The China Index: Measuring PRC Influence Around The Globe

>> Glenn Tiffert: Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the China Global Sharp Power speaker series. Today we have a very interesting event, the first effort of its kind around the world to document the extent of Chinese influence using data collection by local subject matter experts. The China Index was an initiative launched by Doublethink Labs and Puma Shen in particular, who assembled a team that I was very privileged to be a part of that developed 99 indicators to measure China influence around the world.

We've assembled some of those individuals who did data collection and analysis of different regions around the world to talk to you today about the project and its findings. Puma Shun is an associate professor at National Taipei University, the chairperson of Doublethink Lab, and vice president of the Taiwan association for Human Rights.

His publications analyzed Chinese influence information operations in Taiwan and the US, and he's now investigating united front activities in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Didi Kirsten Tatlow is a senior reporter for international affairs at Newsweek. She has reported for the Hong Kong Standard, the Associated Press, and the New York Times, and was a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2021, she co-edited an excellent volume entitled China's Quest For Foreign Beyond Espionage. Parsifal Desola Alvarado is the founder and executive director of the Andres Baio foundation in Bogota, Colombia. He is a non resident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's Global China hub and acted as chinese foreign policy advisor to the foreign affairs minister of the Interim government of Venezuela from 2019 to 2020.

And finally, the Honorable Tina Tin quidaschele chairs civic idea, a think tank fighting the soviet legacy in Georgia, confronting russian propaganda and advocating for sound defense and security policy. She served as the first female minister of defense of Georgia. I look forward to the conversation and discussion, and for those of you in our audience, I encourage you to use the Q and A button at the bottom of your screens to log questions.

There will be audience q and a towards the end of the program. Puma, the floor is yours, thank you.

>> Puma Shen: Thanks, let me share my PowerPoint real quick. So hi everyone, thank you for hosting all this and thanks Glenn for organizing this. I think it is my pleasure to introduce the findings of the China index, which measures the Chinese influence worldwide.

So people always like curious about how we could define China's influence. So instead of using a theory or describe the Chinese influence, our approach is more bottom up. So what we did is like this. We tried to mapping like all these like Chinese influence operation, like in theory or in practice.

And did a literature review to list all kinds of Chinese influence operations introduced by scholars and try to categorize them into different domains. And in the end, we have this. We have media, academia, society, economy, technology, domestic politics, foreign policy, and military and law enforcement. And each domain consists of eleven indicators.

So, which means that we have 99 total indicators to measure the Chinese influence. And this cannot be done by the index committee. And Glenn is also here to help us to develop all these 99 questions. And also we have all these regional partners that help us in each country find the local partners that can help us answering all these questions.

So with all these domain indicators combined here, we actually right now have an overall ranking for the 82 countries. The top three most influential countries are Pakistan, and Cambodia, and Singapore. However, I think it is worth noting that China might highly influence the country in domain a, but not in domain b.

So in this regard, I think it is better to look into the ranking in each domain one at a time. So if you look at this, I mean, in terms of academia, United States has been deeply influenced in this field of academia. But if you look into, like, technology, the US is not that affected.

So all these, like, the overall ranking only tells us a partial story. So by digging into all these, like what all these domain scores tell us, we could learn, like how China deploys its efforts. For example, China prefers to build up ideology when a targeted country has experienced a history of Chinese diaspora, or maybe Chinese students.

So using a Chinese diaspora as a leverage, China could easily infiltrate or invest in media companies like hoticultural events and use Chinese students to gain some power academically. So if a researcher wants to focus on whether China is trying to establish an ideology in a particular country, we suggest that we could look into the domain like media.

Academia and society on the far left and the top country in terms of all these ideological influences, actually Taiwan, which is not surprising. And what happens when building all these ideology could be very difficult, especially with the language barrier. So the answer relates to another strategy China loves to deploy is the dependence approach.

This approach is much straightforward. It is about China trying to build economic relationships with other countries. And when dependence has been established, China uses it as a leverage again to provoke the targeted country. Selling and exporting technology to the targeted country also works and is the famous approach that China standard 2035.

So this dependence approach can also be built politically, while China tries to reach politicians and automatically bribe them. So if one wants to focus on whether China is building this kind of dependence on specific countries, we could check the domains like the economy, technology and domestic politics. The country at the top in this dependence category is Pakistan.

And followed by South Africa and Philippines. And the end game of all these kinds of chinese influence is the so called rule making, which contrasts the western rule of law. So China wants to create a Chinese paradigm, or Team China. This includes forcing other countries to adopt the same foreign policy as China and having some military drills together, or even allow Chinese law enforcement into targeted countries.

So in this regard, I mean, if a researcher wants to focus on whether China implements Chinese rules in a particular country, we suggest to look into the military, foreign policy and law enforcement. So the top one for Chinese rulemaking is Cambodia, followed by Pakistan and Thailand. So, I mean, in summary, it's like a different focus with change of countries ranking enormously.

And we could also look into the regional difference and, but I don't think I have time to dig into the regional. But as you can see here, like, different region actually has some different effects, and some region has some more effects in technology, and some region has more effects in academia.

It really depends by region by region, region. But we also suggest that maybe we could have another criteria or divider to categorize all this country in addition to all this regional focus to geopolitics. So in the end here, I want to introduce how we design all these 99 indicators.

So the way we design all these indicators is not that random. So for example, we try to conceptualize Chinese influence using three different layers, exposure, pressure and effects. So we measure exposure, pressure, and effects in each domain. For example, for the eleven indicators in the media domain, we ask whether the media is invested in by China.

That's the exposure question. Or whether the journalists are threatened by China, that's the pressure question. Or whether the media reports align with Chinese propaganda, and that's the effect. So the hypothesis here is that if a country is more exposed to China, the effects of Chinese influence are higher, and if China pressures the country, the impact of Chinese influence is higher as well.

