Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World, Bethany Allen, HarperCollins (August 2023), $32.99
Common wisdom once held that Beijing simply wasn’t in the business of disrupting information ecosystems abroad. Beijing was no Moscow. While the Chinese government projected stilted propaganda globally, its obsession with online information control more or less stopped at its own borders.
Russia’s successful efforts to sow chaos and distrust amid the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and its similar campaigns across Europe, seem to have changed Beijing’s calculus, however. The Kremlin showed the world that the online information space is a realm perfectly fit for asymmetric warfare, in which one side does not have the ability to control the information flow and must find other ways to tilt narratives in its favor. Putin and his officials perfected a playbook of power projection that Beijing simply couldn’t resist.
The Chinese government debuted this playbook in a big way during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeking to deflect blame for a global catastrophe that originated within its borders, Chinese officials and propaganda outlets began pushing a conspiracy theory that the U.S. military had planted the virus in Wuhan. On March 12, 2020, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, the original “wolf warrior” diplomat, made this mainstream, tweeting in English, “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”
His words, which were retweeted more than four thousand times, marked the debut of China’s “big lie” on the novel coronavirus pandemic—that it did not begin in China—which swiftly became a sweeping global disinformation strategy. It prefaced the joining of wolf warrior diplomacy with brazen disinformation—“big lies” that, in recent years, had characterized Russian government officials but that more demure and camera-shy Chinese diplomats had avoided.
Chinese diplomats, government officials, Beijing-aligned content farms and social media accounts, and state media outlets soon began touting COVID-19 origin conspiracy theories, even when they contradicted one another. Chinese and Russian state–linked social media accounts increasingly quoted and tweeted one another, amplifying one another’s messages and demonstrating growing convergence between their ideologies and information strategies—a result, in part, of a secret agreement signed between Moscow and Beijing in July 2021 to cooperate on news coverage.
Coordinated inauthentic behavior on Twitter and Facebook also promoted alternative theories for where the virus might have originated or how it might have entered China. Later on in the pandemic, Chinese state media headlines cast doubt on the efficacy and safety of Western-made vaccines, as Chinese-made vaccines, on which Beijing’s soft power hopes were riding, failed to achieve comparable levels of efficacy. In the three years since Zhao’s tweet, Beijing has made Russian-style online disinformation campaigns a standard weapon of its foreign policy.
China is now playing an even more ambitious game. Within a matter of just a few years, Beijing has copied and successfully used many of Russia’s information warfare techniques. But unlike Russia, the Chinese government believes it has the ability and even the mandate to turn its domestic online surveillance apparatus outward, to disrupt and, perhaps eventually, even control global narratives in real time.
The Chinese state’s big lie on COVID-19’s origins, and its use of external-facing online disinformation to promote that lie, seemed like a striking departure from precedent. But the seeds of the Chinese government’s propensity to use foreign social media platforms to engage in disinformation campaigns were planted years before, as was evident to anyone who cared enough to pay attention. As with so many of its influence tactics, Beijing’s earliest online disinformation campaigns related to its core interests: in this case, public remembrance of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It was early June 2014. In Hong Kong, thousands of residents would soon be converging to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on antigovernment protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that killed hundreds or perhaps thousands of student protesters. This would be the only public memorial on Chinese soil, where the ruling Communist Party had worked tirelessly for a quarter century to wipe the event from the historical record.
Unbeknownst to the participants, however, the commemoration was about to be infiltrated by dangerous Islamic terrorists—at least, according to Twitter. Six “terrorists hoping to participate in jihad” had just escaped police in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou and slipped into Hong Kong, read a widely shared Chinese-language Hong Kong police report posted on Twitter. It said that the terrorists “will probably dress in dark clothing and mingle at the candlelight vigil.” Apparently seeking to warn participants, the user who posted the report wrote in Chinese that “brothers attending the activity tonight” should be careful.
Shortly after the police statement appeared on Twitter, another user purporting to live-tweet from the vigil wrote that he had just glimpsed a man “five feet ten inches tall, weighing around 154 pounds, wearing a black headband just like us; a knife with jagged edges is protruding from his bag.” In March of that year, a group of Uyghurs wielding knives had killed 31 civilians and injured 141 during a terrorist attack in the southwestern city of Kunming. The user concluded, “This is absolutely terrifying.” That post was retweeted 315 times.
But there was one problem: The Hong Kong police report wasn’t real. Nor did any mainstream media outlets report on the allegedly escaped Guangzhou terrorists. The Twitter account that posted the police report closely resembled the 138 accounts that retweeted it. The handles were either random numbers or letters, or two English names followed by numbers—such as with the accounts “ericashley1231” and “drewserenity10,” both of which posted related tweets. The accounts were barely active, often with fewer than 50 tweets and fewer followers. Writing exclusively in Chinese, most of these accounts had posted their first tweet between March and June 2014. The 315 accounts that retweeted the report of the supposed knife-carrying terrorist fit a similar mold.
