The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates on a massive and non-stop business-scaled operation to capture elites in the countries it considers important. These operations have made a lot of progress across the world including substantial captures in the United States, according to former intelligence officers and experts.
“The Chinese Communist Party engages in [the] practice of elite capture. They put [an] immense amount of energy, [and an] incredible number of resources into targeting countries that are important to them. We are top of that list. And [they are] turning the elite in these countries into their will,” said Sam Faddis, retired CIA officer and Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in an interview on China in Focus, a show on NTD TV, Epoch Times’ sister media.
The Chinese elite capture has recently made a lot of news in different parts of the world with former intelligence officers like Faddis, and geo-political analysts especially, raising an alarm, and some calling it cognitive warfare.
“This is not science fiction. This is all day, every day, on an industrial scale. They have made a lot of progress in that regard in [the] United States. As sad as that is, we have a lot of people in positions of power that in one way or the other, now are inclined to help Beijing against the interests of Washington, D.C., and that is sick,” Faddis told the show’s host, Tiffany Meier.
In another interview on the Seattle-based the Discovery Institute, Scott S. Powell, Senior Fellow, at the Institute’s Center on Wealth, Poverty and Morality said that “elite capture” has been mastered by the CCP and these efforts are more successful in “subverting America” than the previous efforts by Soviet Communists.
“While the CCP uses front groups for propaganda, they have mastered all manner of techniques, with an emphasis on infiltration, to influence, compromise, and co-opt elites so as to “capture” them. Typical targets include university professors and scientists, media executives and reporters, and political and corporate leaders,” said Powell in an interview on Oct. 24.
Elite capture, according to Powell first developed in China where the rural elites used their authority and influence to “monopolize” the planning and management of public development projects for personal gain at the expense of the larger population.
Today, the CCP uses it as a strategy of expansion for the Belt and Road Initiate (BRI) in the developing world, and in destabilizing developed countries, particularly the United States, said Powell.
“With China running a multi-billion-dollar trade surplus with the United States for many years, it has a huge stockpile of U.S. dollars to facilitate elite capture through generous funding of bribery, but also through granting access and favors within China,” said Powell.
A former chairman of India’s Joint Intelligence Committee, S.D. Pradhan, on Dec. 19 raised a similar alarm about the Chinese intentions in an article in the Times of India where he called the cognitive domain the “sixth domain of warfare” and said such operations are planned in-depth after collecting the necessary data.
Read More: CCP Works on an ‘Industrial Scale’ to ‘Capture Elites’