EXPERT VIEW — 2024 has brought multiple reminders of the threats – real and potential – posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Over the past year, Beijing has had some of its most violent clashes with the Philippines in the disputed waters of the South China Sea; Chinese military activity around Taiwan has increased; China stands accused of providing military equipment to Russia for its war against Ukraine; and the Pentagon’s annual China Military Power Report – issued Wednesday — found that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has expanded its nuclear arsenal.
The threat from China is also cropping up more frequently in the U.S. homeland – most prominently in the cyber campaigns conducted by the China-backed groups “Volt Typhoon” and “Salt Typhoon.” The former burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure to preposition cyber intruders for potentially disruptive and destructive cyber attacks in the future, while the latter breached telecommunications networks, targeting the devices of top officials, including the phone of President-elect Donald Trump.
Few know more about the China threat than retired Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, a Cipher Brief expert who served as Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Earlier this year, Taiwan’s then-Vice President-Elect Hsiao Bi-Khim – who Studeman had briefed, along with former President Tsai Ing-Wen, when he was the Navy’s Indo-Pacom Director for Intelligence – invited him to Taiwan for a series of high-level visits. The Cipher Brief caught up with him during that trip to discuss Taiwan’s defenses and the prospect of conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
Now Studeman offers a stark, “straight-talk” assessment on the various dangers emanating from Beijing – and the need for the next administration to find “the right balance between being overheated and undertreating the PRC in America’s national dialogue...American leaders must also help citizens distinguish the benign from the malign, because not everything regarding China is inherently sinister.”
As the Lunar New Year of 2025 ushers in the Chinese Year of the Snake, U.S. officials must engage in better strategic communications about foreign threats in the American heartland. Speaking openly and “getting real” with the public is overdue. Americans deserve straight talk after a succession of presidential administrations that struggled to clearly articulate the extent of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) menace to America. Dealing with persistent and manifest dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demands dextrous and steadfast leadership across all of government, but especially from the top, in order to better implement whole-of-society mitigations.
America’s elected leaders must fulfill their duty to articulate societal hazards and furnish the “why” behind efforts to deal with them. The challenge for the new presidential administration will be finding the right balance between being overheated and undertreating the PRC in America’s national dialogue. Appointed officials must eschew hyperbole, strike a balanced tone, and deliver even-handed evaluations of complex threats. American leaders must also help citizens distinguish the benign from the malign, because not everything regarding China is inherently sinister.
For all their noble efforts to manage an intricate and testy Sino-U.S. rivalry, previous leaders have struggled to connect the CCP threat dots for U.S. citizens. Despite significant efforts across multiple administrations and congresses to reduce American vulnerability to CCP predations, they have struggled to find their words to explain the full breadth and depth of Beijing’s exploitation of America. Presidents and congressional figures have come up short in speaking with one unified voice on PRC challenges and how they impact the average American. A consensus has existed inside the U.S. national security community for at least a decade that the CCP, especially under Xi Jinping, regards America as an archvillain and a tyrannical hegemon that China must replace as the dominant geopolitical power on earth. Yet U.S. leaders have equivocated in public over whether the PRC is a true geostrategic “adversary” or just a prickly economic “competitor.” As a result, the nation has been inadequately sensitized to make the tough choices and sacrifices associated with prevailing in a major power contestation that is redefining the 21st century.
A new Cold War?
During the Cold War, American leaders undertook fulsome measures to publicly describe the uncomfortable superpower dynamics that required a national focus, integrated action, and hard societal choices to meet the awesome multi-decade challenge of the Soviet Union. In contrast, the level of effort to institutionally educate the American people on the PRC threat has been lackluster. The character of the Sino-U.S. rivalry may be idiosyncratically different than the U.S.-Soviet struggle, but the Cold War-like nature is the same.
