STATEMENT OF MATTHEW F. POTTINGER, DISTINGUISHED
VISITING FELLOW AT THE HOOVER INSTITUTION AND CHAIRMAN
OF THE CHINA PROGRAM AT THE FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF
DEMOCRACIES
BEFORE THE SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
“BEIJING’S LONG ARM: THREATS TO U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY”
4 AUGUST 2021
Chairman Warner, Vice Chairman Rubio, I’d like to thank you and your
fellow committee members for hosting a public hearing on this important
topic.
Many Americans were slow to realize it, but Beijing’s enmity for the
United States began decades ago. Ever since taking power in 1949, the
ruling Chinese Communist Party (or “CCP”) has cast the United States as
an antagonist. Then, three decades ago, at the end of the Cold War, Beijing
quietly revised its grand strategy to regard Washington as its primary
external adversary and embarked on a quest for regional, followed by
global, dominance.
The United States and other free societies have belatedly woken up to
this contest, and a welcome spirit of bipartisanship has emerged on Capitol
Hill. But even this new consensus has failed to adequately appreciate one
of the most threatening elements of Chinese strategy: the way it seeks to
influence and coerce Americans, including political, business, and scientific
leaders, in the service of Beijing’s ambitions.
The CCP’s methods are manifestations of “political warfare,” the term
that George Kennan, the chief architect of our Cold War strategy of
containment, used in a 1948 memo to describe “the employment of all the

means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national
objectives.”
One of the most crucial elements of Beijing’s political warfare is socalled “United Front” work. United Front work is an immense range of
activities with no analogue in democracies. China’s leaders call it a “magic
weapon.” And the CCP’s 95 million members are all required to participate
in the system, which has many branches. The United Front Work
Department alone has three times as many cadres as the U.S. State
Department has Foreign Service officers. Instead of practicing diplomacy,
however, the United Front gathers intelligence about and works to
influence private citizens and government officials overseas, with a focus
on foreign elites and the organizations they run.
Peter Mattis, who detailed how United Front work is organized during
his 2019 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, said “Put simply, United Front work is conducted wherever
the party is present.” And the Party is quite present here in the United
States.
Assembling dossiers on people has always been a feature of Leninist
regimes. But Beijing’s penetration of digital networks worldwide has taken
this to a new level. The party compiles dossiers on millions of foreign
citizens around the world, using the material it gathers to influence and
intimidate, reward and blackmail, flatter and humiliate, divide and
conquer.
As Bill Evanina’s written testimony today made plain, Beijing has stolen
sensitive data sufficient to build a dossier on every American adult—and
on many of our children, too, who are fair game under Beijing’s rules of
political warfare.

Newer to the party’s arsenal is the exploitation of U.S. social media
platforms. Over the past few years, Beijing has flooded U.S. platforms with
overt and covert propaganda, amplified by proxies and bots. The
propaganda is focused not only on promoting whitewashed narratives of
Beijing’s policies, but also on exacerbating social tensions within the United
States and other target nations.
The Chinese government and its online proxies, for example, have for
months promoted content that questions the effectiveness and safety of
Western-made CoViD-19 vaccines. Research by the Soufan Center has also
found indications that China-based influence operations online are
outpacing Russian efforts to amplify some conspiracy theories.
So what are some things Washington should do to address Beijing’s
political warfare?
* First, we should stop funding technologies in China that are used to
advance their surveillance state and their military. Beijing is turning facial
recognition, data-mining and machine-learning technologies not only
against Chinese citizens, but increasingly against Americans here at home.
Executive orders issued by the Trump and Biden administrations that
prohibit the U.S. purchase of stocks and bonds in 59 named Chinese
companies are a good start. But the Treasury Department needs to expand
that list by orders of magnitude to better encompass the galaxy of Chinese
companies developing so-called dual-use technologies.
* Congress should look at revising the Foreign Agent Registration Act
(FARA) to include more robust reporting requirements, steeper penalties
for non-compliance, and a publicly-accessible database of FARA registrants
updated frequently.

* The United States can also do more to expose and confront Beijing’s
information warfare over U.S. social media platforms—platforms that are
themselves banned inside China’s own borders. U.S. social media
companies have the technological know-how and resources to take a
leading role in exposing and tamping down shadowy influence operations.
The US government should partner more closely with Silicon Valley
companies in this work. Washington should also partner with U.S.
technology giants to make it easier for the Chinese people to safely access
and exchange news, opinions, history, films, and satire with their fellow
citizens and people outside China’s so-called Great Firewall.
* Finally, we should also do more to protect Chinese students and other
Chinese nationals living in the United States. Many people of Chinese
descent, including some U.S. permanent residents and U.S. citizens, live in
fear that family members in China will be detained or otherwise punished
for what their American relatives say or do inside the United States.
Coercion by Beijing has silenced countless Chinese-language news
outlets around the world—so much so that almost no private Chinese
language news outlets exist in the United States or abroad that don’t toe
the Communist Party’s line.
The U.S. government can help by offering grants to promising private
outlets and reenergizing federally funded media such as Radio Free Asia.
U.S. universities, perhaps with help from the US government, should also
hand a second smartphone to every Chinese national who comes to study
in the United States—one free from Chinese apps such as WeChat, which
the Chinese security apparatus uses to monitor users’ activity and censor
their news feeds.
Thank you.
-end-