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Science et ses Applications, cofounded by the French and PRC Science Academies, promotes stays in France for Chinese scientists. It does not list any Chinese sponsoring firm. Huawei has been a major donor to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), France’s famous mathematics institution. The Fondation Victor Segalen is a partnership between a French business school, ESCP, and China’s NDRC, and is sponsored by Huawei and a roster of French firms. Among the recent spate of Belt and Road Initiative conferences, one at IRIS, a Paris-based think tank, was sponsored by the PRC embassy in France.

Media

The PRC now controls the only Chinese-language print media in France. Its TV channels (plus the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV) are the only Chinese-language channels carried to France and its overseas territories. In the French-language media, China does not have a very strong position and the country’s officials deplore what they believe is negative reporting by French reporters. The PRC has had more success with the publishing world, where several books have appeared praising the Chinese model. The most noted example is François Jullien, a literature professor turned philosopher who emphasizes that China’s thought is “perpendicular to ours.” Jullien’s work is popular among China-oriented businessmen. Michel Aglietta, an anticapitalist economist, promotes China’s state-driven economy, while Philippe Barret, a former Maoist activist of the late 1960s turned government official and sovereigntist, published a book in 2018 titled “N’ayez pas peur de la Chine” (“Do not fear China”).

GERMANY

China has so far made only a few conspicuous efforts to exert improper interference in German politics, society, and business.1 Those that have occurred, however, deserve attention, and, coupled with the overwhelming resources dedicated to nominally legitimate influence activities, will demand a coherent counterstrategy over time.

Chinese influence activities in Germany seem sophisticated even though they currently do not appear very effective. The problem from the Chinese point of view is that German public opinion and its media are traditionally critical of the Chinese leadership. The Tiananmen Square massacre still plays an outsize role in Germans’ public perception of China as it fell on the same year that East Germany began to open up. Thus, instead of launching a PR campaign to play on German skepticism of the United States (for example), as China does elsewhere, Chinese agencies have so far confined themselves to: (a) targeting younger persons—those who have a professional or academic interest in China; (b) weakening the EU and thus subverting a crucial foundation of Germany’s influence; and (c) directing their major thrust at the one part

Appendix 2

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