Failing to properly characterize Beijing’s dark ambitions relegates Americans to obsessing on smaller-scope issues like culture wars that turn neighbor against neighbor. Public obliviousness and complacency to high-end dangers also allow misplaced isolationist sentiment to mushroom. While most Americans care more about domestic matters than foreign affairs, it is incorrect to suggest that Americans can neither understand nor care to respond to what they are facing.
Conveying “inconvenient truths”
If it is true that most Americans now view the world inside-out rather than outside-in, where local issues eat global ones for lunch, then elevating threat awareness begins with spotlighting problems “inside the wire,” so every American can understand the pervasiveness of the PRC’s malign influence. Like it or not, the CCP has engineered the equivalent of a silent invasion of the United States, as it has done in so many other countries. For decades, the world’s premier Eastern power has been stealthily influencing the world’s top Western power on its home turf.
This invasiveness will come as a surprise to many Americans, not only because too many senior officials have shied from sharing inconvenient truths with the public, but also because few have studied China, and Hollywood has been coopted by the CCP. The U.S. entertainment industry, eager to access a multi-billion-dollar consumer market in China, has cooperated with CCP censors for years. Although real stories about China would provide rich entertainment value and help educate America about its Orwellian activities, the “Chinafication of Hollywood” means this country is only shown a benevolent Potemkin village with Chinese characteristics on its digital screens.
One of Xi Jinping’s longstanding priorities has been to gain international discourse power by curating the benefits of China’s “peaceful ascent,” and he has achieved wild success in turning Hollywood into a handmaiden of CCP propaganda. Xi’s playbook comes straight out of classic Chinese schemes for outwitting a hegemon one intends to quietly surpass, or at least marginalize. The CCP has done a remarkable job in tranquilizing major sectors of American society using a blend of implied threats and dangled rewards, leading powerful people to self-censure—a key aim of communist-style psychological warfare.
In addition to the CCP’s vice-like grip on America’s entertainment industry, the litany of other troubling dangers in the U.S. include:
- PRC government and mercenary hackers’ continued pillaging of hard-won American intellectual property worth an estimated $250B to $600B each year, enabling China to now globally lead in 37 out of 44 critical technology areas.
- CCP cyber teams’ incessant efforts to penetrate, map, and pre-stage malicious software into U.S. critical infrastructure like electric power grids, utilities, telecommunications, and transportation networks.
- CCP exploitation of tuition dollars, grants, and gifts they funnel to prominent U.S. colleges and universities to facilitate the PRC’s access to STEM knowledge and critical technology research, which fuels copycat innovation, catalyzes civil-military fusion, and supercharges People’s Liberation Army modernization.
- CCP pressure and inducements on American sinologists to temper coverage of sensitive historical or contemporary topics that could otherwise shine a brighter light onto CCP behaviors, pathologies, and stratagems.
- PRC solicitation of American-based scientists to visit, lecture, and teach in China, or collaborate on research projects as part of the CCP’s High End Foreign Expert Recruitment program.
- Chinese Student and Scholars Associations’ collusion with PRC embassies and consulates to monitor their own citizens, restrict speech, and constrain academic freedom on American campuses.
- China Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Public Security (MPS) agents’ travel to the U.S. under false pretenses to hunt, intimidate, harass, and render Chinese dissidents living here.
- PRC infiltration of American government labs, research institutes, technology centers, and cleared defense contractor companies.
- MSS elicitation through incentives, patriotism, and leverage over family members in mainland China to compel Chinese living in America to cooperate with PRC agents to relinquish U.S. intellectual property to their “ancestral country.”
- CCP subsidization of fentanyl precursors for export to prolong a deadly drug crisis in America.
- CCP success in coercing major U.S. companies and organizations with commercial stakes in the PRC to kowtow to Beijing by verbalizing support for PRC policy choices, issuing public apologies when they might counter the party line, and self-censuring about PRC arbitrary business practices to avoid offending the CCP.
- CCP propaganda and disinformation efforts in the U.S. media ecosystem.
