US Intelligence Warning: China Escalating Influence Operations
by Judith Bergman • October 7, 2022 at 5:00 am
One of the organizations that US intelligence explicitly warned against is the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which describes itself as a "national people's organization engaged in people-to-people diplomacy of the People's Republic of China."
In reality, the organization is a front for the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) foreign influence efforts. It has been operating successfully in the US for decades, especially by forging numerous sister-city relationships with US cities to influence local US political, business, media, and educational leaders. There are more than 200 sister city pairs and 50 sister state/province partnerships between the US and China. Such partnerships, according to US intelligence, can also include business, technical, cultural, and educational exchanges between U.S. and Chinese communities.
China uses the same tactics when it comes to US business leaders: "In 2021, the PRC Embassy in Washington sent letters to select U.S. business leaders urging them to lobby the U.S. Congress to reject bills the PRC opposed, including bills designed to increase U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China....
[T]hese politicians have a strong incentive to remain uninformed. The focus is typically on economic and cultural ties and it's easy to pretend that there is no political element... however, these local ties are in fact highly political.... This is the tactic of 'use the countryside to surround the city'". — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.
China is doubling down on its efforts to influence state and local government leaders in the United States by exploiting the existing web of regional and local US-China relations, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) warned in July.
"Some of the goals of PRC [People's Republic of China] influence operations in the United States are to expand support for PRC interests among state and local leaders and to use these relationships to pressure Washington for policies friendlier to Beijing. The PRC understands U.S. state and local leaders enjoy a degree of independence from Washington and may seek to use them as proxies to advocate for national U.S. policies Beijing desires, including improved U.S. economic cooperation with China, and reduced U.S. criticism of China's policies towards Taiwan, Tibetans, Uyghurs, pro-democracy activists, and others.
