Government should form a royal commission to probe foreign interference. Malaysians are too complacent or too busy fighting some made up racial/religious wars.
It’s a long running secret isn’t it, the elites only noticed english discourse, this overlaps with the malay-only speakers (inc ppl like me… 🙇♀️) who only gives coverage to Malay issue discourse. In the meantime, this sort of thing happened before re: Sri Lankan civil war - I think it’s an open secret how much the MIC ecosystem mingled with the Tamil tigers
what a non-inclusive ruling class does to a motherland 😔
Ooh, I know all these as I used to work under one of those papers 😆
Singapore-focused but this researcher I follow just posted this interesting thread - apparently there’s a taiwanese org that’s kick-started its own indexing of china’s influence in the world
Let’s put yourself into their shoes, and consider cultural exports and soft power to counter the information war and global dominance from the west. We here in major western media social platforms consumed the western narratives and living under the echo chamber too if viewed from their optics.
RFA is owned by the ‘U.S Agency for Global Media’ [1], and is a state-sponsored agency with yearly budget nearly $810 million (2022) [2]. RFA alone with approx. 253 staff received $39.5 million in 2021 [1], approx, not excessive but certainly something to run certain campaign to push their narratives. And then, there are Black Budget in their yearly government budget that estimated to be over $50 billion a year that are classified [4], usually for CIA and covert operations.
Try replace China with South Korea when considering the cultural exports and soft power dominance, the KPOP has certainly successfully influenced the Americans, but, the Americans have been doing it since we have televisions and movies, the spectacular Hollywood blockbuster action movies that always depict the Americans saved the world from all the odds, films like Transformers series, Top Gun, etc., that get to access and filming some actual US military equipment and compounds with the premise to always depict the US in a positive way, the DoD/Pentagon even has a department called DoD Entertainment Media Unit since the WWII. Some of the action movies were co-scripted from the DoD with movie studios [3].
Disclaimer: not shilling for CCP or China, but offered a critical thinking and perspective. What if the Truman Administration didn’t withdraw the support to KMT, and KMT won the civil war and is the current government of mainland China and all the SAR including Taiwan, and the United Nations recognized ROC as the legitimate government instead of PRC, and the CCP only control the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and some remote areas near Russia. Maybe today China under the KMT is still controlled by military junta (Leader of KMT Chiang Kai-shek, and his families), Lee Teng-hui probably never make it into the office, a strong ROC most likely attract rivalry from US similar to today PRC, and that’s certainly a problem for US and it makes good enemy for them to fund their military complex. Maybe Mao and Xi will be their allies. It’s all leverage.
PS: i am just daydreaming, creating content for this community, don’t take it seriously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–entertainment_complex
i enjoyed your input as it’s crucial for media literacy to consider one’s sources. now with all that said though, what would be your thought regarding the points in the report?
key distinction here - China isn’t just trying to project their image by way of bolstering their soft power, but they are also meddling with other countries internal affairs and in this context, using our media to change their perception.
Republic of China (Taiwan) has similar policy as well, under Tsai Ing Wen they are increasingly looking towards South East Asia ie. setting up schools, funds and scholarship. Malaysians when they visit Taiwan for example the machine would say “Welcome back to (motherland)”, education is heavily subsidised too for Overseas Chinese. But they stop short of meddling with local affairs ie. politics, news and media and mindfuck/influence people.
I would be looking into local political donation, uncover money laundering schemes and keep track of business transactions with China if i were the government.
