ExclusiveCCP Targets Americans Using Disinformation and Lawfare | Special Feature

Leaked communications within China have revealed plans at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party to export its human rights abuses outside the country. And this involves a whole of government strategy running from within the CCP, which in turn uses its networks of influence in the United States to carry out these operations. The plan is to use journalists and influencers in this country as pawns to carry its propaganda. And from there it plans to use the articles and online videos to trigger lawsuits and legal investigations. Then to use this as a way to shroud its targets in controversy in an attempt to tear them down. Chinese whistleblowers have revealed direct communications from the very head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, giving these orders. And additional whistleblowers have revealed leaked documents and details on how the orders are right now being carried out. It appears the main target as of now is Falun Dafa, also called Falun Gong, a Chinese religion based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. The Chinese Communist Party has tried to destroy the religion. And given that its attempts in China have failed, the new communist campaign aims to try to destroy it outside China as well as inside. And this campaign, which uses media warfare and legal warfare as its weapons, also takes aims at the companies that were started by Falun Dafa practitioners, including Shenyun Performing Arts, NTD and The Epoch Times. Yet while this CCP campaign is aimed at attacking a persecuted religion, it is also exposing something much more broad. Through this, the Chinese Communist Party is revealing some of its main tools for overseas subversion. And its actions are now drawing out some of its large networks of overseas spies. The people in power the regime has managed to gain influence over, and also the Chinese Communist Party's broad systems to wage what's known as political warfare. In October, the House Oversight Committee released a report about the threat. Chairman James Comer said in a statement that the committee has exposed the CCP's political warfare and is working to ensure the federal government formulates a cohesive strategy to combat CCP threats and protect all Americans. He adds that the CCP is successfully infiltrating and influencing communities and critical sectors across this nation. And it is past time for federal agencies to take this threat seriously and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people. Now I spoke with several experts on the extent of the political warfare threat from the Chinese Communist Party. What is political warfare? How would you describe political warfare? Well, political warfare is a term which is evolving constantly. It basically meant the continuation of warfare by other means, in other words, other than kinetic or military and formal warfare. But one of the things which has evolved with the evolution of total war has been the use of literally every instrument of society to fight your war against your opponent, and not only just to fight your opponent militarily or at its political levels, but throughout the entire level of your opponent's society. So one of the things about, for example, Chinese political warfare under the Communist Party of China is that they have developed a specific doctrine which basically weaponizes every element of their society against every element of their opponent's society. We tend to look at when we think of political warfare, political activities, we, as I said, we think of it as like the stump speech, the primetime broadcast, buying advertisement. We don't think of it as pumping drugs into our opponent so that he'll die. But that is what the Chinese do. We don't think of it as taking over another person's territory, taking their property. That's how the Chinese see it. This is an all-out you-die-I-live sort of action or activity by the Chinese communists, how they see it. And this has really been part and parcel of Chinese really strategic thinking since the beginning of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. And they have done very well at it. And a large part of this, of course, is proxies, so-called proxy warfare, which means you get influential people in another country, in your target area, to do what you want, and to create these narratives that, well, that suit the Chinese communists. You know, in the context of today and the way that China conducts political warfare on a global scale, all the tools of globalization and the internet are brought to bear. This is something totally new. So when you think about the evolution of warfare, there's been technologies like stirrups and rifles and tanks and airplanes, nuclear weapons, lasers, directed energy weapons, hypersonics. And the one that I quite frankly think that we have downplayed or not recognized is, in my opinion, the most powerful weapon, and that is a weapon called the internet. And in particular, when smartphones came out and 4G networks allowed you to use those things to track people, to track their behaviors, to track their intentions, and then to use that data to then change those intentions and behaviors, I think that's the piece where political warfare began to outpace traditional warfare. And I think now when you look throughout our society, this ability to use the economic connections between China and our corporations and our financial institutions and our universities and our people, and then to pile upon that the ability of social media to manipulate people's and influence their behaviors, it's really gone global. Political warfare has in a way that, quite frankly, we've never seen. Political warfare has allowed the Chinese Communist Party to bypass our military, to bypass these two large oceans and two friendly borders that have traditionally protected the American people from this