But according to our statistical analysis, the former seems to be right. When you got more exposure, you got more connections with China, there are more effects could be seen, but not the latter. So it means that imposing pressure is ineffective, and sometimes more pressure even correlates with fewer effects.

And also, we want to talk about whether we could predict the future trend of the Chinese influence, because we're going to update this kind of index nearly. So we need to see what's the trajectory of that. So by comparing our data to other indicators generated by other organizations, we found some interesting results here.

So first is the PRC imports. The data actually highly correlates with our ranking. The more imports from China, the more influence we see in our index. So, to look into this, we checked the AEI Chinese investment scores and found that investment scores correlate with the domain, such as media and academia.

We cannot conclude that China is investing in media and academia. However, we can say that the investment by China looks like a practical approach that can predict Chinese influence. And some researchers suggest that the size of the Chinese diaspora might be a predictor of the media infiltration. However, it is not valid according to our statistical analysis.

And on the other hand, the number of Chinese students actually is relatively stronger predictor that contributes to the Chinese influence in academia. But we need to be careful about that because it only means that there's a correlation in our statistical analysis. And sometimes we also need to see that all these Chinese students might be the victims of the Chinese influence.

They are not actually the leverage over there. And also because we mentioned that the pressure is most likely not a good strategy for China since it backfires. So some predictors are strongly correlated with the pressure indicators. So, for example, we see more pressure from China for other countries when there are more Chinese international students.

In these countries, more pressure can be seen when the GDP is high. And most importantly, less corruption leads to more pressure, and more pressure, however, could also backfire because more pressure leads to less favorability for China. So these are our preliminary findings, and all data is still open.

You can download it whether you, I mean, whenever you want. And we're going to do our best to update this index annually to trace if there's any chronological trajectories. So I think that pretty ends my presentation. And I'll talk about maybe different dividers. How can we categorize all these countries, maybe during the Q&A.

Thank you so much for listening.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you so much, Puma. For those of you in the audience, the report is downloadable from the website with an explanation of the data and methodology. But to get into some of the geographies and the specific findings now we're gonna turn to our other guests.

First, Didi, Kirsten Tatlow. Didi, take it away.

>> Didi Kirsten Tatlow: Hi, thank you so much. And again, also, I'm very happy, I'm very pleased to be here and thanks for organizing this great event. When I started to research Germany for Doublethink Labs China in the world index, I realized, as I think many other people did, just how much information was missing from our knowledge.

Anyone who's delved into this area of CCP activities overseas will be very familiar with this kind of event. But we haven't got enough research, we don't know enough, which is still the case. And as a way of sort of illustrating that, I want to just explain a little bit about how much needed to be done.

I mean, basic research such as what is the communist party, Chinese activities in Germany, the ones that we tend not to see because they're done quietly, they're done by the party, they're done through networks which are not public. Had not been done here in Germany, despite the breadth and depth of the Chinese-German relationship, which is described officially as being for many years, it was sort of a strategic relationship, as the German government likes to say.

It honestly didn't sound terribly strategic to me to be missing out such large, massive chunks of information activity that China was doing in Germany. But so I set about trying to figure out what was going on and came up with the count, working with a researcher of at least 190 groups directly affiliated to the united front.

And I mean, in a formal sense, not in a kind of do something together occasional sense, but in a formal sense. 190 in Germany. Another 40 were part of a nationwide German network of sort of China culture friendly groups.

>> Didi Kirsten Tatlow: Germans that have been sort of taken in, scooped up, if you like, and we're now part of also of similar activities.

80 China student scholar associations, CSSAs, run out and connected to consulates around the country and about 20 computers institutes. So you get there and then add on the China aid centers active in Germany. And now they've been proven to be involved also in the harassment of overseas Chinese living in Germany.

Often people who don't agree with the communist party, that's sometimes why they're here, actually, very, very active harassment, bomb threat, police are involved at least five of those. So we're looking at over 330 organizations in Germany. Now, the one thing that really struck me, and then I'll get onto the extra specifics of the index in a second.

Was that I think any analysis of German Chinese relations that does not take into account the activities of the Communist Party of China in Germany that are highlighted in this index. Any such analysis is simply not helpful because it is so wide off the mark of what's actually going on here.

Yet many such analyses exist and in fact, they still, to this day, I would argue, fear and inform public debate about China-German relations. So immensely important to drill down, as Puma and his team are doing on this issue. I think, on specifics in terms of what I then discovered for the index.

Well, if you go into the actual website on Doublethink Lab, says correctly that the ranking Germany has in these index of 82 countries is 19. And if you look at that lovely chart, that's like a spider's web underneath it there, you'll see the visuals are very telling, a very red patch.

Stretches far out towards academia, this sort of subdivision issue of how much influence is there in academia. And there's a very good reason for that. German research is heavily populated by PRC researchers, most of whom work in the science and technology area. And we have an enormous amount of technology outflow to China, and that's been happening for decades from Germany.

A very short story to illustrate that when the Liaoning trade delegation from the province of Liaoning in China arrived in Germany in January this year, COVID lifting in China, trade delegations are out networking. They rather demanded to go to DZ, which is a high physics laboratory up in the north of Germany.

And they were politely told, why would a trade delegation want to go to a high physics laboratory? The German side is told by the Chinese side, well, because there are so many PRC researchers working there, which is, of course, true. There are some very high-level research institutes in Germany where there are entire teams of people from the PRC, which is not necessarily, as we all know per se, necessarily a problem.

However, given what they're researching, it's almost certain that they come under pressure to share, by all means possible, by all methods, the fruits of those research. So specifically, again, getting back into the index, another area I'd like to point out that was very heavily influenced by the CCP according to the criteria we have was domestic politics in Germany.

