Where Facts Fail, Chinese Shills Prevail

Last week the Chinese foreign ministry posted a video on X declaring it “won’t kneel down” to US tariffs because “bowing to a bully is like drinking poison to quench thirst”. The video, narrated in English with a crisp American-accent, was an explicit display of the Chinese Communist Party’s most favoured propaganda tools at present: artificial intelligence and social media.

While Beijing’s use of technology to spread propaganda has been no secret, it has had a tendency to do so in a more malignant and concealed manner. The most prominent example of that strategy has been the Chinese “spamouflage” campaign, first reported by network analysis firm Graphika in 2019.

At the time, the agency identified hundreds of fake propaganda accounts and bots — sometimes referred to as ‘shills’ in internet slang — that were using political spam across social media to target one of Hong Kong’s most widespread protests against the increasing influence of the Chinese autocratic government on the city-state.

In the years since, that activity has become much more widespread. In just the first three months of the year, we have seen reports of China using spamouflage on social media to encourage Spaniards to overthrow their government, influence the Canadian election by discrediting Mark Carney, and target exiles from Hong Kong in the UK.

But the way China is now using these tools to fight the tariff war with the Donald Trump government speaks to a growing sophistication in its strategy. A huge case in point is the viral trend of Chinese manufacturers using TikTok to tell Americans that all the wildly expensive luxury goods they love are actually pretty cheap, and made in China. “So come, buy from us directly,” they say.

It’s worth wondering how some obscure Chinese manufacturers posting on a platform that sees more than 16,000 videos uploaded per minute became such a viral phenomenon anyway? According to Graphika, the volume of videos calling on Americans to buy directly from China began increasing in early March, rising more than 30% from a month before. By the second week of April, they exploded, with a jump of 250%.

In a blog post, Graphika noted the activity highlighted efforts by pro-China actors to undermine US tariffs. Meanwhile, cybersecurity researchers told Canada’s CBC News, that the TikTok videos driving the “buy from China” narrative often had tell-tale signs of bot activity and state-driven propaganda.

Those signs include multiple accounts peddling the same narratives — like, China has the best supply chains or China supplies 80% of all of the world’s luxury goods. Often, the accounts putting up these videos were also fairly new and had few followers.

While it remains impossible to tell how much of this activity is state-driven, it interestingly speaks to a new approach to spreading propaganda. In the past, China has embodied a blatantly aggressive and confrontational approach, popularly referred to as “wolf-warrior diplomacy”. But this new campaign takes a more relatable approach. In this case, that means promising Americans bargains and affordability at a time when they are worrying about increasing costs due to Trump’s tariffs.

And it is even more interesting that China is using its factories to do so.

MIT Technology Review notes that for years now, videos of assembly lines of Chinese factories have been all the rage on TikTok. Viewers, most of whom would have no experience witnessing a factory floor, find themselves “mesmerised” by the processes seen in loop. Effectively, for many Chinese cities displaying their factory processes has become a “content goldmine”.

And it appears that for the CCP, they are becoming a propaganda goldmine too.

‘Cognitive Warfare’

Back to CCP campaigns: Some analysts describe this new era of propaganda as “cognitive warfare”. According to one report by Johns Hopkins University and the Imperial College London, this strategy turns the human mind into the “battlefield”.

The aim of this strategy is to “change not only what people think, but how they think and act.” And if done right, it can “shape and influence” how individuals or groups perceive facts and respond to them. The fact that scores of Americans now readily believe that China actually is the supplier to the world’s biggest luxury brands, or that hundreds of social media influencers in the US are now curating detailed lists of Chinese manufacturers they can trust to directly buy from, speaks to China’s success in using this tactic.

Another example of how Beijing is using this tactic is its state-media painting China as an “open” society, by citing how it gave American YouTuber IShowSpeed unfiltered access to the country or how it didn’t shy away from showing its humanoid robots fall and flail about during a half marathon this month.

These tactics can easily account for the sea change in how China is being perceived in the world — from being a villain to being the chill guy that won’t bow down to Trump’s trade aggression.

But on the other side of this tactic are real dangers, such as those for the island of Taiwan that faces an increasing risk of a Chinese invasion. Early this month, the Taiwanese intelligence agency said China was increasingly using artificial intelligence to “generate destabilising misinformation”.

The agency particularly noted how Beijing was using ‘cognitive warfare’ to “divide Taiwanese society” on issues like chipmaker TSMC expanding its investments in the US.

It also noted how the widespread growth of AI had fuelled China’s propaganda machinery. And that has been visible in the trade war too, with propaganda ranging from showing Trump kneeling before Xi Jinping, to portraying Americans as obese men and women who didn’t stand a chance at competing with their Chinese counterparts on the factory floor.

• Officials in Los Angeles say the number of cargo vessels arriving at the port on the US west coast will plunge by more than a third next week.

• Some foreign retailers have given up sales to US customers as a tariff exemption for small parcels ends today.

• Chinese e-commerce brands such as Shein and Temu have already started raising prices in the US, with some items seeing increases of up to 200-300%.
  

• And the Trump administration says that one of the first trade deals that it will sign will likely be with India.