How Civil Society Can Confront the China Challenge — And Win

The CCP is engaged in a sprawling campaign to undermine democracy. Governments too often can be lumbering or weak in response. Look to civil society for the creativity and skill to keep the CCP on its heels.

By Kevin Sheives and Caitlin Dearing Scott

August 2024

What if a country’s government joins forces with a foreign authoritarian regime to spy on the country’s own people? Can this be stopped?

Civil society organizations believe the answer can be yes. Take Serbia, for example. In 2019, the administration of President Aleksandar Vučić tried to install a thousand Huawei facial-recognition cameras around Belgrade, the capital. Rights to privacy and free dissent were at grave risk, with People’s Republic of China (PRC) technology supplying the repressive tools for an illiberalizing regime.

In response, the Share Foundation — a Serbian digital-rights organization with a creative streak — launched a citizens’ campaign to track every camera on the streets through crowdsourcing, highlighted the program’s risks in Serbian and European media, and even popularized a line of #hiljadekamera (#thousandsofcameras) streetwear. Under pressure, the government soon halted the mass security-cam program. Even as Serbian law enforcement and government authorities continue to press forward new ways to introduce mass, biometric surveillance systems, the Share Foundation’s activism achieved an impressive win.

In Serbia and elsewhere, civil society is finding itself called on to face down PRC challenges to democratic values and practices. Even governments that are not working with Beijing often respond feebly to PRC ambitions, held back by economic or geopolitical caution. Civic groups and activists — so often the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) targets — lack such inhibitions and may prove hardier foes. When allowed to flourish and shielded from the pressure of governments (whether domestic or foreign), civil society can serve as a potent, genuine, and resilient force for democracy.

In many countries, civic spaces are constricted. In others, officials and businesspeople often overrate the benefits of close involvement with China while overlooking its costs out of ignorance or personal interest. These circumstances too often limit what is done to stop the PRC’s illiberal influence. There are nevertheless opportunities for pushing back, even in societies where civic space is highly contested if not outright under siege. In any such response, civil society will be at the forefront.

The CCP versus Civil Society

Beijing’s effort to undermine core democratic values and practices spans the globe and includes: a school in Tanzania where the CCP trains members of African political parties; the muzzling of newspaper editors and journalists in Canada, South Africa, and Malaysia; secret pay-to-play deals for PRC-sponsored infrastructure and media projects in Ecuador, Sri Lanka, and the Solomon Islands; the manipulation of university life in Germany, New Zealand, and the United States to limit criticism of the CCP regime and push “positive” views of China; and the use of CCP-affiliated media concerns and business groups to support pro-Beijing political candidates in Australia, Taiwan, and the United States.

These are not scattered instances. On the contrary, they form a deliberate, ongoing antidemocratic strategy by the PRC party-state, where the CCP is increasingly fused with the ever-widening reach of the Chinese government, economy, and nongovernment life. Ingredients of a sovereign, successful democracy with a prospering economy are on the line: toleration of political opponents, freedom of expression, accountable and transparent government, open political discourse, and elections free from foreign interference.

In this campaign, civil society and the broader nongovernmental sector has come under attack. To eliminate any opposition to CCP rule under Xi Jinping, the CCP has conducted a sustained assault on China’s own civil society. As the world saw in the A4 protest movement in November 2022, a single spark could ignite the underlying frustration that so many Chinese citizens face when denied their basic freedoms. At home, the CCP is bent on curbing social unrest by coopting or targeting civil society.

Abroad, the CCP’s intentions and, increasingly, its tactics are no different. In South Asia, it financed an academic culture that lauded the Belt and Road Initiative and used fear of lost scholarships to make South Asian students in China avoid “controversial” topics. In Kenya, journalists have said that their reporting on a PRC-built railway brought their publications warnings of ad boycotts by PRC-based companies. And among Chinese dissidents abroad or even foreign citizens of Chinese heritage, Freedom House paints a picture of “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.”

The CCP’s attacks on civil society have grown even more overt. When sanctions came from U.S. and allied governments against PRC officials over their abuses in Xinjiang, China retaliated against prominent civil society voices in Europe and elsewhere uncovering China’s gross human-rights violations. In one instance, the CCP attempted to sue German scholar Adrian Zenz for “damages” resulting from “malicious smearing acts” that exposed atrocities against the Uighur community. In another, the PRC embassy in Australia targeted the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank and “critical media reporting of China” with its notorious list of “14 grievances.” In these instances and others, the CCP targets global civil society precisely because of its unique power and the potential — like any entity that opposes the CCP — to hold authoritarian power to account.

Civil Society’s Edge

Even in democracies, governments can be corrupted by their own power or beholden to geopolitical interests — and malign actors such as PRC-supported elite influencers can exploit these circumstances. In societies where key elites and businesses have begun to succumb to the PRC’s corrupt offers of “access for cooperation,” mission-driven civil society organizations — provided that their space for advocacy is protected — can expose and counter the PRC’s malign influence.

