"Disaggregating ‘Chinese Influence’" - by CWP alum Andrew Chubb
How does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) advance its political interests inside liberal democracies, and what degree of influence has it generated? From 2017 onwards, a wide-ranging threat to the integrity of liberal democratic polities from ‘Chinese influence’ has become common in English-language policy discourse. Despite the analytic attention, however, the threat has remained ill-defined. Scholarly studies have mostly been limited to specific lines of activity, such as propaganda and public diplomacy, and have not accounted for the broader context of the PRC’s multifarious lines of overseas political work through both state actors and intermediaries. Media and policy commentary, meanwhile, has tended to aggregate these diverse activities into singular unifying frameworks that mask their varying motivations, actors, and degrees of success and coherence. This chapter seeks to disaggregate and evaluate this array of PRC political practices abroad. The chapter’s analysis is structured around three key factors that shape the influence generated by PRC overseas political activities. As outlined in the Introduction and other chapters in this volume, these include the intentionality behind the influence generated, the role of intermediary actors in the process, and the conditioning institutions in the target country.1 The chapter first addresses intentionality by cataloguing a set of core concepts that underpin PRC overseas political activities, primarily ‘United Front work’, ‘Overseas Chinese work’, ‘safeguarding state security’, ‘external propaganda’, and ‘liaison work’. The ideas that motivate the activities in question are crucial to assessing their intended effects and thus their degree of success. However, it is equally important to take account of the intermediaries involved, especially the ways in which their actions may reflect particular interests or distinctive views of the national interest. The chapter thus assesses each specific practice in terms of the actors that carry them out.
Disaggregating ‘Chinese Influence’ Concepts, Practices, and Effects of PRC Overseas Political Activities Andrew Chubb - Article Here
Andrew Chubb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global Affairs. A graduate of the University of Western Australia, his work examines the linkages between Chinese domestic politics and international relations. More broadly, Andrew's interests include maritime and territorial disputes, strategic communication, political propaganda, and Chinese Communist Party history. Andrew is the author of Chinese Nationalism and the Gray Zone: Case Analyses of Public Opinion and PRC Foreign Policy (Naval War College Press, 2021) andthe PRC Overseas Political Activities: Risk, Reaction and the Case of Australia (Routledge and Royal United Services Institute, 2021).
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