type of outside influence, outside our border influence. In terms of what we're seeing with this current campaign, the CCP's plans are now being publicly exposed. Whistleblowers recently revealed a secret meeting held by CCP leader Xi Jinping in October of 2022, where he gave orders to top regime officials to carry out a new strategy to launch a global persecution against Falun Dafa practitioners. Now, according to the report, at the core of the Chinese Communist Party's new anti-Falun Gong strategy is launching disinformation campaigns via social media influencers and Western media outlets, and using the American legal system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners. The information comes from Yuan Hongbin, a Chinese legal scholar living in exile in Australia, who has maintained connections within China's top political circles. His sources, in turn, came from information from an individual from a veteran CCP family that now opposes Xi Jinping, and an insider who is now speaking out for his own conscience. The claims also corroborate information now being revealed by additional whistleblowers and from leaked documents from within the Chinese Communist Party. Some of the information has been provided to the Falun Dafa Information Center, the FDIC. It's a nonprofit monitoring the persecution of Falun Gong. What are these documents and what are these whistleblowers saying about the CCP's plans right now? Sure. Yeah, we received it early summer and multiple sources. They essentially admitted, first of all, that the campaign against Shen Yun and Falun Gong broadly overseas has failed, and they were going to shift tactics. And those tactics basically meant establishing a beachhead in social media, Chinese language social media, through which they could spread typical CCP propaganda, but then focus in on the points that would bait mainstream media in the United States prompt investigations from American government agencies, and really drive a wedge between Shen Yun, Falun Gong, and the broader American populace. They stated those things very clearly. So that was their strategy. Part of the CCP's campaign is targeting New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts, the world's premier classical Chinese dance company, which was started by Falun Gong practitioners. A recent series of hit pieces from the New York Times targeting the dance company appeared to have links to the Chinese Communist Party's campaign. This includes an individual named in the CCP's programs who stated in a now-deleted tweet that he introduced the New York Times to several of its sources. The New York Times also failed to disclose that many of its sources have ties to the Beijing Dance Academy, which is a Chinese state-run organization that's tied to the CCP's programs against Shen Yun. I understand the New York Times did a recent series of hit pieces targeting Shen Yun. Do these have any relation to this campaign that we know of? Well, what we know for sure is they achieved the exact results that this campaign laid out in terms of their planning. We also know that one of the main social media personalities that the Ministry of Public Security was backing and using as sort of this beachhead to disparage Falun Gong, disparage Shen Yun, was the person who kind of galvanized the interview subjects, was the person who tipped off the New York Times, and has clearly been working with the New York Times throughout this whole process. So those are the things we know for sure. In terms of the sources from the New York Times, are there any issues with them that we know of? Yeah, there's huge red flags among the interview subjects. The primary group of interview subjects, first of all, are very small, but about half of them have public ties to the Chinese government. And these are things that they talk about openly in interviews, on their Facebook pages, so it's very clear that some of them have ties to the Chinese government. Why should the American people be concerned about this campaign from the Chinese Communist Party? This is a total attempt at a total takedown of Shen Yun, which is an American company, and Falun Gong, which is an American-based dissident group. And the real danger here is not just the Shen Yun and Falun Gong community. This is a blueprint. This is a blueprint for how the CCP can weaponize our media, our government, our legal system to go after any company or any group they want to. Alongside the New York Times hit pieces, several CCP campaigns targeting Shen Yun have already been exposed. This includes a Chinese agent, John Chen, who was convicted in November for trying to bribe an IRS official to revoke Shen Yun's nonprofit status. Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement from the U.S. Justice Department, quote, John Chen aligned himself with the PRC government and its goals to harass and intimidate the Falun Gong, a longstanding target of PRC repression. It doesn't end there either. Additional cases have revealed CCP attempts to use its secret police stations to try and attack Falun Dafa. Also in November, a China-born U.S. citizen, Ping Li, was sentenced to 48 months in prison in Florida for conspiring to act as an agent for the CCP's Ministry of State Security. A Justice Department release stated that Li obtained a wide variety of information at the request of the MSS, including information concerning Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy activists, members of the Falun Gong religious movement, and U.S.