[THREAD] @IRSEM1’s report on “Chinese Influence Operations: A Machiavellian moment” by @PaulCharon and myself is now available in English! Download the full version (more than 650 pages, 3000 footnotes) on irsem.fr/report.html
The result of 2 years of work, interviews in about 20 countries, analysis of sources in Chinese, combined with the available scientific literature and OSINT tools, this report offers a relatively comprehensive overview of Chinese influence operations across the globe.
It shows that, since about 2017, the Party-State has entered "a Machiavellian moment" in the sense that it now seems to believe that, as Machiavelli wrote in "The Prince," "it is safer to be feared than to be loved."
The main symptom of this "Machiavellian moment" is the " Russification" of Chinese influence operations. We briefly reported on this in our January 2020 paper for @WarOnTheRocks. This report develops it. warontherocks.com/2020/01/russia…
It proceeds in 4 parts, presenting 1) the concepts and doctrines setting the framework for these operations; 2) the actors implementing them within the Party, the State, the Army and the companies; 3) the actions themselves, in all domains; and 4) some case studies.
For ease of navigation in this thick volume, there are summaries at the end of each part in addition to the general summary, on different colored pages; bolding allows for diagonal reading; and there are cross-references in the text, sidebars and tabs.
Case studies focus on #Taiwan, #HongKong, #Singapore, #Sweden, #Canada, and the #Covid19 pandemic. France is not the subject of a separate section, but numerous examples throughout the report are drawn from it.
The conclusion looks back at this "Russification" in three stages (inspiration, differences, cooperation) before evaluating the effectiveness of this new Chinese posture which, despite tactical successes, is a strategic failure.
In France, awareness of the risks posed by Chinese influence was late but it is lively and growing since 2019, with an acceleration in 2020-21. This report contributes to this "French awakening" (recently highlighted by @morcos_pierre in warontherocks.com/2022/01/france…).
In a sense, this work is also a follow-up to the 2018 CAPS/IRSEM report on "Information Manipulation" (diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/inform…) but it is both narrower (focused on a single state actor) and broader (it deals with influence in general, not just the information field).
The original French version, published 3 months ago, has already been mentioned in more than 100 media outlets across the world, in more than 20 countries and 15 languages. It made the headlines of major newspapers like “Le Monde” and “Le Figaro”.
A review of the report has also been published in the latest issue of the “Journal of Strategic Security” (14:4, p. 111-115): digitalcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol14/iss4…
Parts of the report have also been translated into other languages, including Japanese (sanseito.jp/translation/33…) and Chinese (pourquoi.tw/2021/11/20/les…).
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