Somehow it’s a crime when Russia does it to us, but good ‘information ops’ when we want to discredit Beijing’s Belt & Road initiatives worldwide.

Since at least 2016, foreign interference in American elections and civil society have become central to American political discourse. The issue is taken extremely seriously by the U.S. government, which has levied sanctions and called out foreign adversaries for sowing “discord and chaos” through their propaganda efforts.

But apparently Washington takes a different view when it comes to American propaganda operations in foreign countries. On Monday, the House passed HR 1157, the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund,” by a bipartisan 351-36 majority. This legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese “malign influence” globally.

As the publics in many nations are likely to be suspicious of U.S. as well as Chinese involvement in their internal affairs, this could easily discredit genuine grassroots opposition to Chinese influence. A historical example is Washington’s funding of Russian civil society groups that criticized the integrity of Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections. This backfired by allowing Putin to depict the opposition as tools in a U.S. plot and resulted in sharp restrictions on U.S. activity in Russia, including the expulsion of USAID.

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Source: responsiblestatecraft.org