And I would say that's down to the issue of elite capture. There are certain organizations in Germany, such as the china-brucke, the China-Bridge, which is highly active, which took as its counterpart in China, Wang Chen, who used to be the central committee member of the Communist Party as a policy member.

He was also vice president, a vice chairman, if you like, of the NPC, the National People's Congress. And that meant that he had a counterpart in Germany called Hans Peter Friedrich, who was also vice chairperson of the Bundestag. And they set up this china-brucke, which most members are anonymous.

And this type of elite capture, if you like, very, very high level then spreads throughout politics. It's enormously effective, and we sort of saw that mirrored in many places. But also, because this is Germany and the states issue is very important. It's a federal country. This situation is happening in many, many at the federal level in the major state, Bavaria, Baden-Wurthemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, etc.

Very briefly, I don't want to take up too much time. Very briefly, the last point then, business. Now, the economy was an interesting one with Germany in the index. And I think that if you look at the spider's web of where the red color shows where the influence was the greatest from the CPP, according to our criteria.

All the 99 questions that we filled in to answer this index for each country, the economy is sort of a little bit surprisingly low, if you like. And the reason for that is that, of course, the German-Chinese business relationship is enormous. It really is very, very large, or wide and deep as they like to stay here, in many levels.

However, there are good reasons why it didn't seem quite that way in the index. And that would be that some of the questions asked, some of the questions posed, which worked for the world, were perhaps slightly different in their impact in Germany in terms of the answers that they produced.

And that I would then single out issues like how much of your country's sovereign debt is owned by China. Well, that's not going to be really relevant to Germany. Or, for example, how much of your country's extractive industries are owned by PRC companies? Again, highly industrialized nations like Germany, that doesn't really hit home.

So I think that that part of the index sort of speaks to a different set of questions, if you like, rather than delivering a finite answer. And of course, this is a project that we use as it goes forward. So I'll finish right there cuz there's a lot more to say, but I don't want to take up others' time.

Thank you.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you very much, Didi. I think that points to a crucial question here, and that is, each country's engaged with China in slightly different and unique ways, very much on their own terms. So turning now to South America, Parsifal, tell us what you found.

>> Parsifal D'Sola Alvarado: Thank you, Glenn, and to everyone and to all the listeners.

So I would like to start with a couple of caveats, even though probably most of you are already aware of these. Nonetheless, I think they're worth highlighting. And first of all, things related to Didi's last point is that, well, a data doesn't live in a vacuum, it has to be interpreted.

Odds are, if a Chinese researcher from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences interprets the China index data sheet, she would probably come to very different conclusions than the ones I, as a Venezuelan researcher, came up with. So I think it's very important to take into account to read these results with a grain of salt and to always try to look at it from a local perspective and how that refers to a larger regional framework and then a global framework.

That being said, in the case of the China index, given its wide scope, this is very difficult. So some indicators might not represent the reality, as Didi mentioned. But, well, that's the whole point of the project, to be able to normalize and to draw some broad conclusions in regards to Chinese influence at a global level, but also at a local level.

So it's very important to use the proper framing, the proper premises when reading these results. This will obviously lead to off-the-mark conclusions. Well, and now digging into South America specifically. So we're talking about ten countries. The first thing I'd like to point out is that if you look at the global map of the index, South America, with the exception of Guyana and Suriname, has been completely covered.

And when you compare it to Africa, there's a lot of missing countries. So one of the first things that caught my attention and one of the things I talked with Doublethink lab and some of their lead researchers, and I think this speaks a lot to, a, the available expertise within regions to carry out this kind of work.

And two, because one of the prerequisites to participate in the project was basically Basically, not to have any official links or receive funding from the PRC or PRC affiliated organizations. So, as I've been told, in the case of Africa, this was quite difficult, and it's something that the Doublethink lab has been working on.

And the way we managed to get around this, because the problem did present itself in the first iteration of the index, you're not being able to find people with enough expertise to carry out their work. Was to rely on a strong foundation of investigative journalism that exists in Latin America.

So the way we approached the project was using tools from the investigative journalism toolkit instead of China expertise. And this led, in our view, led to very good results. But this is precisely because there is such a strong foundation within the region, because of many reasons, a common language being one of them, common culture, a common set of problems, in terms of institutions.

And these are the kinds of activities that usually journalists cover in the region. Speaking specifically about the data, I'd like you to, if there's some points that are worth highlighting that you take with you as food for thought, is that, well, several. The first one is that South America, when you frame it within the global index, is very standard, with a few exceptions.

So, most of the countries are across categories. They tend to be across the middle, regardless of the category. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but if you do a median average, South America is not, it's more or less across the Middle East. It's not on the lower part of the influence index or in the top.

There are two important exceptions, Colombia and Paraguay. And this is one of the reasons why I made my initial comments. In terms of knowing, having local and regional expertise to be able to interpret this data, is that, well, Paraguay is an easy answer, because it doesn't have official relations with the PRC.

And most of the correlations that Puma talked about in the beginning, given the lack of economic engagement with the PRC, primarily. The side effects tends to be lower influence or lower effect from, be a Chinese participation or Chinese influence in general. The case of Colombia is quite interesting, because it's sort of a late comer when it comes to engagement between China and Latin America more broadly.

And there's two important aspects to Colombia. One, its own history. According to some of the research that we've done in the country, there's a lot of negative perceptions in the PRC vis a vis Colombia. Given its internal struggle history with the drug trafficking and the whole peace process that has been developing over the past 10, 15 years.

That would be a first, which can be read as a negative perception that not only the Chinese government but Chinese businesses have towards the country, that has played a role in the decision to get involved. That would be a first, and the second one would be Colombia's own relation with the United States.

