A new publication, The Hard Edge of Sharp Power: Understanding China’s Influence Operations Abroad, describes China’s efforts to promote itself by means of sharp power involving “activities that, although not always illicit, often involve co-optation, corruption, censorship, threats, and other elements.”
A wide variety of key players are listed. “These overlap and/or collaborate with an alphabet soup of organisations, a number of which are ostensibly involved in the promotion of Chinese culture. Many organisations are ‘dual use’ in that their sharp power work occurs alongside perfectly legitimate activities.”
A compelling number of case studies are cited. Academia, publications and media, foreign governments as well as diaspora communities and front organisations are all revealed as theatres of China’s political warfare.
This raises challenges to democratic institutions as to how they should respond. “While some of the sharp power involves clearly illegal activity, many other aspects of political warfare take place in the grey areas of our legal-democratic systems – not strictly illegal, and difficult to pin down as traditional foreign espionage.”
The publication makes several recommendations, including:
• Update the legal system to target political warfare agents and activities
• Strengthen foreign-investment screening mechanisms
• Support measures to identify, track, and protect society against disinformation/ computational propaganda
• Bolster conflict of interest laws for government officials
• Increase cooperation among law-enforcement and intelligence agencies
• Expand government communication programs to help educate the public on political warfare
• Improve outreach to Chinese communities
The publication’s main conclusion is clear. “Simply put, we have failed to pay enough attention to China over the years, or believed, as many did, that engagement would eventually turn the regime into a more liberal, if not democratic, partner in global affairs. Developments in China under Xi Jinping have put an end to such hopes. If we are to fashion the right response to that problem, we must first better understand China and the CCP. We can no longer afford to regard it as a distant phenomenon.”
The author, J Michael Cole, is a Taipei-based security analyst and Editor-in-Chief of the Taiwan Sentinel. The publisher, the Macdonald–Laurier Institute, is a non-partisan think tank located in Ottawa, Canada. The report was published on October 25.
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