In Georgia, for example, the country has undergone a shift toward illiberalism under the ruling Georgian Dream party. PRC exchange programs, Confucius Institutes, technology firms, a conglomerate with a history of corruption, and political-party exchanges with the CCP — all backed by loans and construction contracts awarded to PRC-based firms for a trans-Georgian highway — led to a surprise strategic-partnership announcement between Xi Jinping and Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili in August 2023. Despite pressure from PRC entities and Georgia’s own government, influential civil society organizations such as CIVIC Idea have rigorously exposed PRC-Georgia economic deals, the risks of importing PRC surveillance technology, and CCP-affiliated academic and media exchanges.

In polarized societies, civil society organizations can traverse a rugged political landscape to chart bipartisan solutions that address malign foreign influence. Research institutions, investigative journalists, and key experts have navigated the sometimes-divisive politics in Australia and, more recently, Canada under pressure from China’s interference activities. In such fractured political landscapes, civil societies that consist of organizations working regularly or even exclusively with different parties can leverage familiar relationships to advocate change.

In an era when public trust in government and other key institutions has declined, civil society can also speak locally and credibly. Civic organizations’ proximity to their constituents is a key component of their local legitimacy, which can make them effective at countering PRC narratives.

Advocacy and other civil society activities can also be particularly sensitive to the will of citizens. One Peruvian environmental-advocacy group exposed the negative impact of a PRC company on Amazonian and indigenous areas, activating Peruvian policymakers and even the PRC embassy to address these community vulnerabilities. In Ghana, a consortium of journalists, researchers, and activists exposed Chinese companies’ illegal mining activity. The revelations not only sparked new policy platforms for Ghanaian political parties, but the continued public pressure on Ghanaian law enforcement led to the prosecution of a Chinese national. A Sri Lankan media organization secured greater transparency and access to information for the public by holding public dialogues and conducting investigations of PRC infrastructure projects in the country. All of these initiatives firmly addressed local grievances over China’s impact in ways that international narratives could not easily address.

Civil society is often less subject to the geopolitical winds or alliance structures that drive government responses to China. Civil society organizations are outside sometimes rigid, government-focused bodies such as the EU, NATO, or the G-7, which can hem in governments’ diplomatic choices. Civil society is free to argue for whatever level of engagement with PRC entities it thinks best, without being bound by the “other equities” that governments must reckon into their actions.

Civil society is not without its vulnerabilities to CCP pressure. Academics and opinion leaders find themselves reliant on universities and media outlets, platforms that can be subsidized by the CCP. Despite this, civil society can serve as a powerful complement to government efforts to counter the CCP’s foreign authoritarian influence.

Civil Society Responses to the CCP: Eight Lessons

China’s growing influence is not inevitable everywhere. Despite the CCP’s successes in achieving international tolerance of its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, acceptance in some quarters of its authoritarian governance model, and support for the Belt and Road Initiative, some societies have proven resistant to PRC advances. In many democracies, civil society has taken a leading role in the pushback. From these examples, we offer several lessons for civil societies confronting the China challenge.

1) Locally based China experts must spread knowledge of CCP methods and tactics. To defend themselves, democracies need widely distributed understanding of the CCP’s unique system for exerting political influence — including this system’s effects down to the local level. In countries with limited China expertise, civil society organizations can partner with Chinese dissidents and other foreign China experts to recognize patterns and leverage new analytical and tracking tools developed by China researchers around the world. Perhaps better than governments, these civil society experts are well positioned to educate vulnerable nongovernment sectors. Business associations, law-enforcement agencies, provincial and city officials, media outlets, universities, parliamentary bodies, labor unions, political parties, and financial institutions all have significant vulnerabilities — and, thus, also have opportunities to show resilience in the face of the PRC’s influence activities.

2) Shining light on China’s covert influence activities can catalyze change. In the Czech Republic over the past decade, the Sinopsis research foundation has doggedly investigated and publicized — at a rapid pace — secret deals between PRC business and media entities and their Czech counterparts. Partly as a result, President Petr Pavel (elected 2023) has reversed course on PRC engagement and ended the advisory relationship that a PRC state-affiliated enterprise’s agent had with the Czech government. The sunlight of journalistic investigations that uncover secretive or corrupt deals, long-arm censorship from Beijing, or opaque, overseas PRC police activity can serve as a powerful disinfectant against covert forms of influence.

3) New partners and cross-regional collaboration can develop common causes for action. Democratic civil society activists and national-security services can be strange bedfellows, but the former’s mission to uphold the rule of law and the latter’s mission to protect national sovereignty can align in the fight to counter foreign authoritarian influence. Unlikely partnerships between civil society organizations and the likes of the business sector, technology firms, environmental activists, and foreign-policy institutions can build a strong political consensus within societies to address the challenges posed by PRC influence. For example, an international investigative-journalism collaborative (the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, originally founded in Eastern Europe) partnered with Australian media and law-enforcement representatives to uncover a web of organized criminal activity and CCP “united front” influence schemes in Fiji.

