Russian interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Election proved that foreign influence can threaten the fabric of our democracy. Both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence found that Russia conducted an extensive campaign, involving efforts ranging from hacking confidential email servers to the use of bots to spread misinformation on social media, all in an effort to help Donald Trump win the election. Many of the people closest to Trump were happy to accept that help–the Special Counsel found that up to 16 of his associates were connected with Russia during the campaign [1]. Given this, many are concerned about election interference in the upcoming presidential election, perhaps perpetrated by the Chinese government. It is likely that China would see a second Trump presidency as the lesser of two evils, and would thus seek to guarantee his return to office. If China were to interfere, this would be most possible through social media, which has already been used by Chinese organizations to artificially shape public opinion in the United States. The United States’ passage of a bill that forces the sale of TikTok within nine months, or risks a total ban, shows that American policymakers view election interference via this platform as a genuine possibility. 

While President Xi Jinping disagrees with both Trump and Biden’s Asia-Pacific policy, Xi likely sees a Trump presidency as the preferred alternative to Biden. China’s rapid economic growth has shown to be an avenue to political power, a resource that Xi aims to maximize as he leads the way through China’s rejuvenation. He seeks to define China’s national ethos as a crucial world power that will not be overlooked anymore, and an economic and military force that would rival the world’s most entrenched hegemons, like the United States [2]. In this way, China’s rise is positioned as an opposing force to the United States’ continuing global control, and China’s attempts at collaboration with the United States have been strained because of the confusing interpretations of the U.S.’ vacillating approaches towards managing its rise. China’s goal of economic prominence can be seen in initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), where China seeks to make itself the centerpiece of massive improvement projects worldwide [3]. Xi’s continued military advances into Taiwan and the South and East China Seas show steps taken toward military control of strategic territory [4]. Finally, Xi seeks to strengthen China’s relationship with its neighbors and become more of a leader in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN [5]. The political philosophy of realism predicts that China would need to expand its regional power over its neighbors and strengthen local alliances to balance the power of the United States' hegemonic role. Preeminent offensive realism scholar John Mearsheimer explains that China ought to establish its political and military dominance over its region, which can already be seen in the steps to rejuvenation like the BRI and military incursions in Taiwan and the South and East China Seas [6]. Mearsheimer suggests that the United States would attempt to create close relationships with allies in the region to stifle China’s growth and stunt Xi’s attempts at balancing power. In a realist explanation, China wants to keep the U.S. out of the region while growing its own power. The Biden Administration’s success in bolstering local allies limits China’s ability to grow for this reason. 

While both Trump and Biden seek to strengthen the United States’ global power while constricting China through tariffs, China would most easily cope with a second Trump presidency because of Trump’s isolationist policies and trade policies. Under Trump’s presidency, the United States levied a trade war against China that involved aggressive tariffs against Chinese goods in an attempt to stimulate U.S. production [7]. In the end, these tariffs succeeded in bringing down the U.S. trade deficit with China, but bore a heavy cost in job losses in the U.S. and rising costs to the American consumer, all without actually decreasing the U.S.’ trade deficit globally. While Biden still makes use of aggressive tariffs, as seen in his declaration of a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports in May 2024, the Biden Administration claimed to pursue a more holistic approach that would combine aggressive tariffs with limitations on China’s tech sector, all while strengthening relationships with U.S. allies [8]. This is illustrated by Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, which restricts China’s development of semiconductor technology and aims to maintain the United States’ dominance over the growing sector, a strategy that significantly limits China’s capacity for future economic growth because of the importance of semiconductor production to the modernizing economy [9].  While the impact of this policy has not yet been fully seen, many of China’s biggest semiconductor companies report layoffs and plant closures [10]. Economists estimate that these more targeted tariffs are more damaging to China’s economy than Trump’s policies. Additionally, Xi is likely worried about the Biden Administration’s capacity to use regional alliances to restrict China’s power in their own region [11]. As realism posits, China wants the United States to be a weak partner with East Asian nations. Biden’s use of alliances is potentially deadly to China’s rejuvenation, and when compared to Trump’s isolationism, Trump seems to be a welcome alternative. 

