A conspiracy-minded 100-minute film produced by the Chinese military that was circulating widely on the Internet Thursday accuses the United States of trying to undermine the Communist Party’s control of the People’s Liberation Army and impose American values on China.
Among the American tactics decried in the film are military-to-military exchanges, which Washington has long promoted to improve communications in the event of a crisis. The video, complete with ominous soundtrack, warns instead that such visits are intended to corrupt Chinese officers.
The strikingly hard-line film, titled “Silent Contest” (较量无声), also takes aim at Western nongovernmental organizations, the American and British consulates in Hong Kong, and
prominent reformers inside China. It accuses Washington of sponsoring exiled minority leaders such as the Dalai Lama and the Uighur dissident Rebiya Kadeer.
It is not clear if the video was intentionally released online or somehow leaked, but it began disappearing from Chinese websites on Thursday night. Its heavy ideological content
and propaganda style suggest it may have been produced to support the work of the military’s political commissars, who are charged with the ideological indoctrination of troops and maintaining their morale,
discipline and loyalty. As such, the film appears to offer a remarkably straightforward glimpse into the Cold War mind-set of the Chinese military leadership, as well as the deep suspicions of the United States
festering inside one of the most influential institutions in the Chinese political system.
Cutting from crude graphics of American dollar bills to standard shots of the Statue of Liberty to blurry footage of American leaders from George Washington to President Obama, the video bemoans the fall of the Soviet Union and warns that China faces a similar fate if it fails to counter Washington’s nefarious efforts to infiltrate Chinese society.
The General Staff Department of the People’s Liberation Army is listed as a producer of the film, along with the army’s National Defense University and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The university’s president, Wang Xibin, a lieutenant general, appears on camera describing how the United States grooms “friendly forces, so-called democratic forces,” inside China and on the “exterior goes against the party’s absolute control of the army.” He also criticizes visits by American and Chinese military officials to the other’s country, saying that the exchanges will increasingly be used by the United States for “infiltration.”
“We have to take careful precaution and look out for the smallest detail, and build a strong political and ideological line of defense,” General Wang says.
The United States has long urged reluctant Chinese leaders to increase the number of military exchanges, arguing that such visits yield transparency and trust. In recent months, several top Pentagon officers have traveled to China or hosted visits by their Chinese counterparts, a flurry that Washington has described as progress.
The version of the film available online Thursday was undated, but it contained footage of President Xi Jinping after he took office in March. It makes no mention of Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor with the National Security Agency whose leaks in June about the scale of Washington’s global surveillance presented the Chinese with a propaganda windfall.
The video singles out villains in both China and the United States.
In China, nearly a dozen people — scholars, lawyers, disgraced military personnel and dismissed journalists — are accused of having been compromised by the United States. In some cases, lines in their writings are shown and underlined for emphasis. Among those tarred are Mao Yushi, 84, a liberal economist who was awarded the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty at a ceremony in Washington last year, and He Weifang, a prominent law professor at Peking University and an advocate for judicial reform.
On the American side, the video goes after nongovernmental organizations, including the Carter Center, the Asia Foundation, the International Republican Institute and the Ford Foundation. “Nongovernmental organizations are the soft tentacles of Western countries displaying the will of their nation,” the narrator intones. The Fulbright program, which has promoted cultural exchanges between the United States and other countries since the late 1940s, is called an instrument for “America’s cultural invasion.”
The video takes exception to local officials who visited the United States in 2004 to look at the election process as guests of the Carter Center, complaining that the participants were part of “a very meticulous plan” for what the Americans wanted to achieve in China. Sounding alarmed, the narrator points out that one official returned from the visit and wrote a blog post arguing that elections were the legitimate way for a government to gain power in a country.
The film depicts the United States and British consulates in Hong Kong as nests of spies, without actually using the word. “A lot of information suggests that the functions of the two consulates extend to more than what is described on paper,” the narrator says, noting that the consulates together employ more than 900 staff members and accusing them of supporting “subversive” pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong.
A spokesman for the American Embassy in Beijing had no comment on the film.