Colombia has been a traditional key supporter of us foreign policy. And most of the country's domestic issues and foreign policy have been highly influenced by the United States and they correlate in a lot of their foreign policy. So when you take those two into account, it kind of explains why Colombia is in the bottom when you look at the Latin American countries, but overall it's still very pretty, pretty low.

And another point I'd like to point out is that, stemming from Puma's comments at the beginning, the divisions of how to interpret the different categories when you talk about rulemaking. Out of the ten countries that are in South America within the index, among the top three categories, foreign policy is present in nine out of the ten.

And this makes a lot of sense because given South America's a geographical location, proximity to the US. When you look at the Chinese foreign policy objectives at a global level, and talking about the global south in particular, the kind of influence the PRC tries to exert varies very much with, a, countries in its close proximity.

B, the west and c, particular the United States. So the kind of interests vary. And given that foreign policy is way up there, this goes in line with China's pursuit of getting a lot of countries in the global south to, a, not interfere in China's so called internal affairs vis a vis Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang.

And this kind of topics that are highly delicate to the PRC and the Communist Party. So it comes as no surprise to us that foreign policy is way up there in the index in South America. Because when you look at diplomatic engagement and the kind of activities carried at a high level between China and the different countries across the region.

They usually are framed across getting these countries, a, not to criticize China internationally, and b, to vote in regional organizations or global organizations such as the undead. Correlation with the PRC. So if there's something that popped out to us, it's definitely that one of the main interests of the PRC in the region is obviously economy.

The economy has a high ranking as well, but it's more about getting global south countries to align their foreign policy with Chinese interests. Particularly, not criticizing internationally and vying for Chinese interests when the topic becomes a global topic, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. I'll leave it at that, so we have enough time for Q&A.

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you very much, Parsifal. Now we're going to pivot over to a region of the world that looks a little bit different, and that it really is a hotspot for China influence, Russia influence, and US competition. And so again, this is a little bit of how unique that region of the world is.

Tina, over to you, please.

>> Tinatin Khidasheli: Thank you, Glenn, thank you for having me in this very interesting conversation. And thank you to Puma and Doublethinklet for initiating these wonderful projects that brought us together. Well, there are certain patterns when we talk about the, first of all, to define what region we are talking about, this is the South Caucasus and Central Asia.

My organization was in charge of researching and writing about. We did a couple of other countries as well. But in this presentation, I will concentrate mainly on the eight, well, seven, unfortunately. It is still impossible to do any quality work in Turkmenistan. But other than that, I will concentrate on the seven countries of the region that we did research and tried to analyze.

From start, it is to be said that almost with little differences, none of those countries are democracies. Why it is important is that when we talk about collection of data and researching the data, it is not always like in Germany or in other European countries that you actually have an access to the first hand information.

And something that was mentioned here already by Parsifal about the journalistic investigation was very much the most important tool in our work because it takes lots of efforts and several attempts to get to certain information necessary for this research. Because of that, I believe that parts that are related, particularly with national security, defense, military affairs, might be much deeper, much problematic than it looks in the index right now.

Because again, that's the information that which has the biggest secrecy around it and where it's very difficult to access actual data. So that needs to be remembered when we look at this index. And probably, it's not true only for the central Asian countries, but also it is true for lots of countries in the world, probably some countries in South America as well.

And definitely, I believe, in Africa, that some data might be missing very important information due to the fact that secrecy is very high. The other issue that became pretty clear for us while doing this study was a pattern that we found in my region. Basically, looking back, everything that we found in Central Asia was repeated and used in South Caucasus countries later on by China.

The movement of Chinese companies, Chinese universities, I don't know, tech companies, anything that is done by China and those countries starts in most of the cases in Kazakhstan and then moves from there all the way to Georgia. And it's like a playbook. If you research properly central Asian countries, then you basically know what's gonna happen tomorrow in Georgia or Armenia on their China relationship.

Third, as it was already said, it is true for this region as well, that countries differ, obviously. You do not have the same level of influence or interference or even pressure in all seven countries. As closer you get to China, it gets more. But it's not obviously only depending on the geography.

There are other factors as well that make lots of difference in that part of the world. And one of them, obviously, one of the very important critical moments, and probably also in terms of the timing of the research, was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That particular moment gave us lots of insight and lots of responses to the interviews were coming on Tajikistan.

Heavy border and Chinese involvement, influence, engagement, increased engagement in Tajikistan, exactly because of that reason. And at the same time, when you look at the military cooperation or military affairs, then Tajikistan comes on top of the list. This is probably why when Puma showed us this first slide, you could see Tajikistan on top of those five or seven countries.

The dominant factor there is a very clear and strong military and defense cooperation, generally speaking, in security. The first point I wanted to mention is about the foreign policy, which is extremely important for my region. As Glenn already mentioned, it's kind of a big battlefield of two crossing big power influences, Russia and China, and obviously, European Union and United States playing its role, positive role, exercising such a level of soft power in those countries as well.

And because of the still dominant, well, before Ukraine aggression dominant, and the research was done mainly at that time, the Russian dominance was clearly visible. Russia was still present in most of the foreign policy, in most of the security agenda issues, not that much in business and economy.

But when it comes to foreign policy, state affairs, security issues, then Russia had a very dominant position. It is to be mentioned that as we are in the process of restarting this work and renewing the countries, I'm pretty sure that in my case, at least in case of Central Asia and South Caucasus, we will have a huge difference because of the effects of Russia's aggression in Ukraine.

And the countries in this region sort of searching alternative loyalties and shifting their loyalties to China from Russia. That was very, to be said, clearly, very visible when we were doing the first stage of this research. At that time, Russia still was a very dominant power in the region when it came to foreign affairs.