Xi’s worries about another Biden presidency explain why China has already been suspected of using social media to shape U.S. public opinion while gathering data from users in the United States to accurately influence the 2024 election. This represents a departure from previous policy given that in 2020, China publicly stated that they had decided not to become involved in the election, a fact the U.S. itself has verified [12]. When it comes to China’s history of election tampering, China has previously been less concerned about presidential elections and has typically focused more narrowly on local candidates who integrated Taiwan or any similar issue into their platform. While the Department of Homeland Security does not name specific candidates that have been targeted, they verify that China was involved in local elections in the 2022 midterms [13]. This shift has likely occurred in part due to the fact that China now sees the U.S. presidency as more relevant to its own goals in light of the restrictions imposed by the Biden Administration. The Chinese government has already been implicated in a multi-billion dollar media campaign that seeks to flood social media platforms with fake accounts designed to spread fraudulent information about anything from United States politics, commentary on the Chinese Communist Party, and American politicians and elections [14]. Meta has already reported that it has taken down hundreds of thousands of politically opinionated, but fake, accounts connected to the CCP in the past two years. This campaign, termed “spamoflage” is a clear example of how the Chinese government is able to invest in social media to shape election results in its favor. As social media becomes more accessible, it also becomes a more central news source. In Indonesia, presidential candidates identified TikTok as a battleground, as it is a main source of news for many Indonesian voters. Prabowo Subianto won the election, and garnered support through creating dancing videos on the app, despite being once known as a ruthless dictator [15]. Additionally, it has already been proven that TikTok is censored to shift conversations away from topics that may be sensitive to China; for example, for every 100 posts about Taiwan on Instagram, there are only 7 on TikTok [16]. With half of Americans getting their news from social media, apps like TikTok are ripe for becoming political battlegrounds in the U.S. [17]. Campaigns like spamoflage are relatively low cost and typically use AI bots instead of human labor and there are few barriers to entry when registering new accounts, meaning that the technique is easily scalable and has the opportunity to spread vast influence. 

Since Russia’s interference in the United States’ 2016 presidential election, U.S. spy agencies have been more readily investigating possible interference and publishing a limited scope of the findings. Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian hackers accessed voter data by breaching U.S. election systems and stealing voter information. Many of Trump’s inner circle were implicated in cooperating with Russia and welcoming their assistance, such as campaign chair Paul Manafort, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, and senior advisers like Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. However, it is unclear if Trump himself was aware of this [18]. Additionally, Russian agencies hacked the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton’s personal email account. This data was used to spread targeted propaganda on social media from fake accounts and even go so far as to stage fake events and rallies [19]. China aims to emulate Russia’s past goals; influencing campaigns that highlight the deep divisions in American politics [20]. Social media is a ripe environment for these strategies because it exploits the fact that many Americans rely on social media for their news, coupled with the fact that social media is far from perfect in terms of the way that it handles deliberation. While American spy agencies are more vigilant when tracking this interference in light of the 2016 breaches, the social media campaigns that China seems to become more invested in are cheap and highly effective in shaping public opinion. 

The fact that the United States government seems fixated on banning the use of the social media app TikTok, owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, suggests that United States policymakers view the app as a threat. In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that TikTok will be used to influence the 2024 election in the United States, citing the fact that TikTok accounts covertly run by the CCP have already targeted candidates in the 2022 midterm elections [21]. In April, President Biden signed a bill approved by Congress to remove the app from the app store or force a sale to a government-approved buyer [22]. This bill passed with bipartisan support on the basis that U.S. intelligence agencies believe that the app can be manipulated by China to spread misinformation, and because it makes it easy for Byte Dance to collect and store user information. This concern was intensified after TikTok was found to be tracking journalists and storing their information [23]. With the United States’ 2024 election on the horizon, TikTok’s ability to influence election results has shifted to the forefront of the government’s concerns regarding the platform. Because of this, a ban is wholly possible considering that such interference has already been documented in 2016 and in 2022, with an indication of its continuation into the future. 

The 2016 election was mired in fraudulent interference at the hands of Russia, and now in 2024, China’s mounting interest in the U.S. presidency is likely to encourage interference of its own. As Xi becomes more focused on elevating China to hegemonic world power, he hopes to tighten his grip on global politics by expanding his own economic and political influence, and he has identified a Trump presidency as an avenue to do so. With social media ripe for the spreading of information (and misinformation), the low cost of AI bots makes election interference all the more possible. The U.S. has identified this heightened risk in the platform of TikTok, an app so threatening that it has been banned in an unprecedented way. As the United States and China’s competition continues, China may emulate a subtler version of one of the United State’s infamous tactics to accomplish its own international objectives: election interference.