Europe should be warier of China as it shifts from softer forms of communication to more aggressive ones that may soon include influencing elections, experts from the Central European Digital Media Observatory (CEDMO) warned one year before the EU elections.
While there is no evidence that China plans to get involved in the EU’s democratic processes, the institutions should be vigilant, CEDMO researcher Ivana Karásková has said.
“What we know from other countries – because China is most active in the Indo-Pacific sphere – is that it has actively tried to do so (interfere in democratic processes) by buying votes through pushing certain political candidates to the forefront, or discrediting critics of other political candidates through disinformation,” Karasková, who is also special advisor of European Commissioner Věra Jourová, told EURACTIV.cz.
“These things have already been described and have been happening – whether they will happen at the European level, we are not yet able to say, but apparently, it is good to be vigilant,” she added.
According to Karásková, one of the new risks is that China is beginning to target specific population groups, such as the extreme left or right, whose voters are unsatisfied with the current state of affairs.
Experts also warn that Central and Eastern Europe is now a useful laboratory for China to explore how to effectively exert its influence in a region where it has not traditionally operated.
For example, Chinese ambassadors across EU member states, in the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Latvia, have offered similar statements to the media in the case of the protests in Hong Kong, which they have sought to portray as an unpleasant obstacle to a “better future for Hong Kong”.
Similar cases occurred in other countries, such as Serbia and Finland.
China also tried to “infiltrate” the European public space through the media.
For example, the Chinese company CEFC bought a significant stake in the Czech media house Empresa Media. Subsequently, some of the media outlets under this house began to report exclusively positively on China compared to other media. After several months, CEFC withdrew from the media house.
(Barbora Pištorová, Aneta Zachová | EURACTIV.cz)
Read more with EURACTIV
Analyst says Berlusconi voters set to migrate to Meloni
Source: euractiv.com
