleashing “wolf warrior” diplomats to confront Americans on Twitter. I met the most vocal of them, Zhao Lijian, in Beijing in 2019, and he told me he was sick of his country being “badmouthed.” He reminded me then of many of the frustrated, combative figures who now lead the US government. But the country’s leadership soon got sick of his style, and by 2023 he’d been reassigned to an office managing China’s maritime boundaries.

Now, one former State Department official noted ruefully, “we’re the wolf warriors tweeting aggressive sh*t and they’re doing classic public diplomacy.” Mostly, said Krishnamoorthi, the White House sees soft power as “an irritant to their other negotiations.”

China still isn’t running its propaganda with the mischievous tactical brilliance of the Russians or the global cultural dominance of Hollywood. But it’s clear who’s gaining ground, and who’s losing it.

At the height of its 20th-century power, the US played aggressively in the space, from its then-powerful broadcast arms to the covert spending highlighted in Frances Stonor Saunders’ 1999 history, “Who Paid the Piper.” Now Trump Republicans, in their fury at what they see as a conspiracy against them, have slashed the foreign aid and democracy promotion that accompanied messaging across the vast contested spaces of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

“One of the main lessons of 20th-century major power competition is that information wars are absolutely critical,” Christopher Nichols, the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at the Ohio State University, told me. The information war “often determined winners, losers, and if and when conflicts turned into conflagrations.”

In our conversation, Beattie didn’t buy my suggestion that the US government is absenting itself from making much of a case at all in the large-scale global tug-of-war with China. He noted that the State Department remains focused on academic exchanges and cultural heritage issues, and pointed to the diplomatic push and pull with China on fronts from Brazil to Greece.

The bottom line, he argued, is that the US won’t win its international arguments unless Trump’s presidency succeeds on its transformative promises.

“The most effective messaging is truthful messaging that corresponds to the fundamentals,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important to have a president like Trump focused on the fundamentals like trade, economy, technology, ending wars, etc.”