Apropos the revelation that Linda Sun, Trusted Aide of New York Governors Cuomo and Hochul, was really a Chinese spy working behind the scenes to, among other things, add Chinese propaganda to the scripts of New York State government officials, Steven Mosher has published an op-ed in the New York Post on how “China is abusing the freedoms allowed in the US to run a massive propaganda operation” (September 8, 2024).
A prolific student of modern China and critic of the Chinese government, Mosher doesn’t see the Sun scandal as any kind of deviation from what has become a normal course of events.
It’s hard to imagine that any country could be so foolish as to allow a dangerous adversary to set up a massive propaganda apparatus within its borders that openly works to seduce its citizens, undermine its institutions, and weaken it into subservience.
Only you don’t have to imagine, because that would be the foolish country that you are living in.
Over the past few decades, our Washington “elites” have allowed China, the self-declared enemy of the United States, to build a vast network of front groups, Confucius Institutes, and media outlets across the country. More recently, TikTok and other social media have been added to the mix….
By 1998 there were already an estimated eight thousand such front groups in operation, according to the Cox Commission. The number is surely many times larger today.
The CCP’s propaganda invasion ranges from China Daily newspaper boxes popping up “on every other street corner” of major American cities to the Confucius Institutes (now sometimes going under a different name) that have been popping up on American campuses over the last couple of decades.
The op-ed doesn’t quite go where it seems to going, though.
Reciprocity
Mosher’s solution is “strict reciprocity.” Shut down CCP-operated newspapers published and distributed in the United States and other Party front operations unless and until the United States is allowed to run just as many comparable publications and operations within China. This, he says, would preserve the principle of freedom of speech to which even purveyors of CCP propaganda are provisionally entitled.
I’m not convinced by this way of framing things. If “we cannot allow Communist China to abuse rights and protections of the very Constitution that it seeks to destroy,” why would a rule of reciprocity have to be invoked to justify stopping Communist China from doing this?
CCP propagandists operating in the United States either are or are not entitled to the freedom of speech that they require in order to spread their propaganda as agents of an enemy government seeking to destroy us. If they are not, the difficult question is how to deprive them of this weapon, freedom of speech, without also depriving ourselves of freedom of speech.
Mosher: “If we try and defeat China’s propaganda machine by adopting China-like censorship methods, we will have defeated ourselves. The cure, in other words, would be worse than the disease.”
But shutting down “China-run newspapers, which are widely distributed in America’s major cities, and are used to advance China’s interests” on the basis of a reciprocity rule suppresses CCP speech just as much as if it had been suppressed on the basis of some other derivative rule. And what justifies the “strict reciprocity” rule if not our interest in protecting ourselves from the machinations of the Chinese Communist Party?
Unpeaceful assembly
Even less persuasively, Mosher also argues that we would be preserving freedom of assembly and association by relying on strict reciprocity to require that Chinese consulates in the U.S. hire no more Chinese for their consulates than the number of Americans that are hired in U.S. consulates in China.
“If we have 25 Americans in our Shenyang consulate, reciprocity means that China will be limited to 25 Chinese in their Chicago consulate. And so on.” Enforcing this formula would “[reduce] the number of China’s operatives in the United States who help found front groups and regularly liaise with them.” Reduce.
As illustrated by the events of November 2023 in San Francisco, Chinese “diplomats” don’t hesitate to sponsor and organize violent thugs. We are at least on such grounds, as well as others, warranted in kicking all CCP “diplomats” and consulate staff out of the U.S. immediately without any reference to a rule of reciprocity. It’s no violation of “freedom of association” to decline to give foreign invaders opportunities to attack you.
