U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) this week re-introduced the Sister City Transparency Act, a bill aimed toward addressing geostrategic scheming, particularly by China.
“Sister cities” are municipalities that enter into diplomatic relationships with localities abroad to facilitate cultural and economic exchange. But, the senator told The Tennessee Star, China is using these arrangements to advance propaganda and exert political pressure.
Her legislation would direct the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to generate a report analyzing the extent of these risks, advising American communities on how to address them and suggesting best practices to make these partnerships transparent. Senators Roger Marshall (R-KS), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Mike Braun (R-IN), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), and Steve Daines (R-MT) are co-sponsoring the bill which was initially proposed last session. U.S. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX-21) is offering a companion bill in the House of Representatives.
“What we’re asking [the GAO] to do is to identify the oversight practices and processes that communities should implement to mitigate the risk of foreign espionage or spying or economic coercion with these sister-city partnerships,” Blackburn said, “and really review the extent to which foreign communities are using these partnerships to conduct malign activities whether it is something with academics or with research and development or economics or our military complex….”
The senator said her continuous work on China’s threats to human rights and American security alerted her to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) increasing investment in “soft propaganda” to make its world-stage presence seem benign. She noted that part and parcel of this strategy had been the establishment of “cultural centers” known as Confucius Institutes, particularly at American universities and other schools.
In reality, she said, these centers have been sites where significant espionage by CCP adherents has taken place. Institutions as politically diverse as the hard-left New Republic magazine and the right-leaning Heritage Foundation have treated this as a major concern. Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee has worked to end schools’ housing of these Confucius Institutes. In 2021, the University of Tennessee in Knoxville closed the one that used to exist there.
Blackburn suggested sister cities are another apparent tool the CCP uses to promote its ideology abroad. The United States maintains roughly 1,800 such partnerships with cities in various nations. One hundred and fifty-seven of those accords involve Chinese locales. Two Tennessee cities have Chinese sister cities: Nashville (with Taiyuan since 2007) and Chattanooga (with Wuxi since 1982).
“We became aware that, sometimes, what [China] would do is try to get participants in these programs to agree with China on policy like the ‘One China’ policy [denying autonomy to Taiwan] and they were using it as a way to rewrite their history,” she said. “As the CCP admitted that their past global dominance was depending on soft propaganda, we began to look at this more closely.”
Blackburn cited the example of Prague, Czech Republic, to show how China reacts to dissent from a sister city. Shanghai cut its sister-city accord with Prague after the former would not honor the One China policy.
The senator insisted that America show resolve in scrutinizing sister-city arrangements and in other aspects of China’s global posture. Recently, she has championed the congressional effort to ban the China-based video-sharing application TikTok, which has been revealed to have aided the CCP in monitoring numerous individuals in America.
“They’re [China] quite aggressive,” she said. “They’re very emboldened right now because they see [the Biden] administration as weak. Because they see it as weak and because they are so aggressive, they feel as if they can use this time to really push forward their agenda.”
– – –
Bradley Vasoli is a writer at The Tennessee Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Marsha Blackburn” by Marsha Blackburn.