So when you look, for example, at the voting in international organization, Organizations, let's say UN voting. There is a huge difference that we had a year ago, year and a half ago and we have right now when if before most of those votes would, except for my country, actually that's where I can clearly say that except for Georgia.

Most of those countries would go along with Russia's decision, Russia's vote, Russia's preferences. Now it is shifting towards Chinese vote, Chinese preferences. So let's say on Ukraine vote, when you have Russia and some countries, not many, but still some countries voting against all the resolutions supporting Ukraine. You have Central Asian countries and Armenia, Azerbaijan mainly abstaining like China does and not necessarily going again in line with Russia anymore.

When it comes to business and economy, parts of the research, again, companies are almost the same. You do not have that much of a difference of who is coming to the region, who is interested in the region, who does what kind of work and also what are the relations and strategies used towards the state.

Didi mentioned elite capture and that's an issue I cannot miss here because that's a very big deal in the region. Elite capture is probably one of the most defining character of Chinese and those countries bilateral cooperation. I can speak for my country which looks like the least influenced.

If you look at the research done so far, if you look at different police papers written so far, you will see this. If you see the grades, if you see the index numbers, then Georgia will come the last. But in reality, when it comes to elite capture, for example, probably we are in the worst situation.

For the first time we have a government we have a prime minister who is an officially Chinese man, in Georgia government similar to what we had before in Czech Republic, in the face of the president of Czech Republic. The guy used to work for very famous, not for the good reasons, Chinese company CFC for a while and he was serving as an advisor after that.

And if you look at the files, he's being a prime minister, he's still listed under the CFC files. Well, obviously it's not a case anymore, but technically speaking, he did not even bother to remove his name from all those papers since he came to power. You see increased participation of China, widely speaking in Georgia being it in academia, at the university level, at the Academy of sciences level, being it in state procurement.

I can tell you with absolute confidence that there is no single bid in a country that is over 100 million. We are any other company than Chinese has a chance of winning. And that's been the case since the current prime minister came to power. And after he came first, he came as a minister of defense.

And when he became the minister of defense, he brought Chinese companies to the Ministry of Defense as well. If before we were saying that at least on that part, on the security and defense part, Georgia was immune and was very different in the region, now that's not the case anymore either.

So we are in this puzzle on the one hand, going to NATO and having strategic military cooperation with United States and at the same time, Chinese companies starting their activities with the Georgian military on a small scale so far. But it has started again exactly at the time when carried prime minister was working as a minister of defense.

So now there is a very interesting moment if we move to another country in Kazakhstan, because with the new president and the parliamentary elections, a lot is changing, not that much towards China, more towards Russia. But if you see significant change towards Russia in the region, then it automatically means that there is a change of policy towards China as well.

Because those countries, unfortunately are still in a condition and under the belief that they need a patron, they need someone bigger to protect and to secure their not even well being, but even more generally speaking, their being, their existence as a state. And just the last point, when we were watching the meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Council in Uzbekistan, all of that was there.

All the deals were cut regardless, the fact that Putin was Mister President Putin was present still, it was absolutely clear who was in charge and who was the boss in a room. And obviously then Xi Jinping's visits to Kazakhstan, supports from Uzbekistan also proved the case that he's searching for those ties, he's strengthening those ties, and he's trying to have those countries wandering around after the collapse of Russia as we knew it.

And obviously, it is still to come with their defeat in Ukraine, Xi Jinping is making all those smart choices and smart moves for ensuring those loyalties, like with China. So I'll stop here and happy to answer any questions and comments.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you, Tina, for those in the audience, I encourage you to post questions to the Q&A, and I'm gonna get started pulling a few of those questions for the group here, and we'll see if we can take the discussion any further.

Let me start with Puma, first, the question was asked, why were some countries selected for coverage in the index and why are others not represented? Could you tell us a little bit about how those choices were made and the future iterations of the index?

>> Puma Shen: Yeah, cause sometimes it's really hard to find a local partner.

And just like pacifist said, because sometimes even like you find a partner or some sort of experts, but they actually receive fundings from China so that would be excluded from us. And some of the local partners they participated in survey but disappear along the way. So that's why some countries are still not covered and it's extremely difficult right now to find, find more local experts in Africa, but luckily I think we have find some this year.

So hopefully, because I think we're going to have more than 110 countries this year, so hopefully we could see like more trajectory trajectories along the way.

>> Glenn Tiffert: That's right, and data will be updated for countries that you've already covered in the original iteration.

>> Puma Shen: Yeah, right, definitely.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Yeah, excellent, excellent.

So this is an ongoing exercise. I was wondering if, and I invite all of you to participate in the answer to this question, which uniform universal global trends that you identified across your different geographies. And in particular, if you wanna pull one or two unique regional or local factors, because I think Tina pointed out that China does a lot of learning from one space, that it then applies to other geographies.

So what are the things that China has learned that you have seen that are common and then unique? Let's start with Puma. You can give us a global perspective, and then I invite the others to join in.

>> Puma Shen: Yeah, so I think I'll be brief, but I think I would say two or three years ago, China really focused a lot on economy, try to use it as a leverage to, I mean, have more influence all around the world.

But actually you could see that the economic power actually is waning. And for the part, I mean, it's just my hypothesis, but for the part that the economic is waning, that they don't have enough power, they're using more and more warrior-like foreign policy to compensate that. So which means that still they're trying to use some leverage or dependence power like I mentioned before.

But right now, because they don't have enough resources, they have to use foreign policy to compensate that. Another thing is that they're also using technology all around the world. For example, I think in Europe it's a perfect case that they're using technology as a power to have more leverage over there.

