The Chinese Communist Party exploits American civil unrest to divide the U.S. society; the pro-Palestinian campus protests are the latest example, experts say.
China’s communist regime is using the pro-Palestinian campus protests to discredit the U.S. government and amplify social divisions. This online activity, experts say, is part of China’s information warfare or psyop—psychological operation—to weaken the United States by causing Americans to fight each other.
Researchers have traced such Israel–Hamas war-related campaigns to a multi-year online influence operation known as “Spamouflage” or “Dragonbridge,” which Meta found had links to Chinese law enforcement.
Meanwhile, Chinese propaganda and officials accuse the U.S. government of having “double standards” and being “hypocritical.”
Along with a montage video of police arrests on various campuses, Hua Chunying, spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, implied on social media that the United States was handling protesters in the same way that it has criticized other countries for.
According to H. Colleen Sinclair, a Louisiana State University associate research professor specializing in misinformation and methods, China uses a false equivalency—equating the U.S. arrests of protesters to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) persecution and silencing of its own people—to say that the United States doesn’t have the moral authority to criticize Beijing’s human rights record.
“It’s just a form of distraction: ‘whataboutism.’ It also further amplifies any political divisions or polarization that there might be in a particular culture,” she told The Epoch Times.
Referring to the CCP, she continued, “They are always looking for things that make the United States look unstable, unable to be trusted, and hypocritical.”
CCP Propaganda Highlights ‘Internal Divisions’ in US
On April 17, Columbia University students started protesting by camping out on campus, demanding their schools call for a ceasefire in Gaza and divest from all Israeli institutions and Israel-aligned companies. They called the Israel–Hamas war genocide of Palestinians, an accusation that the Israeli government has repeatedly rejected.
A day later, police began arresting protesters at Columbia. Students vowed to stay on until the university met their demands. As the negotiations between the school and students broke, the tension escalated. The encampment protests at Columbia inspired more students at a dozen other colleges to do the same.
By Terri Wu
