US to offer millions in new funds to take on China
- If they look, swim and quack like US influence operations, they probably are US influence operations, especially when they come with an annual price tag of US$300 million to be authorised as law by the US Congress, of which US$10 million has been earmarked especially for Hong Kong
When the Chinese do it, it’s propaganda. When Washington does it, it’s “investing in our values”. The last phrase is taken from the Strategic Competition Act of 2021, newly passed by the United States Senate and will soon become law. It aims squarely at China and enjoys bipartisan support.
Buried deep within the 270-plus pages of the document is a provision to fund influence operations in Hong Kong with a budget of US$10 million for next year. I quote from Section 301: “Authorisation of Appropriations for Promotion of Democracy in Hong Kong.
“There is authorised to be appropriated US$10,000,000 for fiscal year 2022 for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour of the Department of State to promote democracy in Hong Kong.”
The large sum will more than make up for the US$2 million that was originally budgeted for anti-government protesters and rioters in 2019 but was cancelled because of an unrelated internal purge of key staff at the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) by former president Donald Trump. We know this from congressional testimonies conducted by the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee last September.
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The act formalises America’s “geopolitical competition” against China in all fields, including the military, diplomacy, technology, trade and global news. US$300 million for each of the financial years from 2022 to 2026 will be released to the “Countering Chinese Influence Fund to counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally”.
The USAGM will have new funds “to support independent journalism” to counter “the Chinese Communist Party and other malign actors [for] promoting disinformation, propaganda, and manipulated media markets”. Foreign journalists will be funded and trained “to help expose and counter false CCP narratives”, specifically about “the negative impact” of the Belt and Road Initiative.
The USAGM’s Open Technology Fund, which previously admitted to providing US$3 million to Hong Kong protesters between 2012 and 2016 to develop programmes to evade police surveillance, “shall continue and expand work to support tools and technology to circumvent censorship and surveillance by the CCP, both inside China as well as abroad”.
US lawmakers are too optimistic. Before the introduction of the national security law in Hong Kong, the opposition was happy to take American money. Now, there won’t be many takers.