-based non-governmental organizations, and reported that information to the MSS. Whistleblowers have also revealed that the CCP's Ministry of State Security plays a key role in the current campaign targeting Falun Dafa. The campaign also involves the CCP's Political and Legal Affairs Commission, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and its United Front Work Department. And the campaign also is mobilizing additional agencies to work alongside these ones. The structure of this operation is important because it also exposes the CCP agents, overseas networks, and even military operations now being used to carry out these orders. And a key part of this relates to the United Front Work Department, which in turn is tied to the CCP's overseas secret police stations and its agents of influence who work to subvert American businesses, media, and government. I understand one of the Chinese Communist Party's methods with the United Front Work Department is to capture what they call the civil society, with the belief that if you capture the civil society, you kind of control the country as a puppet state. To what extent is that a concern in the U.S.? Well, it should be something that terrifies us. But you can get that elite class to excuse a way to ignore the threat very well. Actually, if you put money in front of many Westerners of a certain class, they'll perform like a sea lion at a water park who thinks he's going to get a macro stack. It really does have an effect. Another example I would cite is academia. For whatever reason, they have been very successful at winning over the American academic class, as you've mentioned. And there's really this allure of hundreds of thousands of full tuition paying Chinese students that has caused a lot of professors in academia to just shut up. It's the promise of invitations to seminars and symposiums in China with a business class ticket and nice honorarium. How does the three warfares fit into the CCP operations for political warfare? Well, they're all part of the same overarching thing which we used to call psychological warfare or psychological strategy because it becomes creating an overarching doctrine which combines all of the elements. You don't separate legal warfare from political warfare from economic warfare and certainly diplomatic warfare. You utilize them all unremittingly in a manner which crosses borders. We see it fairly regularly that the US government is being lobbied by other entities, meaning law firms, K Street law firms in DC. We're seeing it through companies, defense industry contractors that say, we need this, we need that. But they have contracts through shell companies that are backed by the CCP or even further proxy companies, Singaporean companies that are led by the CCP or directed by the CCP. So you have to understand the CCP has a lot of representatives, officers in the CCP that are deployed in major companies, well, all companies that mean anything in China. But outside of China, they have people inside those companies, either in board positions or plant manager positions that have control and influence of those operations outside of China and in the rest of the world. Casey, what's the scale of this? How serious is all this? I can't explain enough. It's beyond words. The only word I can say is how serious all this is, is that it's extreme. You can say it's serious or it's concerning or whatever, but the word is well above that. And that is extreme. A key part of this new CCP campaign to export its religious persecution to the United States is to use media and law. Now, the goal of the CCP is to feed disinformation to journalists and online influencers, have them repeat this disinformation and then use it to trigger attacks on its enemies by manipulating the legal systems. While this may at first sound far-fetched, the Chinese Communist Party has an open strategy for this exact type of attack. It was adopted into its military doctrine in 2003. The strategy is known as the three warfares. These are psychological warfare to frame disinformation narratives, media warfare to control and influence outlets of information, and legal warfare, also known as lawfare, to manipulate legal systems and to disable its targets using non-military means. Now, the three warfares is an extension of the CCP's political warfare operations and even goes back to strategies used by the Soviet Union to target and destroy its critics. What the CCP is doing is precisely what the Soviets did in terms of trying to get their narrative, their propaganda into recognized Western newspapers, magazines, media outlets. The premise, the way they'd approach it, they would flood even, they didn't care if it was a union trade newspaper or a local whatever. If they can get their story and start planning it in, they get in five or ten local little newsletters. Pretty soon a regional newspaper picks up a story about it. Now you're in two or three regional newspapers. Sooner or later, letters to the editor, articles appear, editorials appear in major newspapers. That's when disinformation matters. They put it out in their own press, controlled press. We don't care about, we don't respect it. We know not to trust it. If they make it into major media outlets here in the West, we believe it's true. To what extent did that influence political action? The enormous purpose of propaganda is to influence political action. If you can get the people to believe that changes need to be made, they will influence the politicians and the politicians will influence the legislation. So it's a circular kind of matter where we're trying to persuade the people, persuade the politicians, change the narrative to develop a political end. And that's not just disinformation. That's how propaganda operates. How does that system work where it can eventually get the government to actually act, but responding to things that just aren't even true? American politicians respond to the public. If you can persuade the media, the media persuades the public, the public drives the political action. Interesting. And I mean, what was the Soviet thinking at the time on how they regarded what the Chinese Communist Party would call the borrowed vote strategy? Well, within intelligence circles, it was well understood that you've got to get to that level of publication, that level of a trustworthy news outlet before your disinformation, before your