A republication and reassessment of a July 18, 2020 essay on censorship and surveillance under the Chinese Communist Party, Sino-Russian cyber operations, attempted theft of COVID-19 research, online disinformation, and the Japanese media frame that portrayed Japan as simply caught “between the two great powers of the United States and China.”

2020-07-18
A Surveillance State Without Freedom of Speech and Sino-Russian Cyber Warfare
A Critique of Japanese Media Framing the Chinese Communist Regime Merely as One of “Two Great Powers”
Original publication date: July 18, 2020
Review and republication date: July 23, 2026
Recently, I have often watched programmes broadcast by TV Tokyo.
However, TV Tokyo’s World Business Satellite and BS TV Tokyo’s BS News Nikkei Plus 10 are, to put it bluntly, entirely different.
BS News Nikkei Plus 10 is scarcely distinguishable from the reporting of NHK or the Asahi Shimbun.
Yoshio Arima of NHK’s News Watch 9 and a female presenter on the previous evening’s BS News Nikkei Plus 10 used almost exactly the same expression.
That morning, I realised that they shared a particular manner of framing the issue.
They both spoke of “what Japan should do between the two great powers of the United States and China.”
The wording was so similar that one was tempted to wonder whether they had been given the same conceptual framework from somewhere else.
In his essay Random Thoughts Under the Lamp, Lu Xun wrote, in substance, that the Chinese people had historically failed to secure recognition of their value as human beings and had, at best, been treated as slaves.
Present-day China is a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, in which freedom of speech is not recognised.
It is a country that has turned the surveillance and administrative control imagined by George Orwell into a twenty-first-century reality.
The following was taken from an article by Nihon Keizai Shimbun editorial writer Eiji Furukawa, published that day under the headline:
“China and Russia Go on the Offensive in Cyber Warfare: Espionage, Disinformation and Fears of Election Interference in the West, with Few Effective Countermeasures.”
Russia and China were going on the offensive against Western countries in the cyber domain.
Following the spread of the novel coronavirus, espionage and information operations conducted through social networking services had become increasingly conspicuous.
While Russia and China strengthened control over their own cyber spaces, they sought to destabilise democratic countries through cyberattacks.
Concern about interference in elections was also growing.
On July 16, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada issued statements condemning a Russian hacking group for mounting cyberattacks against research institutions developing COVID-19 vaccines.
They believed that Russian intelligence services were involved and that vaccine information had been targeted.
The United States had previously warned research institutions that China was attempting to steal information concerning vaccines and treatments through cyberattacks.
Both China and Russia were deepening their confrontation with Western countries and increasingly combining military and economic pressure with attacks in cyberspace.
Both countries were believed to maintain cyber units under their armed forces and intelligence agencies, while also involving private-sector and criminal hacking groups in their operations.
China’s cyber forces were said to number approximately one hundred thousand personnel and to have repeatedly stolen confidential information.
It was widely suspected that hacking incidents in 2020 targeting defence-related secrets held by Mitsubishi Electric and NEC had also originated in China.
Western authorities were also increasing their vigilance against information operations.
On July 16, the British government announced that Russian hackers had disseminated unlawfully obtained internal British government documents through social media in an attempt to interfere in the United Kingdom’s general election at the end of 2019.
The European Union reported that China and Russia were spreading conspiracy theories and false information around the world in ways that intensified the COVID-19 crisis.
In 2016, Russia interfered in the United States presidential election through cyberattacks and public-opinion operations conducted on social media.
Concern was growing in the United States Congress about possible Russian or Chinese interference in the presidential election scheduled for November.
Russia had been subjected to United States sanctions over what was described as malicious activity, including election interference, but had not reduced its operations.
Democratic countries faced inherent limits in their ability to defend themselves.
Following the interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, social-media companies strengthened their monitoring, but the struggle continued without a decisive conclusion.
Twitter had recently announced the suspension of a large number of accounts believed to be connected to the Chinese government or Russian authorities for distributing distorted or biased information.
A senior NATO official said that cyber defence ultimately depended on deterrence—showing an intention to retaliate and thereby persuading an adversary not to attack.
However, such a deterrence strategy was primarily designed for the defence of armed forces and infrastructure.
It could not prevent every individual act of espionage or information manipulation.
The repeated warnings issued to China and Russia by Western authorities also revealed a sense of frustration at their inability to develop fully effective countermeasures against cyberattacks.
Those were the principal points of Furukawa’s article.
Despite this record, Yoshio Arima repeatedly described China simply as a “great power,” without expressing serious doubt about the implications of that description.
The female presenter on BS News Nikkei Plus 10 used almost exactly the same conceptual framework the following evening.
The issue was not whether China possessed great economic or military power.
That was an undeniable fact.
The issue was that describing Japan as being “between the two great powers of the United States and China” obscured the fundamental differences between the two countries’ political systems, values and attitudes toward the international order.
For Japan, the United States is an ally that shares commitments to freedom, democracy, fundamental human rights and the rule of law.
China is a one-party state in which the Chinese Communist Party controls speech, journalism, the internet, the judiciary, education and politics.
Placing the two countries under the same general description of “great powers” and implying that Japan should occupy a position midway between them risks causing Japan to lose sight of the most important question:
What kind of country does Japan intend to be, and what principles does it intend to defend?
To me, their statements appeared to repeat, without sufficient examination, a conceptual framework favourable to the Chinese government.
Before asking how Japan should manoeuvre between two great powers, Japanese news organisations should explain clearly to their audiences the difference between a country that protects political freedom and a country that suppresses it.
Present-Day Conclusion
Calling China a “great power” is not in itself factually incorrect.
China has a vast population and economy, major military and nuclear capabilities, and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
It is therefore a great power in the conventional language of international politics.
The term “great power,” however, does not mean that a country respects freedom, democracy, human rights or the rule of law.
The possession of extensive military and economic power is entirely separate from the legitimacy of a political system or its conduct abroad.
When the Japanese media repeatedly speak of “Japan between the two great powers of the United States and China,” they create the illusion that Japan should remain equidistant from both.
Japan must maintain relations with both the United States and China because of geography and economic necessity.
That does not require Japan to treat a security ally and a one-party state that rejects liberal-democratic institutions as two equivalent countries.
Dialogue is necessary.
Trade is necessary.
Diplomatic communication is necessary.
But concealing fundamental differences is not dialogue.
Reporting only the abstract structure of a confrontation between two major powers, while failing to explain censorship, surveillance, cyberattacks, technology theft and information operations, is not neutrality.
It is an omission of essential reality.
At the same time, great caution is required before declaring a specific presenter or journalist to be an agent of a foreign government.
Bias in reporting can be criticised through statements, programme construction, the selection of evidence, the form of questioning and a sustained pattern of coverage.
Making an unsupported allegation of a secret foreign relationship would weaken, rather than strengthen, the credibility of the underlying criticism.
The proper question is not an unproven speculation about who issued instructions.
The proper questions are:
Why does the same conceptual framework repeatedly appear?
Why are one-party rule, censorship, surveillance, cyber activity and information operations pushed into the background?
Why are the freedom and democratic principles that Japan must defend relativised by the phrase “between the United States and China”?
It is that journalistic posture that must be examined.