And surmise, I mean, it's also another case here in Taiwan. Because since that they don't have enough power, especially economic power, to persuade their own public, saying that, hey, the CCP is the best choice for them. Means that they're having to use ideology approach to persuade their own citizens that China is the great power right now around the world.

And that will really backfire, I think.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Mm-hm, others, Didi?

>> Didi Kirsten Tatlow: Yeah, thanks. I think I would reinforce what Puma just said about technology. You'll see in the Germany survey index that I did, that technology is also one of the areas where there was a lot of influence.

And I think I addressed that when I talked about the situation with Germany. Of course, this relates to the industrial strength of Germany and also to the growing industrial strength of China and the upgrade in quality that we're seeing in China and the desire to sort of overtake Germany, if you like.

I think not just Germany but Europe or generally the west more generally. These very specific industries outlined in several plans, they just being the 14th Five-Year-Plan. I'd like to address, however, a question that I see in the Q&A from Norbert Holtkamp, who says that the federal policy on China is not enforced in the German research infrastructure universities.

Correct, it's not. But the German research infrastructure, so the system of research institutes, which are outside of universities, for which there are very, very many scores for major systems. Perhaps in total, hundreds of such research institutes, they are a constituent part of Germany's relationship with China. So, Norbert, I see this as working the other way around, that it produces a certain type of pressure toward the government to behave in certain ways.

So, that's why it's so important. And I think also left to the states and the individual institution to implement in a way they see fit. The question continues, as long as that's the case there's no way to better manage the intellectual property outflux. I'd actually disagree with that.

I think there are a lot of better ways to manage the intellectual property outflux. And I think that one way is that the federal state, the federal government rather, does indeed have to connect much more closely to states and make a much clearer case for why it really matters to protect very, very valuable intellectual property.

Which is, after all, the result of enormous investment into Germany by German society itself and the EU, of course. And in a longer term way, the US, with this sort of background of security support, which has really sustained Germany since 1945. I think that these points are absolutely crucial.

And we do have a lot of new ways, we do have a lot of ways in which we can better manage technology transfer when unwanted and intellectual property outflows. So I just wanted to make that point. I think it's extremely important, thanks.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Tina, I see that you've unmuted.

 

>> Tinatin Khidasheli: Yeah, I just wanted to stress on the points that Puma mentioned. The lesson that we've learned, particularly in the region, and also looking at the data from other countries in China index, is that definitely there is a shift from pure economic cooperation to everything else, including military cooperation.

And then that theory, or the idea that China comes just with the economy, with the money and with businesses, and that's it, and everything else goes the old way, is not the case anymore. And again, as I was designated to talk about the region, I will bring examples from the region, mainly with the diminishing power of Russia, it is even more visible now than ever.

And this hard power interference is already seen in the face of even a Chinese military base that exists in Tajikistan, although they deny, they call different names, different things, but in reality it is a full-functioning military base. And I would say that in exactly the same context, we can talk about this whole police station ideas that is now clear and discovered almost all over the world and not just in my region.

Including in Europe, in Canada, in other countries, where again Chinese move otherwise than just by economic tools. And the second lesson I think they've learned, but not from their own experience that much, is from the soft power activities of the west after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the former republics was the old movement and activities in academia.

So you see almost duplicated programs that used to be run by American universities or USA department in our countries, but obviously with a completely different ideology and without the free speech and without the possibility of rediscussion. It is relevant in both ways in the countries where those programs are implemented on the base of local universities, and also, in China when they take the students to China on various stipends and scholarships.

And then once they come back you see that influence moving into the media as well and different from the standard, for example, Kremlin-run propaganda tools. In this case, these are very legitimate instruments, and these are Genuine instruments. These are not run by Chinese companies or Chinese media. You do not have, at least in this part of the world, have anything close to Sputnik, or Russia today, which is a Kremlin run media source.

But you have locally established media outlets by the alumni of those various Chinese universities. And they are the locals, Kazakhs, Georgians, Armenians, Tajiks are running those outlets as a genuine local media resource. And because of that, they gain more credibility and they are more legitimate than if there is something labeled directly as a Chinese communist party run media outlet or something.

And finally, to answer the first question you asked, and to agree with what Puma said, particularly in my region, there is a huge lack of the expertise amongst the independent players in NGO sector or amongst journalists. It is for objective reasons, because the area was so dominated by Russia, that all expertise goes to Russia.

Everybody for years, for decades were working on Russia, and there is not that much human resource left for it, but it is starting. Now we are getting more and more people interested in it and more and more young people interested both in on the media side, as well as young researchers and scholars who do more and more job on China.

And I believe the China index is playing a very interesting role in all of that.

>> Glenn Tiffert: I think all of you point to a critical factor here, and that is the role of civil society in either substituting for China expertise or supplementing China expertise and bringing to the attention factors that.

That are really at stake in your own countries that matter tremendously. And it can't be emphasized enough that this is not just an academic problem, that this is a lived problem, that individuals, for reasons of ensuring that their local governments are accountable to their people, ensuring that they have control over their own societies, that their stories are told fairly and accurately.

All of this is critical. It is much more than just a foreign policy or military issue. And the China index has been critical there. I want to ask across your different geographies, because it is often said that China is moving into a vacuum that was left by the retreat of the United States and traditional european powers from the world, and China is exploiting that space.

To what extent do you think that fairly describes the areas that you covered? I expect Germany is a little bit different. It has a different relationship to the United States, but that could be the counterexample. Is there a policy response or set of solutions that one could prescribe that says that the US State Department or the British Foreign Office or Germany or Japan should do more in these regions of the world to compete against China to crowd out China, or is China actually competing effectively with them in those spaces and winning in some instances?

Over to you, who wants to take a first stab at that?

