China pushes divisive narratives amid heated US election

 

FILE – The logo of China's Xinhua News Agency is seen on a partition at the agency's newsroom in Beijing, March 27, 2015. A recent Xinhua video lampooned U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, capitalizing on divisive topics.

As the polling sites across the U.S. started counting votes Tuesday in the highly contested U.S. presidential race, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency published a satirical video titled “Presidential Election Victory Speeches of the Divided States of America.”

Posted on social media platform X, Xinhua’s video lampooned President-elect Donald Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, capitalizing on divisive U.S. political and societal topics.

Mocking the issue of gun violence in America, an actor portraying Harris said, “We are rolling out bullet vending machines in every grocery store.” The actor portraying Trump said that "while kids are being shot by stray bullets,” Americans will “have to pass a background check to buy bubble gum.”

The video similarly portrayed the Trump and Harris stand-ins as having farcical views on economic and environmental policy, criticized the U.S. for providing military aid to its allies, and ridiculed a potential ban of the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.

Similar to disinformation spread by other U.S. adversaries like Russia and Iran, China’s disinformation narratives targeting U.S. elections focused on efforts to undermine the U.S. democratic system as a whole.

Like Russian and Iranian state-run media outlets, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Global Times newspaper predicted "post-election unrest.”

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Xinhua published an Election Day piece outlining eight key issues that reveal “the truth about American democracy.”

They included problems with inflation, health care, crime, education, abortion, housing affordability, shale gas and immigration — all of which Xinhua described as “urgent.”

The article presented the United States as failing politically and economically, and it cast the presidential candidates as using these issues to get popular votes despite being incapable of enacting genuine change.

Lu Xiang, an expert on U.S. studies and research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that “neither candidate will accept defeat easily, because they have bet too much on this campaign.”

Harris already debunked such speculation. Following U.S. political tradition, she called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him and publicly conceded the race.

Publicly, China has denied any effort to sway the vote in the U.S. When asked Wednesday about Trump’s victory, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning called the election “an internal affair of the United States.”

“China respects the choice of the American people,” she added.

However, researchers have documented China’s influence operations in the leadup to Tuesday’s poll.

On Tuesday, the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council published a study that found a Chinese bot network had amplified apparently Russian-produced content intended “to undermine the integrity of the 2024 U.S. election.”

“These videos amplified disinformation narratives alleging rigged votes, destroyed ballots, malfunctioning machines and dead voters, with some suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris benefited from these supposed instances of election fraud,” DFRLab said.

Authorities said those and other malign narratives Russia pushed through its “interference campaign” preyed on “an already tense political climate,” Agence France-Presse reported.

While China has long used social media platforms to counter negative reports about the CCP and its human rights records, researchers at Microsoft found that China has in recent years spread messages intended to undermine the U.S. and “sow discord along racial, socioeconomic and ideological lines.”

In an August report, Microsoft found that the CCP-linked influence actors continued to “engage U.S. audiences on divisive political issues.”

Like Iran, China sought to stoke social tensions over U.S. support for Israel in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Microsoft found that one CCP-linked influence group, Taizi Flood, “leveraged hundreds of accounts to stoke outrage around pro-Palestinian protests at U.S. universities.”

Taizi Flood assets portrayed themselves as being students involved in the protests, reacted “in real time as students clashed with law enforcement across campuses,” and provided directions to demonstration locations, Microsoft found.

A September report from the research company Graphika similarly found that China had “become more aggressive in its efforts to influence U.S. political conversations ahead of the 2024 presidential election.”

As with Taizi Flood, that included an expansion of efforts to impersonate U.S. voters on social media platforms to spread “divisive narratives about sensitive social issues in the U.S.”

 

By：VOA