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Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2018 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Near the end <\/span>of September, before the United Nations, President Donald Trump leveled an extraordinary charge: China was attempting to \u201cmeddle\u201d and \u201cinterfere\u201d in the upcoming US election. A senior intelligence official repeated the claim on a subsequent call with reporters. And on Thursday, in a speech at the Hudson Institute think tank, Vice President Mike Pence made the implication explicit: \u201cWhat the Russians are doing<\/a> pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country, and the American people deserve to know it.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a standout \u201cbig, if true\u201d moment in an administration full of them. Russia, after all, launched a coordinated, well-funded, years-long covert assault on US democracy. It spread disinformation<\/a> and sowed division<\/a>, posing as US citizens online<\/a>, violating laws and geopolitical norms. Russian intelligence agents hacked into the email accounts<\/a> of multiple high-profile Democratic individuals and institutions, and timed their release<\/a> for maximum disruptive effect. It was an unprecedented attack on the US electoral process. It\u2019s hard to imagine what a more aggressive version of that would even look like. Especially because it does not yet exist.<\/p>\n China absolutely tries to exert its influence in the US. It has carried out several high-profile cyberattacks<\/a>, generally focused on gleaning intelligence. But to say that China\u2019s actions are anything remotely like Russia\u2019s in 2016 and beyond isn\u2019t just wrong\u2014it distorts the threats the US faces, potentially making it harder to counteract them.<\/p>\n \u201cThey feel like substantively different things. China seeks to influence foreign actors, and does use influence operations, but they really differ in important ways from what Russia does,\u201d says Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former senior intelligence officer currently at the Center for a New American Security think tank. \u201cI actually think that the Chinese probably view Russia\u2019s approach as ineffective and counterproductive.\u201d<\/p>\n Pence at least articulated a fuller picture of what the Trump administration means when it castigates China. He cited the country\u2019s efforts to promote its interests in the United States through tough interactions with business leaders, retaliatory tariffs that target districts that voted for Trump, and an advertisement in The Des Moines Register<\/em>, designed to look like authentic news articles but clearly labeled as paid content. \u201cThere can be no doubt,\u201d Pence said. \u201cChina is meddling in American democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n "I don\u2019t think the goals or intentions of China are anywhere near comparable to what Russia has been looking to accomplish."<\/p>\n Andrea Kendall-Taylor, CNAS<\/p>\n China clearly prioritizes and tries to advance its own interests. But what the Trump administration describes as meddling can more reasonably be called political maneuvering. China often sets unpalatable terms when dealing with outside business interests\u2014look how far Google has reportedly considered bending<\/a> to launch a search engine there\u2014but it does so in the open. Its tariffs sting, but likely would not exist had Trump not levied his own. That they exert political as well as economic pressure seems unsurprising for a trade war. As for newspaper inserts, that\u2019s a fairly common practice. More importantly, it plays by the rules.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not covert. It\u2019s quite on the top that it\u2019s a Chinese-produced document,\u201d says Todd Helmus, senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation who focuses on strategic communications. \u201cThe notion of them doing an insert is not really news. I don\u2019t really see that level of comparison of Russia\u2019s covert actions to influence the election and this insert.\u201d<\/p>\n The next logical question, then, would be if perhaps the National Security Council was sitting on classified information that showed more active, politically disruptive cyberattacks or misinformation campaigns of the type Russian hackers have pursued. That is, after all, how \u201cinterference\u201d has lately been defined. The answer, again, seems to be no, according to Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. \u201cWhat we see with China right now are the influence campaigns, the more traditional, longstanding, holistic influence campaigns,\u201d not active hacking, Nielsen said<\/a> at a recent Washington Post<\/em> summit.<\/p>\n Independent cybersecurity researchers back up that assessment. \u201cWe have not yet identified any covert influence activities by China to influence the US elections, though it is possible we haven\u2019t yet detected those operations,\u201d says John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, one of the leading trackers of nation state cyberactivities.<\/p>\n None of which is to say China doesn\u2019t pose a threat in some areas. A blockbuster Bloomberg<\/em> report<\/a> this week alleges that the country infiltrated servers operated by Apple, Amazon, and dozens more companies through a sophisticated hardware supply chain hack<\/a>. (All implicated parties have vigorously denied the story.) And Chinese hackers have increasingly targeted<\/a> the United States, in step with escalating trade war tensions.<\/p>\n "We have not yet identified any covert influence activities by China to influence the US elections."<\/p>\n John Hultquist, FireEye<\/p>\n But conflating China\u2019s operations with Russia\u2019s distracts from genuine, specific electoral threats the United States has and continues to face. \u201cWhen we\u2019re talking about Russian efforts to influence, we have to distinguish what would be expected from a regular country looking to advance its interests, and what crosses the line into something more unsavory. Those are really important distinctions to make,\u201d says Kendall-Taylor. \u201cIt\u2019s much more problematic to say that China\u2019s looking to interfere in our elections. That\u2019s a much less helpful comparison. I don\u2019t think the goals or intentions of China are anywhere near comparable to what Russia has been looking to accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned this summer<\/a>\u2014also at the Hudson Institute\u2014that the \u201cwarning lights are blinking red\u201d when it comes to Russian cyberattacks. By shifting focus to China\u2019s overt courtship of US opinion, the administration distracts from, and minimizes, the impact of Russia\u2019s covert campaigns.<\/p>\n One thing did ring true from Pence\u2019s speech Thursday. \u201cIn June, Beijing itself circulated a sensitive document entitled \u2018Propaganda and Censorship Notice,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt stated that China must, in their words, \u2018strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups in the United States of America.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n If that strategy sounds familiar, it\u2019s the one that Russia deployed to devastating effect through dummy social media accounts\u2014and the same tactic that President Trump pointedly refused to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for<\/a> when he had the chance.<\/p>\n