Search

Begin New Search Topic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Political Geography Xinjiang

1. Cultivating friendly forces: The Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in the Xinjiang Diaspora

Author:
Lin Li and James Leibold
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed well-documented and large-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other indigenous minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) that amount to crimes against humanity. Through its complex united front system, the CCP is actively monitoring members of the diaspora, including Uyghurs, creating databases of actionable intelligence, and mobilising community organisations in the diaspora to counter international criticism of its repressive policies in Xinjiang while promoting its own policies and interests abroad. These organisations are powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, influence political elites abroad, and ultimately control the Chinese diaspora, but they’re also poorly understood. These organisations purport to represent and speak on behalf of ‘Xinjiang’ and its indigenous peoples. They subsume Uyghur and other minority cultures and identities under a nebulous yet hegemonic ‘Chineseness’, which is defined by and connected to the Han-dominated CCP. In reality, these organisations and their leaders play important roles in muting alternative and independent voices from the community while amplifying CCP messaging and spreading disinformation. They exploit the openness of democratic and multicultural countries while assisting the CCP and its proxies to surveil and even persecute members of the Xinjiang diaspora community or individuals who are critical of the CCP’s Xinjiang policies. Like united front work more broadly, the activities of these groups and their links to the Chinese Government are often overlooked and can be difficult to parse. While human rights abuses in Xinjiang are being exposed internationally, the mechanisms and tactics developed by united front agencies to co-opt overseas Xinjiang-related community groups have gone largely unnoticed. Our research demonstrates how these groups can sow distrust and fear in the community, mislead politicians, journalists and the public, influence government policies, cloud our assessment of the situation in Xinjiang, and disguise the CCP’s interference in foreign countries.
Topic:
Human Rights, Diaspora, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Uyghurs
Political Geography:
China and Xinjiang

2. Assessing the impact of CCP information operations related to Xinjiang

Author:
Albert Zhang and Tilla Hoja
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using technology to enforce transnational digital repression and influence unwitting audiences beyond China’s territory. This includes using increasingly sophisticated online tactics to deny, distract from and deter revelations or claims of human rights abuses, including the arbitrary detention, mass sterilisation and cultural degradation of minorities in Xinjiang. Instead of improving its treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, the CCP is responding to critiques of its current actions against human rights by coordinating its state propaganda apparatus, security agencies and public relations industry to silence and shape Xinjiang narratives at home and abroad. Central to the CCP’s efforts is the exploitation of US-based social media and content platforms. CCP online public diplomacy is bolstered by covert and coercive campaigns that impose costs and seek to constrain international entities—be they states, corporations or individuals—from offering evidence-based critiques of the party-state’s record on human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and other sensitive issues. This asymmetric access to US-based social media platforms allows the CCP to continue testing online tactics, measuring responses and improving its influence and interference capabilities, in both overt and covert ways, across a spectrum of topics. The impact of these operations isn’t widely understood, and the international community has failed to adequately respond to the global challenges posed by the CCP’s rapidly evolving propaganda and disinformation operations. This report seeks to increase awareness about this problem based on publicly available information.
Topic:
Human Rights, Propaganda, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Uyghurs, and Information
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Xinjiang

3. Strange bedfellows on Xinjiang: The CCP, fringe media and US social media platforms

Author:
Albert Zhang, Jacob Wallis, and Zoe Meers
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
This report explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), fringe media and pro-CCP online actors seek—sometimes in unison—to shape and influence international perceptions of the Chinese Government’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including through the amplification of disinformation. United States (US) based social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, along with Chinese-owned TikTok (owned by Chinese company ByteDance), are centre stage for this global effort. The Chinese Government continues to deny human rights abuses in Xinjiang despite a proliferation of credible evidence, including media reporting, independent research, testimonies and open-source data, that has revealed abuses including forced labour, mass detention, surveillance, sterilisation, cultural erasure and alleged genocide in the region. To distract from such human rights abuses, covert and overt online information campaigns have been deployed to portray positive narratives about the CCP’s domestic policies in the region, while also injecting disinformation into the global public discourse regarding Xinjiang. The report’s key findings: Since early 2020, there’s been a stark increase in the Chinese Government and state media’s use of US social media networks to push alternative narratives and disinformation about the situation in Xinjiang. Chinese state media accounts have been most successful in using Facebook to engage and reach an international audience. The CCP is using tactics including leveraging US social media platforms to criticise and smear Uyghur victims, journalists and researchers who work on this topic, as well as their organisations. We expect these efforts to escalate in 2021. Chinese Government officials and state media are increasingly amplifying content, including disinformation, produced by fringe media and conspiracist websites that are often sympathetic to the narrative positioning of authoritarian regimes. This amplifies the reach and influence of these sites in the Western media ecosystem. Senior officials from multilateral organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN), have also played a role in sharing such content. The Xinjiang Audio-Video Publishing House, a publishing organisation owned by a regional government bureau and affiliated with the CCP’s United Front Work Department, has funded a marketing company to create videos depicting Uyghurs as supportive of the Chinese Government’s policies in Xinjiang. Those videos were then amplified on Twitter and YouTube by a network of inauthentic accounts. The Twitter accounts also retweeted and liked non-Xinjiang-related tweets by Chinese diplomatic officials and Chinese state-affiliated media in 2020.
Topic:
Human Rights, Media, Social Media, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Political Geography:
China, United States of America, and Xinjiang

4. Borrowing mouths to speak on Xinjiang

Author:
Fergus Ryan, Ariel Bogle, Nathan Ruser, Albert Zhang, and Daria Impiombato
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:
This report explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses foreign social media influencers to shape and push messages domestically and internationally about Xinjiang that are aligned with its own preferred narratives. Our research has found key instances in which Chinese state entities have supported influencers in the creation of social media content in Xinjiang, as well as amplified influencer content that supports pro-CCP narratives. That content broadly seeks to debunk Western media reporting and academic research, refute statements by foreign governments and counter allegations of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Often, such content is then promoted by party-state media and diplomatic accounts across major international social media networks and in Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) briefings. This trend is particularly notable given the difficulty faced by journalists reporting in Xinjiang. Our research also examines how the CCP’s use of foreign influencers presents a growing challenge to global social media platforms, and in particular their efforts to identify and label state-affiliated accounts. This report focuses on the promotion of foreign influencers who disseminate content about Xinjiang on US-based social media and content networks, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as on Chinese platforms such as Bilibili. The report analyses this unique online influencer ecosystem and examines three in-depth case studies with a focus on Xinjiang-focused foreign influencer content and the amplification of that content by Chinese state entities. The Chinese party-state continues to deny allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including forced labour, mass detention and cultural erasure. Previous work by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) has found Chinese party-state entities using US social media networks in an effort to create greater ambiguity about the situation in Xinjiang, push a counter-narrative and amplify disinformation. It has also found that the CCP uses tactics, including leveraging US social media platforms, to criticise and smear Uyghur victims, journalists and researchers who work on this topic, as well as their organisations. Other tactics have included temporal and narrative alignment between pro-CCP social media influencers and state entities (for example, targeting the BBC over its reporting on allegations of systematic rape in Xinjiang’s internment camps, among other stories) as well as the amplification of content that depicts Uyghurs as broadly supportive of the Chinese Government’s policies in Xinjiang.
Topic:
Social Media, Propaganda, Disinformation, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Influencers
Political Geography:
China and Xinjiang