- PRC aggressive collection of big data, including from social media platforms like TikTok, to sharpen Beijing’s widespread influence efforts in America, shape perceptions, amplify divisions, and fine-tune PRC machine learning algorithms to attain decision advantage in diplomatic, military, and economic matters.
- The CCP’s strategy to promote sister cities/provinces and curry favor at the U.S. state and local levels through business dealings to create dependencies and indirectly shape federal policy choices regarding China.
- CCP cutout entities hiring U.S. lobbying companies to sway American politicians against any legislation Beijing deems disadvantageous to China.
- Brazen Chinese efforts to gain access to U.S. bases and national security facilities.
- Chinese-owned commercial ships and auxiliary vessels likely involvement in collection while near U.S. territories or operating in American ports, plus their potential to engage in sabotage such as severing seabed communication cables in a time of crisis.
- Chinese green-field, brown-field and direct investments in property and infrastructure near sensitive U.S. military and government installations around the country to facilitate intelligence collection and potentially interfere in U.S. military operations during a crisis.
- Continued CCP enticements of a substantial number of American investors and venture capitalists to divert capital into the China market regardless of mid- to long-range security impacts to U.S. service members or Americans in the homeland.
It's a long list. And absent more candid and coherent talk from the White House about these and other exploitation efforts, average Americans will be unable to string all these disparate threats together into a coherent picture nor undertake the concerted efforts required to defend themselves from repeated PRC assaults inside America’s lifelines.
The new administration must elevate conversations with the country about these sweeping vulnerabilities. Now more than ever, Americans need calm, balanced, and expert voices to navigate out of their homeland crisis with their values intact. Because America’s mainstream entertainment industry will hesitate to regain its patriotism for fear of profit loss, U.S. leaders should incentivize independent films, shows, interviews, and documentaries to engage in truth-telling. They should also consider scaling support from Federally Funded Research and Development Centers to help improve U.S. narrative power competencies. Ironically, the U.S. government has worked harder to strengthen its international public diplomacy efforts with institutions like the Agency for Global Media than its domestic internal education efforts for affected Americans.
To overcome the government’s scattershot, event-by-event mode of providing updates on PRC threats, the new National Security Council should direct the information-related machinery of government to dedicate China experts to more regularly speak from department podiums. The President should also designate a credentialed China sage at the national level, a true expert of high repute, to provide top-level updates to the masses that connect all the dots that matter. In coordination with adjacent departments, agencies, and intelligence experts on China, this senior government spokesperson should proactively and holistically educate Americans about fast-moving challenges, new dynamics in the Sino-U.S. rivalry, CCP manipulations of America, and necessary countermeasures. The executive branch must live out its obligation to wage the truth on American soil and do so in a complementary way with legislative branch bodies such as the Special Committee on the CCP.
The U.S. Intelligence Community, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Defense Department criminal investigative services and an increasing number of commercial counterintelligence and insider threat detection companies also have a role to play in selectively disclosing evidence of PRC malign influence inside America’s heartland, to help illuminate legitimate menaces in its midst. One hopes private U.S. companies might also see the value in becoming more forthcoming about abuses, pressures, and compromises at the hands of the PRC actors to expose their tactics and share best practices in defending against them.
Hardening the U.S. from rampant depredation by its top adversary that is unwilling to abide by most rules of fair competition will entail hard choices and sacrifice. Some policies will be bitter medicine indeed for many Americans and will be reflexively resisted unless U.S. leaders convince the public of the strategic stakes. Getting America’s house in order will require framing our most overarching nation-state problem correctly and then treating strategic communications to the American people as indispensable rather than an afterthought.
Drifting to the extremes of informational silence or informational fury from the White House and across government will signify nothing to the American people. In threading the needle between overcautious quiescence and inflamed rhetoric about full-spectrum China dangers, American leaders might be pleasantly surprised at how quickly the country might rise above its current dysfunction to unite for a common cause, when faced with a truly epic threat to its future.
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