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US Elections: Trump Plays Up China Threat, But Russia is The Real Threat- A Report

Timothy Ojo October 24, 2020

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For months, the Trump administration has been warning of the dangers of political interference by China in the US election.

In April, President Trump said Beijing wanted him out of the White House. Attorney General William Barr and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Beijing was a bigger threat than Russia. And Bill Evanina, Director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center, listed the ways that China had been “expanding its influence efforts.”

Yet, this week, China didn’t feature in the latest warning about election interference.

On Thursday, US national security officials accused Russian state-sponsored hackers oftargeting state and local governments and of successfully stealing data in at least two instances. The allegations came shortly after officials accused Russia and Iran of using US voter registration information to undermine Trump’s campaign.

By contrast, very little evidence of China’s alleged meddling has emerged, weeks before the vote. The China-backed foreign misinformation efforts that have been made public had a minuscule reach compared Russia’s efforts before the 2016 US presidential vote.

“China studied what the Russians did in 2016 very closely,” said cybersecurity expert James Lewis, a former foreign service officer at the Departments of State and Commerce. “They’d like to be able to do what the Russians do, but they aren’t that good at it.”

However, experts predict that China’s influence operations will become more formidable in the coming decades. They warn China will own more parts of the global telecommunications networks and export its system of censorship and propaganda to other governments.

According to Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent and information warfare expert who testified before Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, Chinese influence operations “will be more prolific over time and successful over time because they can control the entire information environment, which is different from the Russians.”

In August, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said China had never interfered in a US election and “had no interest to do that in the future.”