Today, if a major American university is looking for government support to promote study of the foreign language—Chinese—that will be most crucial to the future shape of global competition, it may well come instead from the Chinese government, in the form of the Confucius Institutes that provide funding, teachers, and curricula to study Chinese language and culture. The goal of these institutes, explains the website of Hanban (their coordinating headquarters within the Chinese Ministry of Education), is to help develop “multiculturalism” and build “a harmonious world.” But for the Chinese Communist Party, “harmony” means never being questioned by society. China’s vast global network of some 500 Confucius Institutes (most of them on university campuses) may be the most benign dimension of an increasingly visible and troubling Chinese government effort to penetrate and influence democratic cultures and societies.
The experience of New Zealand and Australia suggests that what begins with the cultural and social progresses to the political. In November, an Australian commercial publisher postponed its commitment to publish a book by a highly respected professor, Clive Hamilton, detailing China’s efforts to shape and censor public expression in Australia. The clumsy cave-in to China’s sensitivities, reflecting rising Chinese pressure on Australian publishers and media companies, outraged the Australian public and appeared to confirm the book’s title: Silent Invasion: How China is Turning Australia Into a Puppet State.
More recently, as reported in the Telegraph this week, “An Australian MP was forced to quit over revelations he adopted pro-China positions after accepting donations from a wealthy Chinese property developer with links to China’s Communist Party.” As accounts have piled up of Chinese government-linked donations to Australia’s two major parties, Australia’s government has proposed legislation that would ban foreign donations to political parties and groups that lobby the government and institute a public register for foreign lobbyists. The political scandal—coming amid years of accelerating Chinese influence activities—may represent a “Sputnik moment” for Australia.
But the situation in neighboring New Zealand is more urgent still. . . .
What these two resurgent authoritarian states are projecting, argue Walker and Ludwig, is power that is not “soft” but rather “sharp,” like the tip of a dagger: It enables them “to cut, razor-like, into the fabric of a society, stoking and amplifying existing divisions” (in the case of Russia) or to seek, especially in the case of China, “to monopolize ideas, suppress alternative narratives, and exploit partner institutions.”
There is also an alarming technological dimension to China’s sharp power: a relentless, multidimensional, and highly orchestrated campaign to capture, transfer, and innovate the technologies of the future, including artificial intelligence, supercomputing, drone vehicles, robotics, gene editing, and other advanced medical technology. Within a decade, China could well overtake the United States in the development of these critical technologies, which will increasingly drive the next generation of global economic growth and China’s continued rise to superpower status.
Yeah, it was probably a mistake for the Clinton Administration to open up our technology to them so readily.