Why China hasn't followed Russia on disinformation — yet

The Chinese government certainly has the ability to pursue an online political disinformation campaign directed at foreign elections — but hasn’t yet because it favors long-term thinking over Russia’s scorched-earth foreign policy, experts said. Researchers note that China could turn its sights on the US if it wanted to. “The question for me and some other researchers is: will they make that jump more aggressively to the English language space in the more heavy-handed manipulation sense? Do they need to, if the Russians are doing that and they’ve got it well covered?” said Laura Rosenberger, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Will they do it just in their immediate periphery in ways that are of more immediate concern to them, like Taiwan, like Hong Kong?”