China launches ‘malign influence campaign on steroids’ targeting Biden and his officials

US intelligence officials claim China has launched a major campaign to influence president-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration.  

William Evanina, who is chief of the Director of National Intelligence's counter-intelligence branch, said they have “seen an uptick, which was planned and we predicted, that China would now re-vector their influence campaigns to the new administration”.

Mr Evanina said the Chinese were also focusing on people close to Mr Biden's newly announced team members, and called it a foreign influence campaign “on steroids”.

"And when I say that, that malign foreign influence, that diplomatic influence plus, or on steroids, we're starting to see that play across the country to not only the folks starting in the new administration, but those who are around those folks in the new administration,” said Mr Evanina on Wednesday in a virtual discussion at the Aspen Institute think tank.

The official said his department was going to make sure that the new administration “understands that influence, what it looks like, what it tastes like, what it feels like when you see it”.

The intelligence official also said China had attempted to meddle in the recent US elections, as well as the US’s efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

During the last four years, Sino-US relations have deteriorated with the Trump administration repeatedly attacking China on a range of issues such as trade, Asia-Pacific regional security and Hong Kong’s autonomy, while also blaming China for the spread of coronavirus.  

Mr Biden and Donald Trump have also shared exchanges over Chinese influence. While Mr Trump has attacked Joe Biden on the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden in China, the president-elect raised the fact that the incumbent’s Trump Organisation holds a Chinese bank account.

Meanwhile, during the same think tank discussion on Wednesday, a justice department official said hundreds of Chinese researchers who had close ties to the Chinese military were identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s officials over the past few months.  

John Demers, chief of the Justice Department's national security division, said the inquiry began when US authorities arrested several Chinese researchers who had hidden their affiliation with the Chinese army.  

“Those five or six arrests were just the tip of the iceberg and honestly the size of the iceberg was one that I don't know that we or other folks realised how large it was… more than 1,000 PLA (People's Liberation Army)-affiliated Chinese researchers left the country,” said Mr Demers.

They are in addition to about 1,000 Chinese students and researchers whose visas were revoked by the US in September, said Mr Demers, while noting that only the Chinese have the “resources and ability and will" to conduct alleged political and economic espionage on such a scale.  

In July, the US’s State Department had closed China's consulate in Houston and accused Beijing of stealing intellectual property. China in turn accused the US of racial discrimination.