My colleague @fryan's comments for WSJ about the White House's release of files relating to the 2020 election: “Beijing’s appetite for bulk data on foreign populations is well documented. Much American voter data is legally purchasable in the first place,” said Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based think tank. “But it’s very important to distinguish influence operations, which target opinions, from interference, which targets the machinery of voting,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen nothing around President Trump’s claims that bridges the gap between holding data about voters and actually manipulating votes.” wsj.com/world/china/trumps-a…

I increasingly find that my primary role in the "China influence" space these days is to debunk a lot of very, very poor quality "China influence" research reports that have been coming out. I don't think it would be an overreach to call this slate of reports "China influence slop." But such a term is too kind, because it fails to indicate that these reports are primarily motivated by the desire to delegitimize grassroots American organizating by attempting to associate them with "hostile foreign forces" — a tactic widely used by the CCP to delegitimize grassroots Chinese civil society whenever it finds such movements inconvenient. Let me start with a couple recent ones: — The reports from Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future which have led House reps to call for an investigation into anti-data center organizing — And this latest one about how China is supposedly bankrolling climate activism at the University of California system and thereby acting to "shape California’s climate and energy policies." I can demonstrate, very easily, that these reports are 1) exceedingly poor quality as China influence reports go and 2) primarily and overwhelmingly motivated not by a desire to uncover China's influence (and thus to preserve the integrity of US civil society), but rather to delegitimize what are very obviously organic US movements (and thus to compromise the integrity of US civil society) Reports like these represent an anti-democratic abuse of the concept of China influence research, which denies agency to real Americans. These reports, given both their methods and their political goal, are also a form of disinformation and propaganda, very similar to how China paints Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters as stooges of America. And finally, these reports make a mockery of actual, high-quality China influence research. This must stop now — and journalists reporting on this style of report should do so with the highest degree of journalistic professionalism and scrutiny.

Read my latest for @nytimes , together with my colleague Dr. Jennifer Wong-Leung, featuring our latest ASPI research: Shutting out China’s best minds will only push them into a homegrown Chinese research ecosystem that is already eclipsing American universities.