We cannot ignore China’s information warfare any longer 

An important but little-noticed hearing took place on Capitol Hill last week, before the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. The subject was China’s disinformation campaign against the West, and the chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) laid out the challenge. 

“In Xi Jinping’s view, the war has already started on the most important battlefield: your mind. The CCP calls it cognitive domain warfare, part of their larger political warfare strategy.”  

Gallagher quoted from a handbook of “military political work” that President Xi invokes to motivate his subordinates: “The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas … changing the way people think is a long-term process. Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend.” 

The regime that Xi and his “no-limits strategic partner,” Vladimir Putin, openly seek to “crumble” is nothing less than the rules-based post-World War II international system led by the United States. China and Russia, with their authoritarian allies, North Korea and Iran, see information warfare as a key component in their strategy.  

The United States and other Western countries have belatedly awakened to the more conventional aspects of the multi-dimensional challenge from communist China and its revisionist allies.  

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said last week that the U.S. and China are “in a competitive relationship” regarding their militaries and economies. He did not mention the intense ideological struggle that is being actively waged every day by Beijing without an adequate, broad-based response from Washington. 

The Trump and Biden administrations, recognizing the danger of China’s stranglehold over Western economies — and despite the objections of many in the business world — launched a campaign of de-coupling critical supply-chain components from China. Europeans, seeking to preserve economic relations with China in non-strategic areas, prefer to call it de-risking. 

In the military domain, the U.S, and its allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe are prudently coordinating their defense capabilities in response to Beijing’s massive military buildup and aggressive actions. Nevertheless, China continues to expand its capabilities and to maintain its strategy of intense pressure on the West, deploying the psychological element of a new Cold War.  

Chinese leaders intend to achieve their objective not simply through economic entanglement and military coercion but by destroying the West’s will to resist. “The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas.” 

While Xi’s handbook was intended as guidance for China’s leadership, it contains powerful messages for the West. Washington and its allies once recognized the decisive role that the dissemination of truthful information plays in the face of existential challenges from hostile regimes. The campaign of speaking democratic truth to totalitarian power and to oppressed populations was instrumental in winning the original Cold War. Across U.S. administrations, that strategy needs to be resuscitated to win the current fateful challenge from the world’s leading authoritarian powers. 

Xi and his colleagues know how glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (political restructuring) brought down the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which is why they are tightening their grip rather than relaxing it. It was why, post-Mao and pre-Xi, Deng Xiaoping, that “great reformer,” ordered the People’s Liberation Army to use its tanks and guns against the millions of students and workers gathered peacefully in Tiananmen Square and hundreds of other Chinese cities to plead for a modicum of political reform.  

The Chinese Communist Party’s visceral fear of the Chinese people is manifested in every aspect of Xi’s rule and has reached new heights of suspicion and paranoia. Exploiting that vulnerability presents the West with a far safer, non-kinetic way to influence positive change in China’s communist government — something Richard Nixon envisioned in 1967 when he wrote that for the world to be safe, “China must change.”

The Chinese people, like the East European and Russian populations before them, are America’s natural and necessary allies against the system that oppresses them and endangers the world. Washington’s moral and ideological support for the populations subjugated by Soviet communism was a key to their peaceful liberation from totalitarianism. 

Instead, as Gallagher and his witnesses showed, China wages Cold War II against the West and largely has the information arena to itself. The disparity in access to the Chinese and American publics shows the one-sided Cold War that is underway.  

It was evident in the juxtaposition of two points in the testimony of Miles Yu of the Hudson Institute. He told the committee that, from its inception, Twitter was blocked from China. Yet, he also noted that China’s TikTok is rampantly deployed in America as “a particularly powerful tool for the CCP to maximize their chaos narrative of American democracy, and tout China as a guarantor of peace and stability.”  

As Gallagher noted, “Cognitive warfare is not something we tend to think about here in the West. Sure, we have ideas like soft power, but they’re not a national strategy. We don’t really do propaganda here. … How do we fight back on the battlefield of people’s minds while staying true to our values?” 

We knew how to do that during the Cold War. Fighting communist lies and siding with the people against their tyrannical rulers was, by definition, being true to our own values. Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Natan Sharansky all publicly attested to the tremendous spiritual sustenance America’s open moral support provided the dissident movements in their peaceful resistance to despotism. 

Ronald Reagan welcomed the war of ideas as a safer and more rational alternative to a shooting war between the United States and the Soviet Union. When Soviet leaders came to the U.S., they were always free to engage with ordinary Americans. In return, Reagan insisted that when he visited the Soviet Union for official meetings, he would also be allowed to address the people directly, including students and Soviet dissidents.  

It is unimaginable that under Xi Jinping, such access would be freely allowed today — but U.S. leaders don’t even use their considerable negotiating leverage to demand it. 

Ambassador Burns also said in his interview that “No one in his right mind wants a war between America and China.” But the way to avoid that catastrophe is to engage in and win the information war China is already waging against us. 

“The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas.” 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.