In 2023, the Chinese government spent millions of dollars on influence campaigns designed to better Beijing’s image and damage the reputation of those the country’s communist leadership considers foreign adversaries.
In the last year, Beijing has stepped up efforts in sowing disinformation to discredit the United States at home and abroad.
Other hot-button targets included Taiwan, the South China Sea, Xinjiang, the Ukraine war, and the Israeli-Hamas conflict.
China has Russian disinformation tactics and narratives, especially in information campaigns to support the regimes in and Iran and discredit Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression.
Beijing used three major channels to spread propaganda and disinformation, including top government officials, state-backed media outlets, and government-linked influencers on social media platforms. On two platforms, X and YouTube, China has deployed considerable resources to counter criticism and boost its image abroad.
“Beijing’s information manipulation spans the use of propaganda, disinformation, and censorship,” the U.S. State Department said in a published in September that examined China’s propaganda efforts.
Below are a few examples of the Chinese propaganda and disinformation that Polygraph.info unveiled and debunked in 2023.
Polygraph closely monitors the disinformation narratives pushed forward by Chinese government officials, particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs through its daily briefings.
One of Beijing’s major disinformation campaigns of 2023 involved China’s fabrication of a global environmental catastrophe from Japan’s discharge of purified nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. This campaign was designed to target both domestic and foreign audiences.
Spokespeople from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs routinely described Japan as “extremely irresponsible” and accused it of “selfishly putting the world at risk.” Once the discharge started, the foreign ministry Japan “a saboteur of the ecological system and polluter of the global marine environment.”
Polygraph vetted these claims as misleading because the PRC government officials have ignored multiple facts that are vital to the truth about the Fukushima wastewater. First, the Chinese propaganda the rigorous process Japan used to purify the water before dumping it into the ocean, which included running the wastewater through a chain of advanced filters. Beijing intentionally that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been providing real-time data to monitor the Fukushima water’s level of radioactivity. China also avoided mentioning that most Pacific countries, including South Korea and Micronesia, who used to be fierce critics of the plan, eventually gave Japan the green light.
Polygraph.info’s fact checks on this topic received a combination of 395,000 views on X (formerly Twitter), where netizens questioned whether China’s actions on the matter were more about politics than science.
Chinese state media and state-backed news outlets are dominated by publications that promote Beijing’s narratives on world issues. One of the keys of this narrative is to portray the United States as the world’s super-villain and a nation unfriendly to the Chinese people.
Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own province, is another target on the front line of China’s hybrid warfare. China has been spinning a web of influence campaigns to win over Taiwan’s public opinion in recent years, particularly at a time when the U.S. is strengthening its commitment to help the island defend its sovereignty.
Partly because of these campaigns, Taiwanese trust in the U.S. dropped 10% between 2021 and 2022, and this year the number stood at 33.9%, according to a new conducted in November. Thus, fact-checking China’s disinformation targeting Taiwan is vital for understanding and exposing Beijing’s propaganda goals.
One of the persistent narratives is aimed at discrediting U.S. aid to Taiwan by attacking its quality and questioning its intentions.
Global Times, the English language tabloid arm of the People’s Daily that provides news and commentaries on international affairs and China’s foreign relations from a nationalist perspective, is a vital organ to the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign propaganda.
In August, GT published an editorial questioning the intention of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and claiming they only benefited the United States’ military-industrial complex. The U.S. was sending to Taiwan “outdated yet overpriced weapons,” GT wrote.