Sinophobia in Post-Truth America

False narratives have lost any semblance of fact-based credibility in a post-truth era. Compounded by the viral spead of cyberhacking, the dangers of US-China conflict esclation are mounting.

My perspective on the US-China conflict has long been framed in the context of false narratives — stories that are based on a shred of fact that then gets distorted through the lens of political expedience. I have been critical of both the United States and China for embracing a multitude of false narratives about each other, the confluence of which has become the high-octane fuel of conflict escalation.  With this combustible mixture vulnerable to ignition by any one of a number of sparks — Taiwan, the South China Sea, US containment actions, for example — the risks of "accidental conflict" have risen ominously.

This framework needs to be rethought in today’s toxic political climate. False narratives are no longer spun out of facts.  For all practical purposes, facts have been shredded, displaced in many instances by outright lies.  The “theory” of conflict escalation is the same.  But in a post-truth era, the risks of accidental conflict escalation become more frequent, more dangerous, more urgent. 

That’s especially the case in a cyber-connected world with lies amplified and increasingly manipulated by the viral spread of social media. In the United States, where lies have now become an accepted element of political discourse, fears of China compound this problem.  If you believe the popular press, Chinese-sponsored cyberhacking has now reached epidemic proportions.  That’s certainly the message of a recent feature story in The Wall Street Journal, only the latest in an outpouring of America’s cyber angst over China.  It is also a  conclusion that can be drawn from a broader “Google Ngram” word search on all published books from 1990 to 2022 (see figure below).  Like it or not, cyberhacking has taken on a central role in this post-truth era.

China is certainly guilty of crossing the line with its cyber aggression.  But it is hardly alone as a leading hacker. According to a new “Cybercrime Index” complied by researchers from Oxford University, the world’s top cybercriminal threats originate, in order of importance, from Russia, Ukraine, China, the United States, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, and the United Kingdom. Note that China only narrowly beats out the US for third place in this global index — certainly at odds with FBI Director Christopher Wray’s oft-repeated hyperbolic claim in front of Congress that “The PRC has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined.”

The message from Washington is that cyber-attacks from China pose a unique, almost existential, threat to the United States.  Yet this steadfast fixation on a singular China-US cyber clash misses the broader global context.  That doesn’t mean that China or any other foreign actor should be ignored as a potential threat to American cyber security.  It does suggest, however, that we need to be more objective in warning the US public of the scope of this threat. Moreover, as the Cybercrime Index suggests, we also need to be clear-eyed in owning up to our own role in propagating this global outbreak of cyberhacking.

We also need to do a much better job in separating truth from fiction in framing narratives about others.  Making policy on the basis of the viral spread of anecdotal generalizations is reckless and irresponsible. Lurid descriptions of potential Chinese threats embedded in electric vehicles, Huawei telecom equipment, dock-loading and construction cranes, a “Volt Typhoon” attack on American infrastructure, even TikTok, all have one important thing in common — the conjectural motive of nefarious Chinese activity.  I have made this point before,  but it bears repeating: The capacity to attack is very different than the intent, or motive, to strike.  The US intelligence community has had a hard enough time getting the evidence right — remember the tragic mistake of 2003 with Iraq’s so-called weapons of mass destruction? Deciphering motives is even tougher — the US was just as surprised as Israel’s vaunted Mossad by the horrific Hamas attack of a year ago. The circumstantial evidence of a looming cyber-attack could well be even more difficult to get right.

This gets to a broader political aspect of America’s post-truth perils.  The title of The Wall Street Journal article noted above, “Scale of Chinese Spying Overwhelms Western Intelligence,” paints a picture of hopelessness in facing a seeming tsunami of cyber espionage from China. Out of hopelessness comes despair, blame, and eventually aggressive reaction.  As an example of how this insidious dynamic plays out in the politically charged real world, the Journal article also noted the recent indictment of five Chinese graduates from the University of Michigan who were found taking photos near “a U.S. National Guard training exercise that included Taiwan military personnel.”  The inference is clear: Literally nothing, including US defense, escapes the watchful eyes of the Chinese. If students can easily spy, implies the argument, just think about the unlimited possibilities of organized state-directed cyber espionage!

Jeremy Daum, a lawyer and colleague of mine at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center, took the time to read the indictment in the Michigan case. He noted in an email to me that “It's not really an espionage case at all, and original reports that the young men were on a military base didn't pan out — they were about a twenty minutes’ drive away from the base [Camp Grayling], at a remote site that was having some drills. The 'base' itself is a national guard training post [the largest in the US] that has some facilities open to the public. They aren't charged with espionage but with lying to the investigators and colluding to get their stories straight.”

This is where the political plot thickens. It turns out that this same exaggerated anecdote is not just fodder for a Sinophobic newspaper article but has also been twisted into a politically motivated effort to stop construction of a new $2.4-billion plant for lithium battery components to be built in northeast Michigan by the US subsidiary of Gotion.  Gotion High-tech Co is a leading EV battery producer, whose parent company is Chinese, although its largest shareholder happens to be Volkswagen — not the CPC, as US politicians allege.  Yet Michigan State Republican Senator, Aric Nesbit, recently filed a formal complaint aimed at quashing state subsidies to this project, justifying his objection largely on the basis of the alleged “spying charges” described in the Journal article noted above. This compounds the already intense political focus that Gotion has received in the upcoming presidential and US Senate elections in a very important swing state.

In short, this Wall Street Journal feature article on Chinese cyber-enabled espionage draws freely on the politicized fiction of a post-truth world.  The same can be said of new efforts aimed at bringing bring back the notorious “China Initiative.” This was the centerpiece of an earlier Trump Administration campaign that targeted purported Chinese spies masquerading as US scientists. Fortunately, that program was canceled by the Biden Administration in early 2022, in large part, because the evidence behind such allegations was not only flimsy but seriously inflamed anti-China racial and ethnic biases. Unfortunately, motivated by polarized American politics, new bipartisan efforts in the Congress are now moving to reinstate the China Initiative under a new creative name, the  “CCP Initiative.” Unsurprisingly, such actions are right out of the script of “Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the policy agenda of a Trump 2.0 Administration (see page 556 of Chapter 17, “The Department of Justice”).

I have to confess that I am starting to feel like the proverbial little boy with his finger in a leaky dike. Sinophobia is spreading like wildfire in post-truth America. The cyber dimension of this pathology is particularly disturbing.  In one respect, cyber threats are like Covid — invisible, potentially lethal, and subject to the disinformation of an increasingly toxic political climate. Cyber and Covid threats have something else in common — they enable an uniformed American body politic to pin the blame for its fears on China. That, in turn, helps sow the seeds of conflict escalation between two superpowers.  I am literally starting to lose sleep over the growing dangers of a post-truth world.  What about you?