Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the invitation.
I'll probably first describe the institution I represent, which is the NATO centre of excellence for strategic communication. It is a NATO-affiliated organization that researches and looks into the issues of influence operations, how hostile actors are using this for undermining the democracies, and how it works in the information space and increasingly into what we call cognitive conflict.
The views I will present today are views of my own, based on the research by the centre, and are not agreed positions of NATO itself.
With that caveat, I will sketch out how we see China in the influence operations. Of course, as a NATO institution, we have been looking for many years at Russian activity, but over the last few years we have increasingly been looking at Chinese activity.
To quickly look at how we see that activity, the way they process their influence operations through more soft touch, soft power angle of trying to create a favourable image of China has transformed, increasingly adopting hard-handed and assertive measures against countries—not only within their own neighbourhood, which was the case some time ago already, but increasingly adapting these measures also to countries that are further away, especially when there are key elements of contention where they believe Chinese interests are at stake. Of course, one has to point out the different value systems that democratic countries and China have.
If I look at the areas of influence that they are good at, in our view, they are very good at using the leverages they have, especially on the economic front and the infrastructure front. They are very active in the technology landscape, first and foremost in cyber activities, hacking and espionage, but also at more nuanced technology activities, like data and emerging technologies. They are also quite good in most of the cases, but not always, at targeting Chinese communities for their influence.
Where they are not yet very good, but they're quickly gaining ground, is in what we call the information warfare. We've noted that in most of the cases they've used what I would call an old-school methodology of the communist propaganda system that has not worked very well. However, they have been quickly adopting...in particular, some of the Russian tactics have been adopted on the information front as we speak.
As next steps, we see that they will increasingly try to leverage their technological powers and try to gain more say into the infrastructure of the future of these technologies. I believe they see data and AI as very critical future technologies where they would want to have strong leverage, not only within China but also outside.
We look at the social scoring systems they have developed, which we believe are not the way the technology has to be used, but we see, with a concern, the export of this technology and the possible impact of the social scoring system on western companies wanting to operate on Chinese territory, which I think will have significant impact.
All in all, as the Chinese modus operandi changes to a more hard-handed approach, we foresee that there will be more contention, more pressure, especially given that the core elements of the Chinese system and the way they view the world are fundamentally different from those of democratic countries. Therefore, there is in-built conflict on the values system side.
We therefore see an increase in not only the competition but also the influence operations from China. They will increasingly try to leverage especially the technology but also the economic and infrastructural positions they have.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.