China Is Investing Billions in Global Disinformation Campaign, U.S. Says
By Volz and Gordon, Sept. 28, 2023, WSJ
WASHINGTON—The Chinese government is pouring billions of dollars annually into a global campaign of disinformation, using investments abroad and an array of tactics to promote Beijing’s geopolitical aims and squelch criticism of its policies,
according to a new State Department assessment.

Beijing’s broad-ranging efforts, the assessment said, feature online bot and troll armies, legal actions against those critical of Chinese companies and investments and content-sharing agreements with media in Latin America and Africa.

Other tactics include laundering English-language articles written by fake authors in influential local media and placing diplomatic pressure on foreign universities and newspapers that publish content deemed offensive.

China, which has a close partnership with Russia, has also used its information apparatus to reinforce the Kremlin’s narratives on the Ukraine war. China has amplified Russia’s false claims that Kyiv has been operating secret biological-warfare
laboratories, and has echoed Moscow’s claims that the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization instigated the war.

Russia, the report said, has responded in kind by promoting Chinese propaganda related to Beijing’s claims to the democratic, self-governing island of Taiwan and other interests of the People’s Republic of China.

“Beijing has invested billions of dollars to construct an information ecosystem in which PRC propaganda and disinformation gain traction and become dominant,” said the report released Thursday by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center,
which was established in 2016 to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation abroad. Many of these efforts are aimed at developing nations, the report said, adding that China’s campaign, if left unchallenged, might succeed in reshaping a global
information landscape, leading other governments to take decisions more closely aligned with Beijing.

“When you look at the pieces of the puzzle and put it together, you see a breathtaking ambition on the part of the PRC to seek information dominance in key regions of the world,” said James Rubin, a special envoy and the center’s coordinator, at a
media briefing. The report was based on both open-source information and U.S. government intelligence, U.S. officials said.

China has broadly denied targeting the U.S. or other countries with online or real-world influence campaigns or disinformation. A representative at the Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The State Department report is the latest effort to draw attention to what Western officials and cybersecurity officials have said is China’s rapidly expanding—and increasingly ambitious—global information manipulation efforts. Though sometimes
unsuccessful, China is expected to continue investing more in the coming years to distort international dialogue around its priorities, including Taiwan and the South China Sea, U.S. officials have said.

“Although backed by unprecedented resources, the PRC’s propaganda and censorship have, to date, yielded mixed results,” the report said. “When targeting democratic countries, Beijing has encountered major setbacks, often due to pushback from
local media and civil society.”

Meta last month said it had taken down thousands of social-media accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to the Chinese government, in what it said was the largest known online influence operation in the world. The company said the operation included
other platforms such as YouTube and X, formerly Twitter. Other researchers separately spotted the same network active on more niche sites that are popular with far-right activists in the U.S., including Gab.

Those efforts, and others like them, including previous attempts to target Asian-Americans in the U.S., appeared to gain little traction online. The State Department report, however, said China was having success in its efforts to shape and control
international conversations by acquiring stakes in foreign media companies in Africa, investing in satellite networks and intimidating international companies that Beijing views as challenging its preferred pro-China narratives.

China has used technical censorship and harassment of individual content producers on WeChat, an app popular among global Chinese-speaking communities, the report said. Those efforts have included leveraging data harvested by Chinese companies to tailor
intimidation tactics to specific individuals and organizations, it said.

Through “flooding,” a tactic that manipulates search engine or hashtag results by coordinating large volumes of inauthentic posts, China has sought to make content that is critical of China harder to find. One flooding campaign sought to drown out
efforts by foreign activists to focus on human-rights abuses in Xinjiang province by trying to “hijack” the hashtag used by the critics, the report said.

In 2021, Chinese officials agreed to pay a newspaper in an unspecified East African country to publish articles favorable to Beijing while hiding its sponsorship.

China, like other nations, has for decades tried to control and shape international narratives to its advantage. But the report said Chinese leader Xi Jinping has dramatically expanded the country’s information manipulation efforts since taking power a
decade ago.

