Chinese President Xi Jinping visits an industrial park, which produces high-end auto parts and molds, in Ningbo, east China’s Zhejiang Pr

Opinion

https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-the-breakthrough-xi-jinping-has-been-waiting-for-and-hes-making-his-move/

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What’s new is that the Chinese state is committing vast resources to a hybrid strategy of intensified propaganda and information control in lockstep with an aggressive Russian-style disinformation effort. Aimed almost entirely at western audiences, the effort takes its cues from several Kremlin-backed operations, most obviously the barrage of fabricated “news” unleashed on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Experts in the field say Beijing isn’t just selling a “narrative” anymore. The new strategy is intended to spread chaos and confusion and incite mistrust of governments in democratic countries. According to an analysis undertaken by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Beijing is adopting “increasingly aggressive tactics and techniques” and rapidly ramping up its messaging on social media platforms, often cross-pollinating with Russian and Iranian disinformation efforts and amplifying conspiracy theories from fringe third-party websites.

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