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Hudson Senior Fellow Miles Yu testifies before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. (Screenshot via YouTube)

“Beijing’s newfound power in the twenty-first century and the emerging technologies at its disposal make the problem of communist propaganda in our time urgent,” warned Hudson China Center Director Miles Yu [[link removed]] at a hearing before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

To learn the four avenues through which the CCP pursues “discourse dominance,” view Yu’s full testimony [[link removed]], or read excerpts from his written statement below.

Watch or read his testimony. [[link removed]]

Key Insights

1. Disinformation.

The CCP’s disinformation campaign in the West has been massive. And the propagandists, determined to undermine America’s confidence, are aided and abetted by our country’s growing self-denunciation—from opinion-setting editorial boards to opinion-forming classrooms that see only vice in the world’s oldest continuous democracy but ignore the systemic and inherent goodness at its core. The scale of this effort is hard to fathom. In 2020 alone, then Twitter, now X—a social media platform banned inside China, along with all other Western social media apps—was forced to shut down close to 200,000 accounts linked to the CCP’s state-sponsored disinformation campaign. . . . With its dominant market share in social media in the West, TikTok is a particularly powerful tool for the CCP to maximize their chaos narrative of American democracy, and tout China as a guarantor of peace and stability.

2. Elite capture.

Since Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the American elite’s ego, business interests, and curiosity about Chinese culture have supplied fertile ground and ample opportunities for the CCP to create a permanent class of CCP propaganda proxies in the US. But elite capture goes further. Former senior government officials, including cabinet-level figures, routinely defend the CCP’s murderous acts, including the Tiananmen Massacre and other egregious human rights violations. Some of these former officials have even become registered agents for the Beijing regime and its CCP-controlled business interests in the US. Many of our leading universities and their talented professors are often coopted by the CCP to voice Beijing’s views in the US, which they masquerade as research and objective surveys.

3. Coercing self-censorship.

Hollywood and the National Basketball Association are the most obvious examples. The villains in the Red Dawn sequel were to be Chinese military officers, but the insignias were swapped with the North Korean flag. . . . The Houston Rockets—a basketball team close to Chinese citizens’ hearts because of Yao Ming—also got into hot water when their general manager retweeted a post supporting Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. He was forced to apologize, and few figures from the NBA have spoken up since.

4. Brainwashing.

The CCP-controlled Confucius Institutes and the affiliated Confucius Classrooms have penetrated hundreds of college campuses and K-12 schools in the United States alone. Rather than serve as common forums that foster a competition of ideas and are focused on the teaching of Chinese language and culture, they have introduced to American youths the principle and practice of unanimous opinions and self-censorship on topics considered ideologically incorrect by a communist dictatorship thousands of miles away—topics such as the Tiananmen Massacre, Dalai Lama, and Falun Gong. These programs potentially make learning environments on free soil the same as they are on CCP-controlled territories.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.

Watch or read his testimony. [[link removed]] Go Deeper

Gaza Hospital Blast Shows America Is Not Ready for Chinese Disinformation [[link removed]]

Hamas terrorists successfully used misinformation to harm US interests in Gaza. This is a sure sign that Washington needs new tools to fight back against China’s much more sophisticated campaigns, argue [[link removed]] Hudson Japan Chair Kenneth R. Weinstein [[link removed]] and Japan Chair Fellow William Chou [[link removed]].

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The Chinese Economy Is Weaker than You Think [[link removed]]

Expanding on his new report China’s Economic Weakness and Challenge to the Bretton Woods System: How Should the US Respond? [[link removed]], Hudson Senior Fellow Thomas J. Duesterberg [[link removed]] explains why the Chinese economy, already in a downturn, is unlikely to improve on Arsenal of Democracy [[link removed]].

Listen [[link removed]]

Beyond the SCIF: Countering Chinese Influence Operations on American Soil [[link removed]]

On Monday, December 11, join Hudson as we host Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to discuss [[link removed]] how the US can counter Chinese disinformation operations on American soil.

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