This line from an NYT op-ed yesterday by a senior PRC diplomat, talking about how the US has supposedly 'politicized' people-to-people exchanges, really stuck in my craw for the level of hypocrisy on display (thread) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/china-us-biden.html

In English, the phrase "people-to-people exchanges" carries the connotation of genuine, unmanaged contact between ordinary people, that helps to create better relation through unforced mutual understanding. This is the dynamic the PRC is accusing the US of upsetting.

But *according to the PRC party-state itself*, that English phrase does not reflect their understanding of what people-to-people ties are, or how they should be used. The Chinese phrase usually used to translate the English--"minjian waijiao"--means something different.

I'm going to quote directly here from a 2004 article by a senior PRC official in charge of people-to-people diplomacy:

我们讲的民间外交，是指区别于官方外交的民间国际交往。翻译成外文，通常用人民对人民的外交（People to People Diplomacy），这当然是正确的，但意思还不完整。在中文里民间的含义是与官方并列而在官方之外，因此就本来的意义而言，民间外交是一种非官方的外交。

"When we talk about minjian waijiao, we're referring to international ties between peoples, distinct from official diplomacy. When [minjian waijiao] is translated into foreign languages, often the phrase 'people to people diplomacy' is used. This is correct of course, but...

the meaning isn't complete. In Chinese, the connotation of 'minjian' is something that lies outside of officialdom, but still complementary to it. As such, owing to this connotation, minjian waijiao is a form of unofficial diplomacy."

The essay I'm quoting from (linked below) goes on to describe in great detail how minjian waijiao has long been managed and used by the PRC party-state as a means to achieve its political objectives...

...useful precisely because it is flexible and capable of reaching far beyond the staid constraints of normal diplomacy to influence other countries' official policies. https://web.archive.org/web/20190827190302/http:/www.cpaffc.org.cn/content/details25-22392.html

The stuff the NYT op-ed is complaining about--US efforts to stop inappropriate use of PRC students studying in the US by PRC diplomats and others--is the product of this party-state understanding of what "people to people" ties are, and how they should be used.

Because the party-state conceives of people-to-people ties as an instrument to be used to complement its own official diplomacy, it long ago constructed a well-resourced bureaucratic structure to make the instrumentalization of those ties a routine part of its diplomacy.

In the case of students in the US, the problematic entities are Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, state-directed and incentivized theft of US research and intellectual property, and a host of other problems that others have written about at great length.

The existence of these problems is not an accident. They exist because the PRC party-state made a policy choice to "politicize" normal people-to-people ties. The US response is just that: a response.

I'm not going to list here all the other inappropriate ways the PRC party-state tries to use its own people for official, semi-official, and non-official diplomacy, because, frankly, there's not enough room on the internet for it.

I wrote a whole report that gets into that and other problems with PRC diplomacy for @SecureDemocracy if you want to go deeper https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Friends-and-Enemies-A-Framework-for-Understanding-Chinese-Political-Interference-in-Democratic-Countries.pdf

If Fu Ying (the author of the NYT op-ed) is really so concerned about the US 'politicization' of people-to-people ties, maybe she should tell the people she works with that the party-state should stop trying to stick its nose into regular Chinese people's business.

cc @RushDoshi because of how consistent he's been in using the word 'hypocrisy' to describe of a lot of PRC diplomacy nowadays. It's a strong word, but it's accurate, in this and far too many other cases.