4) Civil society must provide an alternative to PRC propaganda. To quote scholar and Hong Kong native Niva Yau, “The CCP is not the only voice on China.” Among Chinese-diaspora communities, however, CCP-affiliated media all too often predominate. Independent Chinese-language news sources and voices are needed.

5) The best responses are rooted in local narratives. Framing the competition between the autocratic CCP and democracies as one between China and the United States has proven a counterproductive strategy in our era of great-power competition. Countries don’t want to feel forced to take sides. Civil society has a key role in raising awareness of CCP influence among mass audiences through research, advocacy, and awareness campaigns that link CCP global influence to local issues of concern (e.g. the environment, labor rights, financial sustainability, unfair economic competition), not divisive matters of geopolitics.

6) Civil society organizations can pioneer new standards to protect themselves and the broader public. Government-initiated standards, especially in media and academia, can arouse legitimate concerns about the state’s overreach into civic life. Where government regulation of university operations could run afoul of key democratic values such as freedom of thought and expression, a working group of academics developed a model code of conduct for U.K. universities to help make foreign funding more transparent. In the Philippines, the National Union of Journalists developed guidelines for reporting on China to address how the PRC “feeds state-sponsored messages into the global news ecosystem” — a trend earlier highlighted by the international trade union for journalists.

7) Do not be afraid to use the law. Even in many autocratizing societies, some national laws are in place to protect civil society and the integrity of public and economic sectors. Where they are lacking, framing and passing them should be a priority. In Zambia, to mention one case, the new, liberal government, in partnership with a long-vibrant civil society, has an opportunity to put legal limits on PRC-based companies to ensure they meet international standards for construction, contracting, and procurements. Such measures are sorely needed in a country where PRC-affiliated companies are engaging in corrupt practices and inflating the political influence of favored Zambian elites to a degree that could threaten the country’s democratic renewal.

8) Civil society needs to guard itself from PRC pressure and coercion. The PRC’s pressure tactics are real and relentless. In dealing with China, NGOs should focus on risk mitigation. They should keep their cybersecurity robust and up to date, publicly call out any instances of PRC harassment, maintain lasting partnerships with their respective countries’ domestic law-enforcement agencies as well as any relevant international bodies, and seek diversified funding sources. The CCP likes to play the pressure game, but that pressure can be countered.

Collaborative Responses to Authoritarian Influence

In democracies, a clear division of labor between government and civil society is natural and fundamental. Yet collaborative strategies are possible — and in some cases badly needed. Some of the most successful responses to PRC foreign interference have occurred when an assertive, knowledgeable civil society and leaders of the national government work together.

In Australia, influential and dogged elements of civil society such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Chinese-Australian journalists and activists, and other prominent voices sounded the alarm early and were far ahead of the Australian government in exposing PRC interference in Australian domestic affairs. Then, under Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 and 2017, civil society found partners in government who were willing to investigate and fully expose the PRC’s “covert, coercive, and corrupting” practices. This close partnership led to bipartisan national and provincial action in areas such as election-financing laws and government-coordination mechanisms for countering foreign interference, along with a major reorientation of Australia’s relationship with China.

In Taiwan, the partnership between civil society and government has also been collaborative, even as many in Taiwan’s vibrant civil society have maintained a healthy sense of independence from the state. During the apex of the PRC’s information-manipulation campaign against Taiwan in 2017 and 2018, activism and awareness-raising from a bevy of Taiwanese civil society organizations led to strong government action. Taiwan’s innovative Ministry of Digital Affairs leveraged its platform and technology resources to equip Taiwanese society and technology firms with cybersecurity defenses as well as analyses of PRC activities. There were investigations and even some prosecutions of prominent Taiwanese media figures who had sold out to the PRC influence campaign.

Many countries, of course, have political climates that little resemble those of Australia and Taiwan. Other governments embrace all types of engagement with China, as Panama has following its decision to recognize Beijing and drop Taipei. Elsewhere, as in Hungary or the Philippines, civil society is sidelined or oppressed.

But even in countries with such challenging political dynamics, the cause is far from hopeless. Civil society can and does serve as a powerful check against the worst kinds of PRC influence, calling it out and demanding accountability even when politicians or political parties might prefer to hide their relationships with Beijing.

The sprawling, full-spectrum influence and engagement campaign that the Chinese Communist party-state is waging around the world requires an equally comprehensive response from civil societies, governments, and economic actors that back democracy. Yet civil societies must not wait for governments to act. In this escalating contest of values across democratic societies, the CCP is clearly not waiting either.

Kevin Sheives is the Deputy Director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy. Caitlin Dearing Scott is the Director for Countering Foreign Authoritarian Influence at the International Republican Institute.

Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy

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