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CHINA

Alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, various commentators have discussed the 'pandemic of disinformation', or an 'infodemic'. The WHO characterises the latter term as an abundance of information, including false information, which causes confusion, undermines confidence in public health responses, and can intensify or lengthen outbreaks. This presents clear challenges to governments as they attempt to develop and implement public health responses.

The origins of misinformation and disinformation are complicated and reflect the underlying purposes of their promulgators. Russian disinformation throughout the pandemic has been frequently alleged. When we speak of threats to the UK, we often talk of 'Russia and China' in the same breath. While each stands in opposition to Western liberal democratic values, the two present very different challenges and engage with the UK in very different ways. In our predecessor Committee's 2020 Russia Report, we discussed efforts to discredit and undermine the democratic process in the UK, including during the 2014 Scottish independence and 2016 EU membership referenda, through disinformation.

With disinformation reported so readily in the media throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we asked the JIC Chair for his assessment of comparisons which could be drawn between Russian and Chinese efforts. The JIC Chair noted that disinformation campaigns by Russia and China seek to fulfil their respective political objectives: while Russia seeks actively to undermine trust in Western democratic institutions and values, China remains focused on controlling the narrative around its position in the world and its domestic challenges. As a result, we heard from Director General MI5 that the "other audience that China is seeking to influence is its own diaspora communities". Although this is concerning, we were told that the scale of the effort expended by China in the UK media is not "as vigorous" as that from Russia, and that targeting of social media, while engaged in extensively by China, is predominantly in Chinese languages rather than English.

As we noted when discussing the role of China in Academia, disinformation can be used as a means to shape the narrative on, or shut down discussion of, the domestic challenges that China considers as presenting the greatest risk to its international reputation or its internal suppression of dissent. Director General MI5 noted that:

if that is their objective in respect of the UK media over the last year, they probably regard themselves as not having done a brilliant job, because, if you look at the balance of stories appearing in the UK media over the last year, there has been a lot of discussion around things like Huawei, Hong Kong, Xinjiang … the tide of public opinion and the opinion polling shows … that the UK public are more conscious of China as presenting threats and challenges to the UK than was the case two or three, four years ago.