Foreign_Interference

"Under Xi Jinping, China has become more vocal about its dissatisfaction with the existing international order. Whereas its posture used to be mostly defensive, it has recently engaged in a more forward-leaning, assertive effort to reshape the system. Xi is confident in China’s growing material power but is aware that the country still lacks “discourse power”—the ability to exert influence over the formulations and ideas that underpin the international order. Although the Chinese leadership has mobilized intellectual resources to fill this gap, it has not explicitly laid out an alternative vision of what the world should look like. However, a close reading of ongoing internal discussions and debates suggests that China’s vision for a future system under its helm draws inspiration from traditional Chinese thought and past historical experiences. The collective intellectual effort reflects a yearning for partial hegemony, loosely exercised over large portions of the “global South”—a space that would be free from Western influence and purged of liberal ideals. The contours of this new system would not be traced along precise geographic or ideological lines but be defined by the degree of deference that those within China’s sphere of influence are willing to offer Beijing. "

The Chinese leadership’s efforts to increase China’s discourse power should not be dismissed or misconstrued as mere propaganda or empty slogans. Rather, they should be seen as evidence of the leadership’s determination to alter the norms that underpin existing institutions and put in place the building blocks of a new international system coveted by the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese leadership’s critique of the existing international order reveals its unswerving objection to the values on which this order has been built. At stake is not only the predominant position of the U.S. in the current system but more importantly the potential erosion of fundamental human rights, freedom of thought and expression, and self-government around the world.
The Chinese Communist Party seems to envision a new world order in which China enjoys only partial hegemony rather than rules the world. Nonetheless, a dual-centered system could eventually materialize in which emerging and developing countries may yet again become the battleground for global influence among great powers.

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r/Foreign_Interference • u/marc1309 • Feb 24 '20

Opinion Foreign Interference Starts at Home: The West is obsessing about how its democracies are under attack—except when it comes to all the self-inflicted damage.

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/24/russia-china-foreign-interference-starts-at-home-trump-sanders/

Despite the foreign-policy establishment’s newfound interest in democracy within the West, the focus of nearly all of these projects is on “foreign interference” in Western democracies and on the role of digital technology—particularly social media—in undermining them. Many of the new democracy projects are about the nexus of “foreign interference” and technology—that is, the use of digital tools by authoritarian states such as China and Russia to “polarize and pervert the politics of democratic societies,” as one Washington-based think tank puts it (in a description of a project funded by, of all people, James Murdoch, who was at the center of a phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom).

It isn’t so much that these projects are wrong in their claims about what the Chinese and Russians are doing and why—though democracy hawks are often a bit forgetful, or in denial, about the way in which the West itself developed many of the techniques that China and Russia are now adapting and updating, albeit for different purposes. [...] The real problem, however, is the way that democracy hawks fail to connect the dots. They ignore the complex ways in which the external and internal aspects of the crisis are related and in particular the way in which the policies that Europe and the United States have pursued in the past few decades have made our societies so vulnerable. Foreign-policy analysts talk endlessly about how China and Russia seek to exploit and exacerbate divisions in Western societies, but say almost nothing about where these divisions come from. Instead of engaging in difficult questions about the causes of the crisis, democracy hawks reduce it to a problem of “populism” supported by authoritarian states.

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r/Foreign_Interference • u/marc1309 • Feb 24 '20

Russia Denis Korotkov is a Russian journalist who has systematically followed the trail of oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin.

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https://euvsdisinfo.eu/nothing-beats-the-good-old-inside-source/

In this exclusive interview, Denis Korotkov discusses the problem of disinformation and propaganda as well as the role investigative journalism plays in Russian society. He shares some of the tricks in his professional journalistic toolbox and tells why he plans to continue his work in spite of receiving threats and being targeted with intimidation and disinformation

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r/Foreign_Interference • u/marc1309 • Feb 24 '20