20110222 The information threat from China

The information threat from China

By Nathan Novak 李漢聲

When hearing accusations that the US is pushing its values onto China and thereby attempting to sneak a democratic Trojan Horse through the “Great Firewall of China,” or trying to contain or weakenen China, we need to first look at the facts.

The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, although obviously not unbiased, is attempting to do just that. Although most politically sensitive foreign media are blocked in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — note that the recent political upheaval in far away Egypt was heavily censored in China — the PRC’s state-run media have a free hand in the US and other open societies. This begs the question what values is the US able to force on Chinese that China is unable to force on Americans?

Let’s face it, the idea that there are universal values and rights that all individuals possess is a value itself. Likewise, the idea that there are no universal values and rights and that each nation’s situation, history, culture, and political and economic systems are particular and not subject to any universal understandings is also a value.

Similarly, the values of free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, and so on, are also values, even though such values are usually attached to some form or other of universal rights. To deny or curtail these values for whatever reason is also a value judgment even though such a judgment can be explained away as merely a pragmatic policy issue — for example exercising these freedoms could be deemed to threaten economic development and modernization.

The real issue for the US as it attempts to scale back the Chinese information attack is not the information itself but the way in which Beijing seeks to control the information allowed into China. That both value systems have their merit is undeniable; however, when only one set of values is allowed in one nation, but both can be freely discussed in other countries — and the former nation is one of the major sources of information (read propaganda) for one value system — can this not also be viewed as one nation pushing its values onto another?

The whole issue is skewed in China’s favor — and what is more, Beijing knows it. By playing off fears of US hegemony, containment and peaceful democratic evolution, the Chinese have been able to use the information war as a weapon of the weak to contain and threaten the strong. By flooding a nation with information, one hinders the free flow of other information; by blocking information oneself, one is essentially unaffected.

I applaud the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for attempting to deal with this issue. In a report due to be released today, a copy of which was obtained by Agence France Presse prior to its official release, the committee stated its goals as fighting censorship in China, sending more US students to study in China, reallocating funding for information and public diplomacy programs away from the US State Department, and opening up more cultural institutes in China.

According to Media Daily News, the report deals with issues regarding Beijing’s “routin[e] jamm[ing]” of the two US-funded networks, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, and that while this was occurring, “Chinese state media were rapidly expanding in the United States, with Xinhua news agency opening a prominent office in New York’s Times Square.”

The report also makes reference to the prospect of increasing competition between the US and China which could, over the next 50 years, resemble the competition between the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

A letter accompanying the report written by the top Republican on the committee, Senator Richard Lugar, states: “We [the United States] are being overtaken in this area [public diplomacy] by China, which is able to take advantage of America’s open system to spread its message in many different ways, while using its fundamentally closed system to stymie US efforts.”

Even the more than 70 Confucius Institutes in the US came under scrutiny, not only because they are supervised by the PRC’s Ministry of Education, but also because the US has only five similar establishments in all of China, all of which are open libraries.

The report is a step forward for US public diplomacy policy. However, the way in which the US has pushed public diplomacy in the direction of the PRC needs to be changed. No longer should words like “war,” “winning” and “competition” be used.

Instead, the message to China when explaining why the US is suddenly putting more emphasis on public diplomacy should be wrapped in language the Chinese cannot resist — that is, their own.

Given that China doe not allow the US to freely disseminate information in China, the US should complain that Beijing is attempting to contain it and force Chinese values on US citizens. This can come with a declaration that this situation makes the flow of information situation unfair, and the US government can then investigate the viability of Confucius Institutes on its territory — not to mention Xinhua news agency’s office in New York.

In case one thinks that this would in some way be unconstitutional, note that we will all still be able to access uncensored Chinese media via the Internet, whereas Western media companies and social networking sites lack even this.

In short, the tactics the US has been using to fend off the information and public diplomacy “threat” from China are not working, and this should be a lesson to all other open democratic societies. Instead of confronting the Chinese openly, which would be met with resistance, a new tactic should be adopted: fighting fire with fire.

Nathan Novak studies China and the Asia-Pacific region with a particular focus on cross-strait relations at National Sun Yat-sen University.