>> Parsifal D'Sola Alvarado: If I may, Glen. Well, related to your question, there's a couple of other questions in the chat that I think are related and also apply to Latin America as a whole. So these are both from Victor Haynes.

The first one is, to what extent, if measured, has the Belt and Road Initiative enhanced PRC influence in countries involved? And the second one is, is there a similar index to be found measuring the United States influence as compared to the PRC? So the second question I wish there was, because usually if you read the headlines, as you mentioned, Glen, that the US stepping aside or leaving a vacuum and China stepping in to fill the void.

And I think this is true to an extent, but it's way more complex than just US pulling out, or paying less attention, or focusing its foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Middle East, or in the current context in Europe and Russia. Commenting on the first question, has the Belt and Road Initiative enhanced PRC influence?

This is not represented specifically in the index, but you can read the data and compare it to the countries that have become members of the Belt and Road. I think, if I'm not mistaken, already 19 latin american countries have signed on to the initiative, give or take one country I might be missing, but we haven't seen.

You do have an uptick in terms of Chinese participation in these countries when they sign on to, and this is part of how these negotiations play out. It's important to point out that these are mous. Being part of the Belt and Road Initiative doesn't imply any sort of responsibilities by the countries themselves.

So there's no official alignment or official policies that stem from this. It's just basically a public way of saying, look, we're willing to work with China. And from the chinese perspective, it's basically part of its global PR campaign of saying, look, this is the amount of countries that we work with.

It's more, I would say, a public relations global campaign. That's something that has specific impact on the countries themselves. In Latin America, if you look at most countries, again, it's an uptick when the MOUs are signed and then things just continue the trend before signing. Usually it's an uptrend, but again, we don't see any sort of correlation between being part of the Belladonna road and greater chinese engagement.

And talking specifically about the region and the future trends that I think are represented in the data as Didi and Tina mentioned is aspect of technology. In Latin America, there are two important industrial hubs, Mexico and Brazil. These are the two industrial nations of the region, but very different to what we would say about Germany as an industrial nation.

These are countries that usually import technology. They don't have vast R&D investments. It's mostly import and technology and assembling and functioning as industrial manufacturing hubs. So when you look at the index, Brazil is It's quite interesting. Let me look it up just one second. So in technology it has 61.4%, which is almost 21 points above the global average.

But when you see Mexico, it is even below, it's 36.4%. So four points below the global average. And I think this speaks to what I was mentioning at the beginning that we shouldn't underestimate US influence. Again, this is my own reading on the data. The main reason why we see this discrepancy is because of Mexico's own relationship with the US and US's own relationship with China.

So a lot of the sanctions on Chinese companies get translated onto Mexico because of its close economic relationship. But we do not see that happen in Brazil. Basically because Brazil is a much more independent country in its economic policy in comparison to Mexico and the United States.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Didi.

 

>> Didi Kirsten Tatlow: Yeah, I wanted to address the issue of, for example, what the US could/should be doing about this shifting strategic moment that we are now in. One thing that really occurs to me is the issue of transparency in countries that are in the index and the desire of people locally to know more about what is going on, what the PRC might be doing, what in the case of Georgia, what Russia might be doing, et cetera.

These are absolutely vital, an absolutely vital ingredient, I would say. And I think, Glenn, that picks up on your point about the importance of civil society, which, of course, intimately linked to democracies, a lot that can be done there. I think through a more targeted focus, a greater effort, if you like, from more kinds of people.

The EU could play a huge role there, too. I also want to pick up on something that Terry Tracy has put in the questions, why is economic leverage waning as a major tool of PRC influence? And I agree that it is. And I agree with the others who pointed to the growth of a harder nosed kind of political pressure.

Puma started by making that point earlier. And, of course, the answer lies in China to a certain extent, that China is bringing in new policies, new laws, new attitudes, turning inwards to a certain extent setting up a kind of a parallel domestic and global kind of economy. That's dual circulation concept.

What I see in Germany among manufacturers, and often they're not the huge ones, not the Siemens, the Bosch, et cetera, but the Mittelstand, the smaller ones. Is that they believe that in order to survive in China now and to flourish, they need to do what they call enter the Chinese economic ecosystem.

You have to sinify, essentially, and this is something that many of them are prepared to do at this point or some of them are prepared to do quite a lot of them because they don't really have much of a choice. They're quite deeply invested there at this point.

But that will have an impact. That's gonna go somewhere. That's not the end of that story. And I wonder how well that's going to go. But I wanted to get back to the political thing very briefly. I noticed recently that when Emmanuel Macron made his trip to China just recently and caused great headlines with his comments about US and China and Europe's position somehow as a third pole in this great power situation.

But he said he drew a parallel between the European Union not wanting the European Union to break up and China not wanting to be broken up with Taiwan, et cetera. Now I thought this was a very specious and a rather silly parallel, actually. But I wondered why he was making it because just previously a Spanish, a very senior spanish official made exactly the same parallel.

So immediately, I think, that's a talking point come from China. How is it getting into Europe? How did that happen? And I think these are precisely the kinds of issues that we really need to investigate. They're deeply political and they're real evidence of a real political intervention, I think an interference.

I mean, you could say, okay, intervention. You could say, well, this is influence, et cetera. If the Europeans are silly enough to kind of, you know, buy these arguments, then we need to kind of get our own house in order. And that's all, of course, true. But the very, very final point, what is the goal of all of this seen from Germany?

Well, I think that the goal is very clear. It's to set up something called the Eurasian integration network, which will essentially separate Europe away from the US. It'll kind of like pries it away like that. Slowly, slowly, slowly, this vast Eurasian trading continent, and America off somewhere doing its own thing.

That would be the final goal. Just a few points there about what could be the long term impact or goal of all this activity.

