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How the Chinese Communist Party exerts influence over other countries
You gotta love China these days.
Canada, the U.K., South Korea and other nations are getting cozy with Chinese leadership as a hedge against an unpredictable Trump administration. It’s a dicey move. U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening retaliatory tariffs, citing Canada as a pressure-relief valve for Chinese overcapacity dribbling into the U.S. market. The Chinese Communist Party’s end game is more opaque.
To find out more, I track down China-watcher and fellow Canadian journalist Cleo Paskal. She often reports from remote places in the world, revealing what happens when China and America bump up against each other.
This week, she’s weighing in on the U.K. decision to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. In her capacity as senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, she testified as an expert witness before the U.K. House of Lords last June.
“I think they were expecting me to say it’s a bad idea because of the Chinese influence in Mauritius,” Cleo shares, “and what I said was it’s a bad idea because of the Chinese influence in the U.K.” I chuckle out loud, imagining how her message must have landed in those venerable chambers.
As for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to China, “I don’t think it’s coincidental,” she says. Starmer arrived in China on Thursday for a three-day visit. Leading up to that trip, Cleo reports, the U.K. “approved this massive Chinese embassy in London, in a highly strategic location.”
In a very, very long-distance conversation — Cleo, at the Guam airport travelling en route from the Micronesian island of Palau to the even smaller island of Yap, and me, shivering in the polar vortex that’s engulfed most of Canada — she endeavours to explain how the Chinese Communist Party operates.
“Yap is in a highly strategic location on the second island chain between Guam and Palau,” Cleo reports. “It’s in the country of the Federated States of Micronesia, and it’s a U.S. freely associated state. (U.S. Defense Secretary Pete) Hegseth announced they would be putting about $2 billion worth of infrastructure into Yap.” That’s US$2 billion worth of critical U.S. infrastructure on an island of 5,000 people, she reiterates.
Cleo’s en route to Yap to witness the upcoming handover of a former Imperial Japanese runway in Yap State, recently rehabilitated by the Chinese, to the local government. “When you’ve been reporting on this for a while,” Cleo explains, “you can feel where something’s going to blow up, or has the potential to go wrong.”
“In Yap, the U.S. is legally required to defend these locations through the Compacts of Free Association, but the U.S. definition of defence is very narrow; it’s kinetic defence,” she says. “The Chinese unrestricted warfare approach is much more societally comprehensive: it’s pushing out the Chinese shops and running the hospitals and all of that sort of stuff,” Cleo continues.
“So, if you’re on the ground and the Chinese are offering you a hospital and the Americans want to build a runway — and the Chinese-influenced media are saying the Americans are making you a target so you can get bombed like you were in World War II, but we’re here to help you with our health care — you know,” she sighs, “it’s tough to make the case that the Chinese aren’t the better option.”
Cleo’s seen this pattern, over and over — what she refers to as attempts at “CCP-ification of a sovereign state” — in places like Tonga, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. The tactics include long-term strategies; the braiding of commercial interests; and criminality and corruption, which enables a system of coercion.
“What’s the take-away for a country like Canada?” I ask.
“The Chinese economy is designed to be, when it comes into a country like Canada, fundamentally parasitic,” Cleo answers, without equivocation. “It sucks out capital, it sucks out IP, it sucks out jobs. It’s designed to feed the parasite and to weaken the host.”
“Another thing about China,” she continues, “is that according to the 2017 National Intelligence Law, every Chinese citizen and Chinese company has to support China’s intelligence efforts. They have to. They’re punished if they don’t, and they’re rewarded if they do. If you’re a Chinese citizen, you are a hostage, an unwilling hostage, often, of the Chinese state.”
How, I ask, does any nation counter this kind of power? “You start following the money, including Chinese organized crime money,” Cleo recommends, “and do corruption prosecutions and start throwing people in jail. If you don’t get at the corruption, you’re not going to get anywhere…. You need to raise the cost, you know, of betrayal.”
And pay better attention, she advises; the Chinese telegraph their punches. If you read the Chinese texts, you can understand what’s happening on the ground, Cleo asserts, quite forcefully. It’s all right there. The CCP is going to fight to become number one in the world in terms of “comprehensive national power” and they’ll do that deploying measures that Cleo describes as psychological warfare, media warfare and drugs warfare (flooding communities with illegal substances and controlling pharmaceutical supply chains).
Cleo also describes how the Chinese Communist Party’s “disintegration warfare” finds fault lines in communities, and exacerbates them; “to use countries’ own weaknesses, or strengths in the case of democracy, against itself, in order to weaken its resistance to China, in order to advance China’s relative comprehensive national power.”
There’s a concerted effort, Cleo explains, to use narrative warfare to create fractures between countries like Canada and India, or Canada and the U.S. As well, the Chinese Communist Party aims to advance the disintegration of a society from within. In Canada, this strategy has been deployed to exacerbate tensions between canola farmers (seeking access to export markets in China) and the automotive sector (seeking to constrain Chinese EV imports).
“The Chinese are very good at identifying legitimate grievances, exacerbating them, and then leading you towards a solution that benefits China,” she observes.
Cleo’s an Anglo, from rural Quebec; she well understands fault lines, and chuckles explaining how she survived two separatist referendums in her home province. And, she acknowledges, the independence movements presently gaining traction in Quebec and Alberta provide opportunities for those who like to meddle.
If she was running the desk in China designed to impose disintegration warfare on Canada, Cleo posits, “I would be trying to make this as emotional as possible. It actually doesn’t even matter whether you’re pro-independence or not, from the Chinese perspective, although you would probably prefer independence … less people to try to manipulate and it weakens coherence.”
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