propaganda really makes any difference. We can spill out stories in our own newspapers all day long. That doesn't matter. If we can get into a Western outlet, even a small one that's planting a seed that can pay dividends down the road in terms of persuading people, pressuring politicians, leading to legislative action, leading to ultimately advances in our military cause. It's warfare. Disinformation is a form of warfare. To understand it, Pacheco would sometimes use the phrase framing. And we think in America, framing someone for a crime, we'll think of framing them in a negative manner. It's absolutely essential that in order to gain momentum, you've got to get credibility. And to get credibility, you need to co-opt credible icons of society. And you still see them working, CCP working through political and journalistic and other individuals and media individuals around the world. We see a number of politicians in Australia who continue to sing the line of Beijing, even though they're now starting to get a very hostile pushback from their society. We see that. There's a famous New York journalist, Owen mentioned, but he just in the last few days came out with an article rebuffing the view that the Chinese mainland economy was collapsing and that he said that China was coming back stronger than ever. And this is a credible New York mainstream journalist saying this. And you say, what's he smoking? Because you can see the evidence of the collapse of China's economy right now. But therefore, China's in trouble. But for China to keep expanding its pool of support, it has to have people believing that the Belt and Road Initiative is continuing to succeed, even though it's run out of money. You have to say that the inevitability of the rise of China as a great power, the second largest economy in the world, was continuing, when in fact, the evidence is all to the contrary. The PRC is still saying, and Western observers are still picking this up, that the Chinese economy grew by more than 5% last year. But everything else is now becoming so patently evident in terms of the collapse of mainland China, that their whole approach to winning the psychological warfare is becoming more and more difficult. The current CCP strategy basically works through a type of information laundering. The CCP agencies steal information and communications on its targets. It then works to frame narratives to reinterpret this information. And from there, it feeds this to individuals and agents who pass it on to journalists and influencers, who then broadcast the false narratives through what are otherwise seen as trustworthy sources. And from there, the Chinese Communist Party's agents will capitalize on the public reporting to try and stir up controversy against its target. And from there, the goal is to trigger political or legal action against the based on the disinformation that it's ceded to the public. Shenyang Performing Arts issued a statement on December 3, in response to the many attacks currently ongoing. It stated, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, it will become frightfully apparent to the American people that the Chinese Communist Party has facilitated the spread of false narratives in mainstream media on a large scale. The US government is now responding to some of the campaigns now being launched by the Chinese Communist Party to extend its persecutions onto American soil. The FBI recently launched a campaign in Texas to investigate the CCP's use of agents to harass people within the United States. Texas Governor Greg Abbott followed this with an executive order also fighting back against the CCP's operations. He said in a statement, the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in a worldwide harassment campaign against Chinese dissidents in attempts to forcibly return them to China. And he said Texas will not tolerate the harassment or coercion of more than 250,000 individuals of Chinese descent who illegally called Texas home by the Chinese Communist Party or its heinous proxies. We're on the front lines of having a guard against this potential Chinese attack, which is why we are redoubling our efforts to arrest any body in the state of Texas who's posing any type of China problem whatsoever by making sure that our universities, our investments, all things like that are being walled off. The US State Department also responded to the CCP's now revealed campaign to spread its persecution against Falun Gong globally. And it stated, we urge the PRC government to uphold its international commitments and the promises made in its own constitution to protect the freedom of religious belief and end its now 25 year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong. The US House of Representatives also passed the bipartisan Falun Gong Protection Act, which calls for an and will require the United States to shun cooperation with the CCP in organ transplantation given the CCP's killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs. It also issues sanctions and visa restrictions to hold anybody involved in the brutal persecution accountable. The bill is currently awaiting Senate approval. This bill before us today will impose visa and property blocking sanctions against those responsible for such atrocities. It deserves our unanimous support. I yield back the balance of my time. The gentleman yields. The question is, will the house suspend the rules and pass the bill HR 4132 as amended? Those in favor say aye. Those opposed no. In the opinion of the chair, two thirds being the affirmative, the rules are suspended, the bill is passed. And without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. The investigations are still underway, but through this current CCP campaign aimed to export its persecution against Falun Gong to this country, the Chinese Communist Party is pulling back the curtain and it's revealing its systems of subversion right here in the United States.