This interview, conducted by Lauren Adler, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
LA: This report provides one of the most comprehensive analyses to date on this issue. Why is this so important, and more specifically, why is it so important right now?
SGJ: There is almost every day a front-page story about Chinese activity in and around the U.S. homeland. But most of these stories are very compartmentalized and focus on only a piece of the broader issue. Some of these stories are about cyber, some of them are about espionage, and some are about Chinese police stations in cities like New York. We felt it was important to pull all of those different threads together into one study, and to examine the breadth of Chinese action.
It is important to do this now because in our interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they said from a counterintelligence perspective, this is the most aggressive period they have ever seen of Chinese activity. One official said to us, “The system is blinking red right now.”
LA: What is political warfare, and how is China using it?
SGJ: The term “political warfare” comes from the former U.S. State Department diplomat and Cold War historian George Kennan, and it refers to activities below the threshold of armed conflict. Political warfare includes cyber operations. It includes information and disinformation campaigns. It includes united front work, which involves efforts to expand influence in academic institutions and other locations. It also includes economic coercion, intelligence operations, and other activities. And these activities are largely designed to expand Chinese power, weaken the United States as part of balance of power competition, and, perhaps most importantly, preserve the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
LA: In the report, you note that the U.S. homeland is the primary target of China’s political warfare. What tactics is China likely to use against the U.S. homeland specifically?
SGJ: The interesting thing about Chinese tactics is they are so widespread. We identified nearly a dozen separate Chinese agencies, in addition to non-state actors—hacktivist organizations, for example—involved in conducting cyberattacks, human intelligence collection, influence, and disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms. There is influence on universities and within companies; we have seen, for example, extensive efforts to control the messages coming out of companies like the National Basketball Association, or what movie studios are producing in Hollywood.
