Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.

Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.

During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.

Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials said.

    • 🦄🦄🦄
      8•8 months ago

      Ibwas genuinely asking and other states being terrible doesn’t mean China can’t be as well.

      • @[email protected]English
        -5•8 months ago

        This is a good resource on the subject then.

        To summarize, the “problem” here was created by the US, which funded separatist militants like the ETIM in Xinjiang through Afghanistan to destabilize China, which eventually led to these groups attacking cities in the region like Urumqi. China has responded by integrating the region better into the Chinese economy, connecting infrastructure, building vocational training centres etc. It’s stable now, specially with covid being mostly over in China and Xinjiang being open to tourists with no additional restrictions than other regions in the country. It gets double the annual visitors than Spain now apparently at 260mil annually. You can look up travel videos on YouTube, or really just visit it and see it for yourself.

        US is banning travel to Xinjiang now though, and have pressured companies like Volkswagen into pulling out of Xinjiang to keep the narrative alive as long as possible.

        • @[email protected]
          6•8 months ago

          “Qiao Collective is a diaspora Chinese media collective challenging U.S. aggression on China.”

          Seems totally unbiased and trustworthy! Surely their stance on this matter is completely factual.