A senior investigative reporter at The Epoch Times says Shen Yun Performing Arts’ latest warning about Beijing’s ability to spread false news stories and narratives in the United States is well founded. Joshua Philipp is an expert on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) efforts to influence American society.
In a recent statement, New York-based Shen Yun warned about the communist regime’s influence in America. The arts group said that the CCP wants to control American businesses and news media, and that if Americans can’t recognize this, they’ll be unable to stop it. Shen Yun is an elite dance company that has been targeted by the Chinese regime for almost 20 years.
Full transcript of the interview below:
Ji:
Josh, Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us.
Philipp:
Glad to be here. Thank you.
Ji:
Now you’ve been covering the CCP’s influence here in America for over a decade. What do you make of Shen Yun’s most recent warning?
Philipp:
Well, what they’re talking about, I believe, is the combination of propaganda and legal warfare being run by the Chinese Communist Party. And while this may seem kind of new to some people, this is not new.
The Chinese Communist Party has public programs adopted officially, publicly into its military doctrine, directing its military to work with different spy organizations to do exactly what they’re saying they’re going to do. The exact name of that operation is called the “three warfares”: that’s psychological warfare—the creation of false narratives—media warfare—the controlling and gaining control of news outlets and outlets of information—and legal warfare—which is the manipulation of international legal systems in order to try to create legal incidents abroad using these as kind of the backdrop. The Soviet Union did the exact same thing. These are old communist tactics being used again under the Chinese Communist Party.
Ji:
Josh, I want to read to you a quote from the Shen Yun press release, which actually touches on some of these issues that you mentioned there, especially related to the three warfares. It says, “When the dust settles and the smoke clears, it will become frightfully apparent to the American people that the Chinese Communist Party has facilitated the spread of false narratives in mainstream media on a large scale. … what is at stake is America’s ability to prevent Beijing from controlling U.S. companies, the press, freedom of belief, and freedom of expression in the United States.” So Josh, is the CCP really able to influence media companies right here in America, and if so, how are they doing this?
Philipp:
Absolutely. Absolutely, the Chinese Communist Party does this. On the lighter end of it, you can see it publicly. You can see how many news outlets operating in China refuse to cover sensitive topics in China because they’ll be kicked out of the country.
You could consider that the lighter end of the CCP’s pressure campaigns on news outlets to influence what they do and don’t report. You can look, for example, what they do to Hollywood, what they do to the NBA, what they do to any kind of foreign asset business doing business in China. And keep in mind that a lot of these big corporations doing business in China also run a lot of the corporate media. Remember that China is one of the big investors, not just in TikTok, but in a whole lot of different social media companies. And we’ve seen openly the fact that anybody who criticizes the Chinese Communist Party—even working in American companies, if they have business with China, they get pressured, fired sometimes, or whatever else when they make those statements. Look at the NBA, when NBA players have made comments against the CCP, and they begin facing pressure within their own organizations.
Now, when it comes to the actual businesses and news media doing this, the Chinese Communist Party has different operations working on this. So when Shen Yun came out with this statement—I read it, it’s really good, in my opinion, what they’re doing—they name the organizations behind it. Now the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of State Security—that’s the branch that runs things like Operation Fox Hunt, where there were Chinese agents on the ground in the United States who were targeting Chinese dissidents, Chinese individuals who fled the Communist Party. You had Chinese agents in America under Operation Fox Hunt threatening to kill people in this country, threatening their families back in China, trying to make them commit suicide in order to protect their families.
Those were things we know for a fact publicly, because our own government exposed it, the CCP was doing in America. That was the MSS (Ministry of State Security). Alongside that, they run these operations through what’s called the United Front Work Department. That’s the Chinese Communist Party’s network of agents of influence, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and influence operations. And the CCP has agents on a large scale that go to business leaders, journalists, social media influencers, and try to get them to repeat the CCP’s slogans to try to get them serving the interests of the Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party has been doing this for decades, creating different paths of influence of people they can manipulate to carry out these exact operations. And I believe, actually, that because the CCP is exposing its hands by attacking Shen Yun now, they’re exposing this network, and I think the CCP, as they note, I think this will be exposed. And I think the American people will come to realize exactly what the CCP has been doing, and also how different news outlets in America have actually been working for the Chinese Communist Party.
Ji:
This is something that a lot of Americans actually find hard to believe is actually happening right here on American soil. Now, speaking of these paths of influence, there is this new report from the Falun Dafa Information Center that actually documents how China’s equivalent of the FBI and the CIA combined is also focusing its efforts on spreading propaganda through overseas social media. How much impact can that have on people living here in America?
Philipp:
It can have a large impact. As I mentioned, the CCP has a military program dedicated to that. They call it the three warfares. This is not a secret program. They have public reporting on it. In fact, you even have a lot of U.S. military organizations who’ve tried exposing it over the years. Also, this ties into the Chinese military branch focused on what they call political warfare. And Congress in the United States, even in October, had a huge 300-page report trying to expose the CCP’s operations for what they call political warfare.
Now, the way this works, it goes back—you can look at Soviet programs for this. The purpose of propaganda is to elicit a political response. The purpose of propaganda is to create a political response within the targeted country. And so what they do is they spread its lies, they spread false narratives. They might even, for example, hack a person’s computers, hack a person’s phone calls. Notably, right now we have a massive Chinese Communist Party telecom breach that just happened. They breached the phones even of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance. They can steal information and then leak that information to media. Iran just did this, notably to JD Vance. Iranian hackers during the presidential campaign in the United States hacked again President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign information, stole a docket on JD Vance, and then leaked that to the media. That is a clear example of this exact type of operation, which the Chinese Communist Party also does.
