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 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, or read excerpts from his written statement below.

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. 

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