The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab invites you to join us virtually on Tuesday, September 27, 2022, from 11:00am-12:00pm ET for China’s digital strategy at home and abroad. Award winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin and DFRLab Resident Fellow Kenton Thibaut will discuss their work illuminating the Chinese state’s approach to the digital world.
Chin and Lin will discuss groundbreaking reporting from their new book, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, which illuminates the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitious push, aided by American technology and capital, to engineer a new society around the power of digital surveillance. Thibaut will discuss research from her new report, Chinese discourse power: Ambitions and reality in the digital domain, which explains how the CCP is attempting to transform the international order through “discourse power,” a type of narrative agenda-setting ability focused on reshaping global governance, values, and norms around technology to legitimize and facilitate the expression of state power.
The conversation will be moderated by Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub Nonresident Fellow, Johanna Kao. Join us to learn more about the far-reaching implications of China’s interlocking domestic and international digital strategies for societies around the globe.
Panelists
Kenton Thibaut
Resident China Fellow
DFRLab, Atlantic Council
Josh Chin
Deputy Bureau Chief, China
Wall Street Journal
Liza Lin
Reporter
Wall Street Journal
Moderator
Johanna Kao
Nonresident Senior Fellow
Global China Hub, Atlantic Council
Regional Director for Asia
International Republican Institute
Read the report
A new report by DFRLab Resident China Fellow Kenton Thibaut explores China’s concerted strategy to gain discourse power within the digital domain. Thibaut explains “discourse power” (话语权), as a type of narrative agenda-setting focused on reshaping global governance, values, and norms to legitimize and facilitate the expression of state power. China’s leaders have articulated that they believe Western countries, especially the United States, have been able to successfully exert global influence because they possess dominant discourse power.
Purchase the book
People living in democracies have for decades drawn comfort from the notion that their form of government, for all its flaws, is the best history has managed to produce. In SURVEILLANCE STATE: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin document with startling detail how China’s Communist Party is striving for something new: a political model that shapes the will of the people not through the ballot box but through the sophisticated—and often brutal—harnessing of data.
Partners
Global China Hub
The Global China Hub researches and devises allied solutions to the global challenges posed by China’s rise, leveraging and amplifying the Atlantic Council’s work on China across its fifteen other programs and centers.
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) has operationalized the study of disinformation by exposing falsehoods and fake news, documenting human rights abuses, and building digital resilience worldwide.