The Soviet Union would do the exact same thing. … For example, they’d have their agents raid a person’s home. They would find or plant evidence, and then they would create narratives to alter the interpretation of the evidence, trying to reframe the narrative of what a person meant in a statement, and then use that to try to go after them legally. This is a common tactic, not just of the Chinese Communist Party, but with most communist dictatorships and most totalitarian countries in the world. This is a common tactic, and the CCP, I think, is exposing itself by doing this.
Ji:
Josh, we see China’s economy weakening, and as more people become aware of the CCP’s human rights abuses, they’re distancing themselves from the regime. So taking the CCP’s attack on Shen Yun as an example—and I know you’ve also done investigative reporting that shows that this attack doesn’t just happen in America, it happens around the world—what allows it to financially keep up its attack on Shen Yun?
Philipp:
You have to remember the way the Chinese Communist Party and any communist system recognizes information. What is the main enemy of any communist system? What is the very first thing they go after? They go after all voices of dissent. Shen Yun exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses. They have different parts of their show that expose the organ harvesting, for example. The very nature of the show, where they present the culture of China—the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades trying to destroy the traditional values of ancient China, things the CCP has waged war against. They’re trying to bring it back. And so the CCP recognizes this as an ideological threat to its power, the same thing with The Epoch Times. Of course, we criticize the Chinese Communist Party, we don’t censor ourselves for it. They target us just the same.
Any kind of communist country, when they take power, they try to destroy any voices of dissent. They go after the journalists, typically first. The Chinese Communist Party, when they took power, the first people who they went after were the academics and anybody who held the culture they wanted to destroy.
Now, a lot of the power from the Chinese Communist Party, though, is not internal. It’s external. Inside China right now, the CCP is facing a lot of social upheaval. It’s facing conflicts within its political system. Countries are decoupling their economies. The CCP went full in with Russia. That’s backfiring on it right now, especially because they’re getting looped in with sanctions. There’s a brewing trade war. All of these things are weakening the Chinese Communist Party, but that’s internal, right? That means their economy is weakening and such.
In order to protect the internal weakening, they need an information campaign. They need to get rid of dissenting voices. They need to clear the way to get rid of controversy, and they’re going after anybody who has been critical of them as a way of resolving that. Case in point, they’ve even gone after U.S. officials—sanctioning U.S. officials. During the COVID pandemic, when you had different officials around the world, in Australia, in Europe, in the United States, calling for investigations into the origin of COVID—which now we have a congressional report which says the most likely origin was a lab leak from China—the CCP tried blocking that by sanctioning government officials, including in the United States. They want to silence any voice of possible dissent, because it’s these voices of dissent that create controversy, and the controversy is what creates the political operations, for example, sanctions and tariffs and what they call issues of risk, where investors don’t want to put their money in China.
The main power of the Chinese Communist Party, as it currently stands right now, is not internal. It’s external. It’s the businesses who the CCP still has ties with. It’s the journalists the Chinese Communist Party can still puppeteer in different parts of the world. It’s the YouTubers who work as propagandists, doing the fake travel blogs for China, making the Chinese Communist Party look as good as they can on social media. It’s the TikTokers and things like that. That is the main power of the CCP, because the ideological force is what lets them get foreign investment, and foreign investment is what they need to continue propping up their system.
Ji:
Josh, along the same lines here, one last question for you. We’re seeing in that report that Tiktok is most likely going to get banned moving forward, and it’s, of course, owned by a Chinese company. On the campaign trail Trump that he said he would not pursue a ban on TikTok. Now, in relation to everything we’ve discussed here, how do you see all of this playing out?
Philipp:
I’m aware that Donald Trump has said that he does not want to ban TikTok. He was critical of it when he was on a campaign trail. I believe that that will change. Trump’s appointee to the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission) has stated publicly that he intends to ban TikTok, and again, the FCC will probably oversee a lot of that. Also, Congress is relatively in agreement. Democrats and Republicans, they want to get rid of TikTok. I do think that Trump was saying things on the campaign trail that may not reflect once he actually hears the security information and gets briefed on what TikTok is.
When it comes to TikTok, my main point would be this: go back and look at the parent company, ByteDance. Go back and look at what ByteDance was. ByteDance, the head of that company, right before TikTok went public, wrote a public paper in China, a self-criticism where they vowed, the head of ByteDance vowed that they would use their company to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. They wrote this publicly.
And I think we understand the way that, again, algorithms can be manipulated in terms of what they show to people, the way they can promote unhealthy content, like TikTok, for example, promoting challenges of people stealing cars and then wrecking cars. TikTok, for example, doing challenges of kids putting bleach on their eyes to change their eye color, which actually causes permanent eye damage. TikTok promoting self-harm to children while they have different algorithms in China on their version of it, promoting healthy content. You can say absolutely the algorithms demonstrated publicly that we can see serve unhealthy content, damaging content, criminal content abroad, and safe, healthy, good for kids type content within China.
And I think again, when it comes to the algorithms and intentional manipulation of information, understanding that the vow of the former head of that company stating that they want to use it to support the CCP and its interests, including directly to Xi Jinping himself under the Chinese Communist Party, I think the writing is on the wall. You can’t ignore it, and I do think that they will move to ban it because of this.