Covert, Coercive, and Corrupt: Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence in Free Societies

10/31/20 • 80 min

1 Listener

Friday, October 30, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

The Hoover Institution and the Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society held a Zoom webinar Covert, Coercive, and Corrupt: Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence in Free Societies: A Conversation with Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell on Friday, October 30, 2020 from 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm PDT | 3:00 pm - 4:15 pm EDT.

Following introductory remarks from Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell will give a policy address on the PRC's malign influence activities and how the US government is countering them. He will focus in particular on how the US government is using legal, diplomatic, and consular tools to identify PRC propaganda outlets, and on how it is seeking to help ensure the fair and reciprocal treatment of foreign journalists in China. After the speech, Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond will lead Assistant Secretary Stilwell in conversation with the Asia Society’s Orville Schell and Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

FEATURING

David R. Stilwell is the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He served in the Air Force for 35 years, retiring in 2015 in the rank of Brigadier General as the Asia advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. From 2017-2019, Mr. Stilwell served as the Director of the China Strategic Focus Group at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. He was awarded the Department of Defense Superior Service Award in 2015.

Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm. Rice served as the sixty-sixth secretary of state of the United States (2005-2009) and as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser (2001-2005).

Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He chairs Hoover’s project on China’s Global Sharp Power. His most recent book is Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (2019).

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society and former dean and professor at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of ten books about China, including most recently Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century (2013).

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Dr. Mastro is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a strategic planner at INDOPACOM.

Covert, Coercive, and Corrupt: Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence in Free Societies

Friday, October 30, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

FEATURING

Previous Episode

What Winston Churchill’s Relations with Russia Can Teach Us for Today

Thursday, October 29, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

“If only I could dine with Stalin once a week,” Winston Churchill said with unusual naïveté during the Second World War, “then there would be no trouble at all.” When it came to dealing with Russia, Churchill went through five distinct phases of engagement, of which the most dangerous was thinking that Stalin was a normal statesman for whom personal relations mattered, rather than a hardened Russian ideologue and nationalist for whom only Realpolitik mattered. Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts will explore how Churchill’s experience can help the West in its dealings with Vladimir Putin.

Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College. He has written over a dozen books including Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Napoleon the Great, and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which was a New York Times Bestseller and won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and the National Army Museum, and received his PhD from Cambridge University.

ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUP

https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group

This interview is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

Next Episode

News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications

Thursday, November 12, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

To control information is to control the world. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. In response, Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe.

Click the following link to read two articles from Professor Tworek

https://www.hoover.org/events/news-germany-competition-control-world-communications

Heidi Tworek is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where she works on media, international organizations, and transatlantic relations. Prof. Tworek is a senior fellow at Centre for International Governance Innovation, as well as a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. She is the author of the award-winning News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945, published in 2019 and has co-edited two volumes, Exorbitant Expectations: International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business. She received her BA from Cambridge University and her PhD in History from Harvard.

ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUP https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group