Free Republic

A little-noticed passage in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy released last month previewed a new push to combat Chinese influence operations that affect American universities, think tanks, movie studios and news organizations. The investigations by Congress and the FBI into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign won’t be affected by the added focus on China, officials say. Instead, the aim is to highlight Chinese activities that often get a free pass but can have a toxic long-term effect because of China’s growing wealth and power. Please see link in post, for full article.

Washington is waking up to the huge scope and scale of Chinese Communist Party influence operations inside the United States, which permeate American institutions of all kinds. China’s overriding goal is, at the least, to defend its authoritarian system from attack and at most to export it to the world at America’s expense. The foreign influence campaign is part and parcel of China’s larger campaign for global power, which includes military expansion, foreign direct investment, resource hoarding, and influencing international rules and norms. But this part of China’s game plan is the most opaque and least understood. Beijing’s strategy is...