State Department Suddenly Uneasy Using the Term ‘Malign Influence’ to Call Out China

U .S. officials are curtailing their use of the term “malign influence” to refer to Chinese misconduct abroad, amid progressive advocacy efforts urging the Biden administration to seek common ground with Beijing.

Top U.S. officials have used the term for several years to call out China over its political-interference operations in Western democracies. But advocates apparently have convinced the administration that the term is imprecise and likely to fuel anti-Asian hatred generally. The issue came up during an official webinar last month, when a speaker suggested that the State Department would avoid such “sweeping” language.

Asked about the change in approach, a State Department spokesperson told NR in a statement: “‘Malign influence’ by itself has been used to describe an array of PRC actions that concern the United States and our allies and partners. Its generic nature without specific examples undercuts our goal of identifying specific behaviors of concern, especially those posing serious threats to U.S. national security or the international rules-based order.” This is aimed at “making clear U.S. criticism is not directed toward PRC nationals, the global Chinese diaspora, or U.S. citizens of Chinese descent, as well as citizens of other countries who are of Chinese ethnicity or heritage.”

State seems to be suggesting that Washington has spoken without specificity about Chinese Communist Party political-influence operations, disinformation campaigns, and efforts to subvert international organizations such as the U.N.

But top Trump-administration officials did employ specificity when regularly referring to these malign-influence activities, which included Chinese efforts to subvert international organizations, operate Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes on U.S. soil, and influence Americans through United Front–influence activities, among other things. Their successors under President Biden have made similar comments, with U.N. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield telling Congress this summer that she’s keeping up the fight against Beijing’s malign influence at the U.N., and the new director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), Sandra Oudkirk, similarly vowing to counter “malign PRC influence” as one of “the global and regional goals of the Biden administration,” as recently as last month.

Oudkirk’s recent comment in particular suggests that the principle State expressed to me isn’t necessarily uniformly enforced across the department, or at least that it’s fairly recent. Whatever the case, State’s apparent change of heart is particularly worrisome because it comes on the heels of several Biden-administration actions that suggest the White House is seeking a more conciliatory China policy: President Biden will meet Xi Jinping for a virtual summit next week, climate envoy John Kerry is playing up U.S.–China cooperation on climate, and Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo is giving interviews about the need to boost business ties between the two countries.

Apparently, confronting malign Chinese Communist Party political-interference campaigns — which often feature harassment of ethnic minorities on U.S. soil — is not one of their priorities. Representative Mike Gallagher, a prominent congressional voice on Chinese-influence issues, put it succinctly in an emailed statement to NR: “There’s no such thing as benign CCP influence.”

“The CCP’s preferred strategy is to use United Front work to promote its worldview while isolating and silencing critics,” he said, referring to the party bureau responsible for bringing non-party members and foreigners into the fold through covert activities that straddle the line between legal and illegal in Western countries. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and if the Biden administration stops talking about malign CCP influence, we should expect such weakness to invite more malign CCP aggression.”

State’s admission is doubly concerning considering that outside voices have counseled a greater emphasis on seeking cooperation with China on climate change and fighting pandemics — despite Beijing’s own reluctance to forge genuine partnerships — and this suggests that State is taking advice from them.

Throughout the spring, activist groups including the pro-CCP outfit Code Pink, progressive lawmakers, and the Quincy Institute think tank warned that confronting Chinese misbehavior has caused hate crimes, in a push to discredit congressional proposals aimed at confronting China’s malign-influence activities. In the end, they furnished little evidence that discrete policy actions inspired hate-crime perpetrators to attack Asian-Americans more than other factors implicated in many of the assailants’ years-long criminal records. But they did push this narrative into the mainstream.

In fact, Quincy’s Jessica Lee claimed credit for State’s turn away from calling out the party-state’s malign influence during a webinar hosted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships late last month. “My communication with Asian-American diplomats at the State Department shows that the work that we’re doing to shine light on these issues is having a positive impact in ensuring that we don’t use sweeping terms like ‘malign influence’ to describe China’s influence,” she said.

Despite my repeated questions, State didn’t address Lee’s claim to have inspired an actual policy shift. (Nor did DHS reply to a question asking why its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships switched a YouTube video of the event to “private” sometime after I emailed the State Department about it on October 28.)

The State Department spokesperson also wouldn’t speak to links between this apparently new posture toward discussing malign influence and State Department–wide guidance urging greater specificity toward talking about issues relating to Chinese Communist Party conduct. During an October 4 event, Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented on the document, which he called “official guidance to make sure that we distinguish between the People’s Republic of China as a country, the PRC government, PRC nationals and Americans of Chinese descent.” A senior official in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Kin Moy, elaborated: “We will endeavor to avoid using the adjective Chinese when speaking with regard to the PRC government’s actions, as Chinese refers to a broad group of people who reside in many nations, as well as a cultural, ethnic, and linguistic group.”

Specificity can be a good thing — but State issued this new guidance even though U.S. officials already spoke with care to differentiate between the Chinese Communist Party and people of Asian descent. Puzzlingly, judging by what Blinken and Moy said about the document, State might not have even instructed officials to refer to the party, which actually runs the government and whose senior leadership far outranks any PRC official. All of this suggests that Foggy Bottom’s push for specificity and clarity will advance neither of those things and in fact set U.S. officials back in their efforts to counter Beijing’s political-interference campaigns.