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-is-investing-billions-in-global-disinformation-campaign-u-s-says-88740b85

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Africa Needs Accountable Leaders, Not Reparations
By Ebenezer Obadare, Sept. 28, 2023, WSJ
None of the African heads of state who addressed the U.N. General Assembly last week held back on the inequities they see in the contemporary world order. And none punched harder than Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo. Taking aim at what he calls “
the historical injustices that have fashioned the structures of the world,” Mr. Akufo-Addo lamented that “much of Europe and the United States” was built using “the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors” of the trans-
Atlantic slave trade and colonization.

The Ghanaian president’s solution to this injustice is for Europe and the U.S. to pay reparations to victimized African countries. What Africa needs instead is moral accountability from its leaders and honesty among its intellectuals about what the
trans-Atlantic slave trade entailed.

Mr. Akufo-Addo isn’t interested in money for money’s sake; he acknowledges that “no amount of money will ever make up for the horrors.” He believes it would help make a moral point “that evil was perpetrated, that millions of productive
Africans were snatched from the embrace of our continent, and put to work in the Americas and the Caribbean without compensation for their labor.”

The idea that Africa was dealt a bad hand at inception, and that Europe and America’s wealth comes from their malign impoverishment of the continent, is standard in African political and historical commentary. The demand for reparations tends to bubble
up whenever frustration with the continent’s economic plight reaches fever pitch.

It’s a dubious theory of Western development to say the least, but more unsettling is Mr. Akufo-Addo’s contention that “it cannot be easy to build confident and prosperous societies from nations that, for centuries, had their natural resources
looted and their peoples traded as commodities.” Every African should be appalled by the notion that the continent can’t establish a modern society because Africans are constitutionally unable to overcome their past. And they should be offended by
the implication that financial compensation is needed to make the continent whole.

While Mr. Akufo-Addo is right that the slave trade was a “grand inhuman enterprise,” his portrayal of it as a one-sided productivity suck grossly misinterprets the historical facts—namely, forgetting the role of African slave traders. Not only did
these entrepreneurs accumulate enormous wealth on the back of an evil enterprise, but history shows that many refused to let go even after moral sentiment in Europe began to turn against slavery. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was exactly that: a trade,
one in which, unfortunately, there were willing agents on both sides. If Mr. Akufo-Addo is genuinely interested in confronting that historical evil, he will have to begin with Africa’s partial culpability, an ugly fact that scholarship has copiously
documented but from which political commentators often shy away.

More insidious than the demand for reparations is the underlying sentiment that the outside world owes Africa a living. This ideology of victimhood is of a piece with many African countries’ continued reliance on external financial support, including
from countries with a fraction of Africa’s population and natural resources. Mr. Akufo-Addo’s speech encapsulates this mentality, which studiously avoids accountability.

If African leaders stopped pointing accusing fingers and instead looked in the mirror, they’d grasp the sad truth that what hobbles Africa isn’t colonialism’s legacy but irresponsible contemporary leadership. About the same time that Mr. Akufo-Addo
was expounding on the evils of the slave trade and demanding reparations, his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame, president of his country since 2000 and de facto leader since the end of the genocide in 1994, announced his intention to run for another term.

This hogging of power, and the institutional stasis that it invariably engenders, is one of the main reasons African countries trail in crucial human-development indexes. When Mr. Akufo-Addo laments “illicit financial outflows” from Africa, estimated
at more than $88 billion a year, it seems to have eluded him that much of that is cash bilked by African kleptocracies and stashed in offshore accounts.

The Ghanaian president says he has the authority of the African Union to hold a global conference on reparations for the slave trade in Accra in November. This jamboree will yield nothing but undignified self-pity—the opposite of the introspection that
the continent needs.

Mr. Obadare is a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/africa-needs-accountable-leaders-not-reparations-forslavery-colonialism-33377f6a

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