This was an early example of a coordinated, inauthentic attempt to disrupt a real-world event using a foreign social media platform that wasn’t even accessible in mainland China. Though it’s difficult to definitively attribute online disinformation campaigns to a state actor, this campaign was clearly aligned with Beijing’s interests. This demonstrates the sensitivity of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, even before the Umbrella Movement that would occur later that year. But it wasn’t until the 2019 protests that would engulf the city, when Chinese state-backed information operations debuted in a big way on major foreign platforms to target Hong Kong protest supporters, that Twitter, Facebook, and Google put resources toward tracing, attributing, and then, for the first time, publicly revealing that these campaigns were backed by Beijing.
The Tiananmen anniversary in 2014 was not the first time similar inauthentic Twitter accounts made what looked like a coordinated attempt to influence the site’s China-focused community. In March 2012, a cybersecurity blogger named Brian Krebs had documented a case in which Twitter bots inundated a pro-Tibet hashtag with so many junk tweets that the pro-Tibet activists said the hashtag was no longer useful for tracking pro-Tibet tweets.
In March 2014, a number of newly opened accounts with pro forma handles let loose a cascade of Chinese-language tweets denouncing New York-based Chinese blogger Wen Yunchao, an anti-censorship activist with 124,000 Twitter followers, as a “traitor” and the “degenerate of all degenerates.” Wen was again targeted in early June, with posts calling him “Traitor Wen” forwarded by the same set of accounts. Another burst of activity came in May 2014, after the U.S. Department of Justice had issued arrest warrants for five Chinese military hackers accused of cyberespionage against U.S. firms. August 2014 featured a smear campaign against Chinese dissident author Murong Xuecun, in which a series of Chinese essays assailing his character and sex life were collectively retweeted more than a thousand times by around 100 accounts with matching characteristics.
In all these incidents, hundreds of nearly identical accounts attempted to influence Twitter’s Chinese community in a direction that bolstered party interests. Wen told me in an email at the time that he had been the target of multiple cyberattacks in the two years leading up to that online campaign. He felt their goal was to “exert pressure” and force him to “shut his mouth” and to reduce his credibility in the public eye. Wen said he felt certain the assaults had “come from government-organized activity.”
Another campaign that year targeted perceptions of Tibet. In July 2014, the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet identified close to 100 accounts that regularly posted material presenting Tibetans as a contented and flourishing people, often linking to Chinese government- sponsored propaganda websites. The accounts, written primarily in English, paired English names with profile pictures that used stock images and photos of models. Twitter closed many of these fake accounts within 24 hours after the New York Times reported them.
At the time, these targeted attempts to shift Twitter’s Chinese-language narrative seemed anomalous. The vast majority of China’s internet users were not on Twitter—the platform was blocked in China—and common wisdom held that party repression was primarily aimed at ensuring domestic stability. But how could a social media platform that was unavailable to the average Chinese internet user be considered a political threat? In retrospect, the answer is clear, as is the trend line: The Chinese party-state, which already did everything it could to shut down its real-world critics beyond its borders, was now trying its hand at translating that kind of interference into the virtual world. These efforts also seemed restricted to China’s core interests: Hong Kong, Tibet, Uyghurs, and Chinese pro-democracy voices.
Twitter was a logical target. As censorship of mainland Chinese social media had become increasingly restrictive, Twitter became a kind of Chinese social media underground, concentrating many of the dissident and activist voices that Chinese authorities wished most strongly to suppress. Chinese dissidents were largely the stars of Chinese-language Twitter. In 2014, well-known artist Ai Weiwei’s Twitter account had more than 250,000 followers; outspoken lawyer Teng Biao had 76,000 Twitter followers; and blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng had 17,000.
Other well-known Chinese Twitterati included Tiananmen movement leader Zhou Fengsuo, Beijing-based dissident Hu Jia, U.S.-based activist Yaxue Cao, and anonymous bloggers who espouse support for freedom of speech and other democratic ideals. By comparison, some Chinese celebrities had Twitter accounts, but they commanded only a tiny fraction of the followers they had on Weibo. Fan accounts for mega-celebrities such as best-selling author Han Han and Taiwanese singer Jay Chou had only relatively small followings, ranging from 4,000 to 17,000 followers.
In those days, official Chinese state-linked accounts had just a tiny sliver of the narrative pie on Twitter. Almost no individual Chinese diplomats had their own Twitter accounts. Chinese state media accounts made barely a blip. In 2014, state broadcaster Xinhua’s Chinese-language Twitter account, first opened in 2012, had around 2,200 followers. The Chinese-language account of the People’s Daily, the party’s flagship newspaper, had around 3,300 Twitter followers in 2014.
