As of: March 15, 2024, 12:19 p.m
By: Christiane Kühl
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Xi Jinping and Donald Trump 2017: Back then, things were still going on between the two heads of state.
Trump invited Xi to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
© Alex Brandon/picture alliance/dpa
Donald Trump used CIA trolls against China in his first term, according to a report by Reuters.
The news endangers the thaw between the major powers.
The West fears trolls from Russia and China who want to undermine our democracy with criticism or conspiracy myths on social media.
But apparently former US President Donald Trump had very similar plans in China.
Trump gave the CIA the green light for a covert campaign on Chinese social media,
Reuters
reported on Thursday, citing three former US officials.
The aim was to turn public opinion in China against the government in Beijing.
The operation is a response to years of covert efforts by China to aggressively increase its global influence.
“The feeling was that China was coming at us with steel baseball bats and we were hitting back with wooden ones,”
Reuters
quoted a former security official as saying.
The report on the CIA trolls endangers the current détente between China and the USA.
Because Trump is not only an ex-president, but is also aiming for the White House again.
He has already de facto overcome the first hurdle, the nomination as the Republican candidate.
Beijing reacted frostily on Thursday.
The report on the CIA project shows that the US government uses the "public space of opinion and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion."
Whether the revelation has political consequences now also depends on how China deals with the information.
Because according to the report, it is initially the project of an ex-president.
Reuters
was not immediately able to determine
whether the Biden administration continued the CIA troll operation .
This will also determine whether Beijing downplays the matter or takes it seriously.
China
Either way, the matter fits into the image that the Chinese Communist Party has of the USA.
For years she has accused Washington of wanting to prevent the rise of China - partly out of rejection of the People's Republic's socialist system.
Trump in particular had made no secret of the fact that he viewed China as an enemy.
He started a trade war with Beijing and always called Covid-19 the “China virus”.
The tone changed under Joe Biden, but his administration left punitive tariffs and other measures taken by his predecessor in place.
Since the summit between Biden and China's head of state Xi Jinping in November, many communication channels have been open again.
Biden said at the time that the talks were among the “most constructive and productive” he had ever had with Xi, whom he has known for 12 years.
But the thaw between the two world powers is fragile because little has changed in the overall geopolitical situation since then.
Reports like this can seriously upset the balance.
In 2019, Trump started the CIA trolls
Trump is said to have given the starting signal for the program in 2019.
According to
Reuters
, the CIA subsequently put together a small team of agents who, equipped with false online identities, were supposed to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping's government and leak denigrating information to foreign news portals.
It sounds like a playbook from right-wing conspirators in the West.
For example, the team spread allegations that Communist Party cadres were hiding ill-gotten money abroad.
They also portrayed China's "New Silk Road" infrastructure project as corrupt and wasteful. The long-term goal was to stir up paranoia among China's elites and get the government to devote resources to pursuing intruders into the Internet, which is strictly controlled by Beijing, two said Former US official told
Reuters
: “We wanted them to hunt ghosts.”
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A CIA spokeswoman and Trump's spokesman unsurprisingly initially declined to comment.
Reuters
' attempt
to obtain statements from John Bolton and Robert O'Brien, both of whom were Trump's national security advisers at the time of the covert action order, also failed.
The Biden administration also initially did not comment.
According to Reuters
, the program allowed the CIA to operate in third countries around the world where the United States and the People's Republic compete for influence.
Four former officials told the news agency the operation targeted public opinion in Southeast Asia, Africa and the South Pacific.