Vice president accuses China of interfering in US elections

By DEB RIECHMANN and ZEKE MILLER

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Vice President Mike Pence charged Thursday that Russia’s influence operations in America pale in comparison to the covert and overt activities China is taking to interfere in the U.S. midterm elections and counter President Donald Trump’s tough trade policies against Beijing.

Pence laid out measures Beijing is employing to undermine the Trump administration. They include public steps such as targeting Chinese tariffs to industries in states that are crucial to Trump in the midterms as well as behind-the-scenes actions such as coercing U.S. businesses to speak out against the Trump administration and intimidating scholars.

China has denied that it interferes in any countries’ domestic affairs, but Pence said Beijing’s actions add up to a simple message: “China wants a different American president.”

“Beijing has mobilized covert actors, front groups and propaganda outlets to shift Americans’ perception of Chinese policies,” he said. “As a senior career member of our intelligence community recently told me just this week, what the Russians are doing pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country, and the American people deserve to know.”

Pence said China has responded to Trump’s tough trade policies against Beijing with tariffs of its own designed to inflict maximum political damage.

“By one estimate, more than 80 percent of U.S. counties targeted by China voted for President Trump and I [sic] in 2016,” Pence said during a speech delivered at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. “Now, China wants to turn these voters against our administration.”

He also noted a multipage advertising supplement that was inserted last week in the Des Moines Register in Iowa, the home state of the U.S. ambassador to China and a pivotal state in this year’s elections and the 2020 presidential election. “The supplement, designed to look like news articles, cast our trade policies as reckless and harmful to Iowans.”

Pence’s speech served as a follow-up of sorts to Trump’s charge before the U.N. Security Council last month that China was meddling in U.S. elections to help Democrats.

After Trump’s remark, intelligence and homeland security experts said they didn’t know of any Chinese influence operations akin to Russian activities during the 2016 presidential election.

U.S. intelligence agencies assess that Russia interfered in 2016 to boost Trump over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, through hacking and releasing sensitive documents and social media manipulation.

Experts say China is known more for conducting economic espionage. A recent intelligence report said China uses joint ventures to try to acquire technical know-how, seeks partnerships with U.S. government labs to learn about specific technology and information about running such facilities, and uses front companies to hide the hand of the Chinese government and acquire technology under U.S. export controls.

Pence offered only two examples related to the upcoming elections – the targeted tariffs and the advertising supplement – which did not rise to the level of the Russian effort to meddle in the 2016 election. But he pointed to a document Beijing circulated in June titled “Propaganda and Censorship Notice,” which laid out a broader influence campaign, similar to Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaign against the U.S.

The document stated that China must “strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups” in the United States, the vice president said.

Pence also said more U.S. companies should think twice before entering the Chinese market if it means turning over their intellectual property.

National security adviser John Bolton said much of what the U.S. knows about Chinese activities in the United States remains classified.

He said if more were declassified, it would help Americans better understand the scope of the Chinese actions to affect the election and its “broader effort to influence political opinion in this country through academic institutions, through think tanks, through intimidation of scholars.”