But sometime around 2019, the Chinese government seemed to make a major recalculation regarding its policy of officially ignoring international social media platforms. This wasn’t entirely a shock. Over the past several years, the follower counts of English-language Chinese state media accounts on U.S. social media had mysteriously skyrocketed. A 2015 snapshot of the Facebook fan base of Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily reveals an inexplicably dramatic surge. The People’s Daily Facebook page had around 3 million fans on April 6, 2015. By early July, just three months later, that number had almost doubled, to 5.7 million fans. “Either China is the new master of journalism or what we are seeing is evidence of something not quite right,” Italian cybersecurity researcher Andrea Stroppa, author of a 2013 report on click farms, said at the time.
By 2021, the number of followers of the People’s Daily English- language account was more than 6 million. That year, Xinhua’s Twitter account ballooned to 12.3 million followers. As Stroppa had intimated, such numbers strongly suggested that Chinese state media outlets had paid to acquire more social media followers. But we don’t have to rely on suggestion. In August 2019, the state-run China News Service posted a tender on a government website, advertising a $175,000 contract for adding 580,000 new followers to its Twitter account, targeting countries with relatively large Chinese diaspora populations and “English-speaking countries that pay attention to China’s development.”
“As China’s international influence has grown, countries around the world, and especially overseas Chinese and foreign friends who are interested in China, have a growing demand to understand China,” the state media outlet wrote on the tender. “China News Agency’s Twitter account provides overseas Chinese with a good information bridge, and at the same time it has also strengthened the influence of China News Service abroad, especially among overseas Chinese. Given that Twitter is a news platform with a particularly large international influence in the world, China News Service is hereby conducting this bidding directed at Twitter overseas.” The task seems to have been accomplished. As of August 2021, China News Service’s Twitter account had approximately 635,000 followers.
The same year, Chinese authorities began tracking down, harassing, and detaining people in China who posted on Twitter. When Luo Daiqing, a Chinese student pursuing a degree at the University of Minnesota, returned to his hometown of Wuhan for summer break in 2019, he was arrested and jailed for six months for posting several tweets satirizing President Xi Jinping from his anonymous Twitter account. Others in China were forced to delete their tweets or even saw them deleted by hackers. Between 2018 and early 2021, at least 50 people in China received prison sentences for content they posted to Twitter, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal.
In March 2019, another pro-democracy protest movement arose in Hong Kong, as demonstrators demanded that the proposed extradition law be shelved. This time, Chinese authorities went on a major Twitter offensive. In August 2019, Twitter revealed that it had discovered a Chinese state–backed covert information campaign operating on its platform and targeting the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. Twitter characterized the activity as “covert, manipulative behaviors” that were “deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground.” Twitter released archives for 936 of the most active accounts but said that it had also suspended an additional 200,000 related accounts before they were able to engage in significant activity. Facebook subsequently announced that it, too, had identified a smaller network of Chinese government-linked accounts engaging in similar activity that it had disabled. Google banned more than 200 YouTube channels.
In recent years, government offices across China have spent large sums to build targeted social media followings on foreign social media platforms, especially on Facebook and Twitter. Government offices may also take advantage of social media followers for hire. In August 2019, the Guangxi International Expo Affairs Bureau aimed to garner followers to help promote the China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Expo, an event held annually in Guangxi Province since 2004 together with 10 other ASEAN member countries. According to the tender, the contractor would be required to accumulate 500,000 Facebook users and 30,000 Twitter followers, most of whom had to come from the event’s target audience.
Local government agencies in China have frequently awarded contracts for the management of their accounts on foreign social media plat- forms. On Jan. 15, 2021, the Anhui Province Culture and Tourism Department awarded an approximately 2-million-yuan contract to the Xinhua News Agency’s News and Information Center to operate the department’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Douyin accounts for one year. The contract specifications require that the contractor increase the number of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram followers by at least 10 percent by the end of the contract period.
It’s not unusual for foreign governments in a variety of countries to hand the management of their social media accounts to outside firms. What’s unusual about the China case, however, is that these foreign social media platforms are blocked domestically. The rise of Chinese government agencies officially building their presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram underscores the asymmetrical messaging—viewing the platforms as tools to project propaganda and other official rhetoric internationally while preventing information from flowing back home.
The sum total of all this was that, by early 2020, the tone of Twitter’s China discourse had already begun to change. The U.S. social media platform was already starting to feel like a battleground. The once-dominant voices of the pro-democracy Chinese critics of Beijing were being increasingly drowned out by a large and growing network of pro-Beijing voices. At the outbreak of the pandemic, the Chinese government was well prepared to use Twitter and other foreign social media platforms to rewrite the narrative of COVID-19’s spread and, later, to amplify the party line on Xinjiang, Taiwan, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and whatever other messages it chose.
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