>> Glenn Tiffert: I've heard you say in the past, Didi, that in many ways, Germany is, you win over Germany, you win Europe is the Chinese strategy.

And that's a brilliant example that you surfaced on Spain. What are the odds there, right? So I want to ask, now that we have surfaced this data, all of you, through your very hard work and we've collected it, aggregated it and begun to analyze it, how has it been received in the geographies that you've covered.

How have people said, well, thank you very much, but I don't see any problem here, or are people alarmed or some mixture of reactions across the spectrum. It looks like Parsifal, go ahead.

>> Parsifal D'Sola Alvarado: Sure, so the index hasn't garnered that much media attention. And I think it is to be expected.

So China, when you talk about China across the region, I'm generalizing here, but usually what you get is a neutral to a positive view vis-a-vis China. Because China represents economic opportunity. It represents foreign direct investment. So when we look at the, the few media comments on the index, they tend to be very neutral.

They actually, contrary to some articles I've seen in Europe and the United States concerning the index, which are very, very critical. Particularly because these are usually people aligned with PRC interests, but their attack usually is related to this is a US funded or Taiwan funded or this is a very western view of China.

But that hasn't been the case in Latin America, which I think speaks to that neutrality that most countries seem to frame China around. So I think that's quite interesting, and it's very different because as we've all seen from the other presentations, the situation is quite different if you're in Europe or if you're in Southeast Asia, and especially if you're in Taiwan.

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: Right, would others like to comment on how it's been received in their region? And in particular, what action has come out of it, Tina?

>> Tinatin Khidasheli: Very briefly, just to continue. It also depends on the audience or the target group who we are talking about, because in our case, its pattern with the media is almost the same.

You do not have that much of an interest in media to the index per se, but it's used by various journalists when it comes to broadcasting on concrete topics. Then they use certain slides or certain data from the index. So they don't necessarily report on the index itself, but they use index for other reporting, which is, I think, the whole idea of having a tool like this.

But when it comes to other groups, for example, the same researchers. And I've mentioned in my previous intervention that increased interest towards China, China index played also its role. It is true, more and more young people are asking feedback about it, are asking how it was done. And whether it's a reliable data or not, whether they can use it in their research, they can use it in their papers that they are writing.

So it depends what groups we are talking about. When it comes to government, in these parts of the world, governments tend to ignore issues like this. It does not mean they are not worried, it does not mean they are not interested, but publicly, they ignored it. They never talk about it as long as it's not directly affecting their concrete policy.

And in this case, obviously, we don't have that. So yeah, I think that to certain level, at least at this stage, China explained this role because it is used very interestingly by media for their own reporting purposes, whatever they report on. And I think that's certainly the case.

 

>> Glenn Tiffert: I wanna give Puma the final word here, and give us a preview of new directions that you might be taking the China index to, what we can expect in the year or two ahead from this work.

>> Puma Shen: Thanks, also, I just want to add an interesting point is that when we release the beta of the China index, I think it's more than a year ago.

China actually reacted in saying that thanks for doublethink that helped us mapping all their influence all around the world, which means that they're kind of proud of it. So that's the perception, actually, from China. And also, I mean, in Taiwan, there are also, I mean, some players thinking that, hey, this is pretty good.

It actually help us know how China, not infiltrate, but how great China is and how they influence all around the world. And also, back to one of the question, because I know there are lots of questions in the Q&A session. But there's another one that I have often been asked is that whether we should have an index for the US, right?

So I mean, from the standpoint of Taiwan, because the US didn't, I mean, doesn't really claim that Taiwan is part of US, but China is claiming that Taiwan is part of China. So that's why we care China more. But the other thing is that there's no united front work department over there in the US, so which could make it a little bit more difficult for us to compare.

But I think we still welcome that. If someone who have the resources, I think it's possible that we can have another 99 top questions that has been asked that could measure the influence from the US. And I think that one of the goal for us to have this China index is that sometimes we kind of overestimate the power of China, but sometimes we underestimate.

So with this kind of index, we could at least have some objective, standard that could help us to talk about Chinese influence operation. And then without exaggerating it, but without downplaying it, and everyone could be on the same page. But we also know that there are so many factors that could not be measured.

So for example, we have the neighborhood leaders that will be elected here in our neighborhood, and they are so infiltrated by China. But we didn't put that question into these indicators, because in other countries, they don't have this kind of neighborhood leaders. So qualitative studies could still be very important.

With all this quantitative data, I mean, if we could have some more field work, more studies and interviews, that could put it, I mean, underneath all each country's report. I think that would help us a lot, I mean, understand what's the real Chinese influence. And we really hope that with the new data from this year, 2022 to 2023, we could predict and see what kind of trajectory we have.

And then we could, again, update the index to everyone.

>> Glenn Tiffert: Thank you. I wanna commend everyone on this panel for the hard work that they've done for the vision. And in particular, for the longitudinal possibilities and the increasing transparency and making more data available on this very important topic, which many of us have worked on in different ways.

I wanna thank our audience for joining us, too. If you all have been wondering about TikTok and the concerns raised about Chinese firms' data collection and national security, then our next event is tailor-made for you. One week from today, on Tuesday, April 18, we'll be rolling out a major new CGSP report by visiting fellow doctor, Matt Johnson, and title China's Grand Strategy for Global Data Dominance.

And you won't wanna miss that. Thank you, Puma, Didi, Parsifal, and Tina, it's been a pleasure having you. And I look forward to engaging further with you in future iterations of the China index project. Thank you to the audience. Be well.

>> Tinatin Khidasheli: Bye bye. Thank you.

>> Puma Shen: Bye, thank you.

>> Didi Kirsten Tatlow: Thank you. Bye bye.

>> Puma Shen: Bye, everyone.