Vice President Mike Pence announced earlier this month that China is working to unseat President Trump and meddle in U.S. elections, revealing what he said was Beijing’s plan as outlined in an internal government propaganda directive.
“In June, Beijing circulated a sensitive document, entitled ‘Propaganda and Censorship Notice,’ that laid out its strategy,” Mr. Pence said in an Oct. 4 speech outlining a tougher U.S. policy toward China.
“It states that China must ‘strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups’ in the United States,” he noted.
As part of the directive, “Beijing has mobilized covert actors, front groups and propaganda outlets to shift Americans’ perception of Chinese policies,” the vice president said, noting that a senior U.S. intelligence official told him that Russian election meddling “pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country.”
White House officials said the document the vice president referred to is a confidential Chinese government directive that was published in the California-based China Digital Times.
The censorship notice published online did not identify the government or Communist Party department that wrote the directive. But the notice directs China’s tightly controlled network of newspapers, television, radio and social media outlets to sharply restrict all reporting on the ongoing U.S.-Chinese trade dispute.
The June 28 directive states that China’s most senior official in charge of the trade dispute, Vice Premier Liu He, has said that in the U.S.-Chinese “trade war,” the Chinese side must remain “calm and rational, strengthen interdepartmental coordination, [and] establish a coherent power in stabilizing market forecasts.”
“We are done with talks, we must now not yield an inch, and formulate reciprocal measures,” the directive says, according to a translation different from the one the vice president used.
“We must carefully control our propaganda tone, not to escalate, not to expand the scope. Instead, we must fire precision strikes, we must sow discord among different groups in the United States and make them collapse. Trade war is in reality a war against China’s rise. We must see who can last to the end, and we must never be weak and soft in action and in rhetoric.”
In conducting trade war propaganda against the United States, Beijing created what it calls the Three Don’t Relays: “Don’t relay comments from Trump, from U.S. government spokespersons, or from U.S. officials,” according to the document.
The notice also tells Chinese propaganda outlets not to “attack Trump’s vulgarity” and “Don’t make this a war of insults.”
“All media should prepare well for protracted conflict,” the notice says. “Don’t follow the American side’s fluctuating declarations. Play down the correlations between the stock market and trade conflict.”
The Chinese government is also ordering propaganda reports to play up “economic bright spots” that appear to show steadying improvements in the Chinese economy. Such stories are to be given “important page placement” in newspapers and timed to have maximum impact.
“Interview experts recommended by each department; websites and Weibo and WeChat accounts must emphasize suitable forms of network propaganda,” said the directive, referring to two major Chinese microblogs.
The document concludes with a warning not to mention China’s long-term strategy to corner world markets in high technology known as Made in China 2025, “or there will be consequences.”
China is known to fire or imprison editors who fail to follow the directives of the Communist Party’s propaganda department, the likely origin of the directive.
