Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia: Chinese Foreign Interference Through Cyberwarfare, Influence Operations, and Coercion

AUTHORITARIAN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS IN EAST ASIA: CHINESE FOREIGN INTERFERENCE THROUGH CYBERWARFARE, INFLUENCE OPERATIONS, AND COERCION Adam Foster Recently, China has increased its foreign political interference operations and developed cyber-strategies to hedge against threats from both state and individual actors. Since 2016, IR scholars have recognized Russian attempts at foreign interference in advanced democracies and US allies. Investigation as to how the Chinese government has developed and deployed foreign interference tactics, however, have largely gone unnoticed. Through the examination of case-studies in Chinese cyberwarfare, influence operations in Australia, and economic and diplomatic coercion in Taiwan, this paper aims to determine how the CCP uses foreign interference tactics to address its regime security concerns. This paper will argue that, as a safeguard against threats to its regime security, China has increasingly deployed interference in domestic economies and politics as part of its statecraft. Cyberwarfare efforts to promote pro-PRC business leaders and elected officials in Australia and to influence Taiwan’s media have had some success in promoting pro- PRC views. However, overt electoral interference by the CCP almost inevitably leads to negative media coverage and backlash against the PRC. INTRODUCTION As China asserts itself as a global superpower, the Chinese Communist Party endeav- ors to pursue legitimation of its rule via reinstating the historical norm of Chinese political, economic, and cultural dominance in East Asia. Whereas prior to the Xi Jinping era, the CCP was content to live within an international system centered around US hegemony, its surge in both economic and political capital has encouraged the CCP to increase foreign political interference operations and develop cyber-operations strategies to hedge against risk from both state and individual actors that the CCP perceives as a threat to regime security. These policies are designed with the intent to change behavior and subvert organized opposition to Chinese interests, re- gardless of the target’s diplomatic or economic relationship with the US. To that end, how exactly does the CCP use foreign interference tactics to address regime security concerns? While the list of entities that China considers to be a threat to its national interests continues to grow, there are only a select number of actors that methodically criticize Chinese behavior or pose a threat to ongoing core CCP policies or national security. These policies include the One China Two Systems policy, the One China Policy, and, under Xi Jinping, the One Belt One Road Initiative. The DPP in Taiwan, Adam Foster is a rising senior at Tufts University pursuing a double major in International Relations and Chinese with a concentration in Security. He currently works as the Lobbying Coordinator for One Day Seyoum, and his publications have appeared in the Tufts Daily and the 2001 Magazine. Due to his past advocacy and research efforts, he was recently awarded the 2021 Anne E. Borghesani Memorial Prize. His other interests include a passion for reading, skiing, and ballroom dancing. He plans to study in Beijing for the fall of 2021. Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia and more recently both major political parties in Australia, pose an active threat to current or future CCP policy initiatives. Action taken by the CCP against these actors provide repeated, visible examples of Chinese foreign political interference. The ten- dency of CCP party officials to divide the world into friends and enemies is a reflec- tion of the harsh retaliation that awaits those who publicly question how it chooses to exercise power (Schrader 2020, 1). The efficacy of such political interference is mea- sured in two outcomes: whether or not the CCP has successfully removed threatening parties or actors from power. To safeguard against threats to its regime security, China has increasingly deployed interference in foreign domestic economies and politics as part of its statecraft. Cyber-warfare efforts to cultivate and promote pro-PRC business people and elected officials in Australia and influence Taiwan’s media, have had some success in promoting pro-PRC views. However, overt electoral interference (to change election outcomes or fund/support pro-PRC politicians) almost inevitably leads to negative media coverage and backlash against PRC. LITERATURE REVIEW Investigation as to how the Chinese government has developed and deployed foreign interference tactics are hampered by lack of covert operations evidence, modest amounts of scholarship for China as opposed to the former Soviet bloc, as well as the uniqueness of Chinese operations. By late 2016, most of the Western world became aware of the devastation of foreign influence campaigns, effectively demonstrated by Russian attempts at tampering in the US presidential election. These cost-effective methods involved relatively few hackers, classified information leaks, and bot farms based on social media platforms (Mohan and Wall 2019, 110–119). These methods successfully eroded trust in the voting and justice systems of one of the world’s foremost democracies, demonstrating both the inherent advantage of authoritarian regimes in political interference and the weakness of advanced democracies (Lahmann 2020, 189–224). Though the US and other Western powers had been previously aware of the power of psychological operations as a military tool, this was the first instance that foreign interference operations had used the medium of technology and succeeded in influencing a large civilian population. As such, 2016 prompted the re-evaluation of cyberwarfare and influence operations as authoritarian tools for democratic political interference. For most scholars, this was limited to an in-depth study into how the Rus- sians interfered with the US elections (Mohan and Wall 2019, 110–119; Ambrosio 2007, 49–57; Bader 2012, 49–57), the validity of electoral interference in international law (Lahmann 2020, 189–224; United Nations 2015), the benefits of electoral interference (Borzyskowski 2019), or how the Soviet Union and WWII-Great Powers used electoral interference to their benefit (Levin 2019; Bubeck and Marinov 2019). An even smaller subset of these scholars actively investigated the history of political interference of other authoritarian regimes outside of Europe (Allison 2008, 185– Adam Foster 202), and an even smaller subset attempted to identify modern attempts at foreign interference in other authoritarian regimes such as China (Diamond and Schell 2018, 145–154). Scholars were initially deterred by the intrinsic difficulty of investigation of covert operations which were compounded by the plausible deniability, stealth, and anonymity inherent to the Internet. In addition, the absence of evidence that China in the mid-2010s had the capabilities or political will to achieve these political influence operations, limited the dataset of Chinese foreign interference to papers published lat- er than 2018, when China was first discovered assisting the KMT in local elections in Taiwan (Templeman 2020, 85–99). The motivations for China to pursue such political interference are obvious in hindsight: in recent years China has expressed a strong interest in not only severing US ties to the East Asian region as well as undermining the legitimacy of national governments or anti-CCP parties (Schrader 2020, 1–6, 10– 14). Moreover, the CCP under Xi Jinping has shown a strong preference for low-in- tensity confrontation below the level of armed conflict. Plus, the unique inherent advantage of authoritarian regimes in having no legitimate elections, the weakness and susceptibility of democratic to foreign influence campaigns, and the innovations in technological influence successfully deployed against the US by other authoritarian regimes, indicates a strong Chinese incentive to establish their own foreign interference programs (Diamond and Schell 2018, 145–154). Since then, international relations experts and domestic governments alike have attempted to decipher the multi-faceted structure of the Chinese intelligence system to uncover Chinese political interference in their own countries (Faligot and Lehrer 2019). Some, like Australia and Taiwan, have emerged with concrete evidence of Chinese attempts at cyberwarfare, influence operations, and diplomatic and economic coercion efforts. These explosive develop- ments were covered in depth by many contemporary news articles but have yet to be digested by the small field of East Asian International Relations Scholars. As such, while most experts studying China agree that the Xi Jinping’s CCP has increasingly come into conflict with Western-aligned countries in the late 2010s and early 2020s, they disagree as to the scope of political interference, the goals that China is pursuing via its political interference, and by extension how China will focus its efforts in conjunction with Western-aligned powers in the future. Based on analysis of Chinese strengths and weaknesses, experts attempt to determine how the CCP uses their perceived strengths to extrapolate how China will favor certain political interference methods. These arguments on the strengths and uniqueness of Chinese foreign interference are diverse and include topics on: cyberwarfare, influence operations, and economic and diplomatic coercion—including subsets of these topics such as the devel- opment of aggressive Chinese diplomatic

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