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July 26 - August 5, 2023
The second component, psychological warfare, was designed to sow dissent, disaffection, and discord among soldiers and the civilian population of competitors like the United States.
the goal of psychological warfare should be to “sap the enemy’s morale, disintegrate their will to fight, ignite the anti-war sentiment among citizens at home, heighten international and domestic conflict, weaken and sway the will to fight among its high level decision makers, and in turn lessen their superiority in military strength.”20
The third component of three warfares, legal warfare, involved the exploitation of international and domestic law to assert the legitimacy of Chinese claims.
Hanban instructed teachers in Confucius Institutes to discourage the discussion of issues that were politically taboo in China, such as the status of Taiwan, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre orchestrated by PLA forces, human rights, China’s prodemocracy movement, and the status of China’s beleaguered Uyghur population.
“by hosting a Confucius Institute, [universities] have become engaged in the political and propaganda efforts of a foreign government in a way that contradicts the values of free inquiry and human welfare to which they are otherwise committed.”
The Confucius Institutes were part of a broader effort by China to wage three warfares overseas. Many of these efforts were tied to the activity of China’s overseas United Front Work Department, or UFWD.
the UFWD attempted to protect and bolster the image of the Communist Party by monitoring and countering criticism overseas—often by recruiting or pressuring Chinese diaspora.
Zhang had become one of China’s leading military figures through political adroitness and unrelenting party loyalty. “What Xi now needs is not talent, but people who absolutely obey his orders, and Zhang is one of the people in his camp he can rely on,” said a senior PLA colonel.
While nominally adhering to a “defensive defense,” China’s foreign policy under Xi, Zhang, and other Chinese leaders shifted to “peaceful expansion.”
The 2013 Science of Military Strategy had cited Sun Tzu’s emphasis on fei duicheng (“asymmetric means”) against adversaries, emphasizing that China needed to “develop its special asymmetric, contactless, and nonlinear warfare style.”
The goal of Zhang and other Chinese leaders was to maintain uncontested Communist Party rule at home, restore China as the preponderant land and maritime power in Asia, become equal—if not superior—to the United States, and export China’s model of political control and a managed economy.58
In 2020, roughly $4 trillion in global trade passed through the South China Sea.1 Oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Malacca, which leads into the South China Sea, was nearly five times greater than in the Suez Canal in Egypt and eighteen times more than in the Panama Canal.2 The Spratly Islands also boasted significant untapped oil and gas reserves.
For Zhang, maritime security was essential for China.3 The 2015 Chinese defense white paper argued that China was increasingly engaged in a “maritime military struggle.”
the focus of China’s navy would “shift from ‘near-seas defense’ [jinhai fangyu] to the combination of ‘near-seas defense’ and ‘far-seas protection’ [yuanhai huwei].”4 The inclusion of far-seas operations indicated that China was attempting to project power outside of East Asia.
“First, they want to have significant influence, particularly in East Asia. Second, they want to expand their economic activity; they have a mercantilist view of the world. Third, they want to compete with the United States on who gets to set the rules of the global road.”
China seized territory in the South China Sea, conducted sophisticated cyber operations, developed an extensive Belt and Road Initiative to expand Chinese economic and political power, and attempted to influence individuals and companies inside the United States—from Hollywood notables to college students and professors.
In the South China Sea, China achieved a result almost as dramatic as Gerasimov and Putin’s annexation of Crimea: China seized the islands without firing a shot.
OVER A MATTER of weeks in early 2015, US intelligence analysts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency examined disturbing satellite images.
Mischief reef
Subi Reef, Hughes Reef, Gaven Reefs, Fiery Cross Reef, Cuarteron Reef, and Johnson South Reef.
To protect its interests, China employed a suite of irregular capabilities: coast guard cutters, vessels from the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia, and even fishing boats.
“China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”
With the support of Zhang, Chinese officials quickly played down the threat by using yulun zhan (“public opinion warfare”).
In 2016, an international tribunal at The Hague ruled against China’s claims to the Spratly Islands and other areas in the South China Sea.18 But Beijing refused to recognize the ruling and argued that the international tribunal itself lacked legal jurisdiction.
In the face of these actions, however, the Obama administration was inconsistent in responding to China. In 2016, Xi Jinping backed down after President Obama warned the Chinese leader there would be serious consequences if China claimed Scarborough Shoal. But the United States did not attempt to block Chinese ships from dredging the reefs.
The secretive 54th Research Institute was situated within the PLA’s recently created Strategic Support Force, which centralized China’s space, cyber, electronic, and psychological warfare missions.23
The Strategic Support Force combined technology and information systems together in an organization that was crucial for offensive operations.
Wu and his PLA colleagues obtained the full names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of a whopping 145 million Americans, as well as the driver’s license numbers for at least 10 million Americans.
As US attorney general William Barr remarked in February 2020: “This was an organized and remarkably brazen criminal heist of sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans.”27
In 2015, the FBI assessed that there was a shocking 53 percent increase in economic espionage against US companies from the previous year—and China was the main culprit.
Zhang had also established a reputation for integrity and aggressiveness in rooting out the pervasive corruption in China, including in the PLA.30
“Zhang is well known for his good character and sociability, which will help unify opinion to help Xi carry out his reforms,” said one Hong Kong–based military analyst.
Chinese leaders did not advertise it as irregular warfare. But it was—especially China’s use of economic assistance to pressure foreign governments to adopt favorable policies on such issues as Taiwan, Hong Kong, control of islands in the South China Sea, and the plight of Uyghurs in western China.
“Belts” referred to the network of land routes that connected China to Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and Europe. “Roads” referred—somewhat confusingly—to the maritime routes, including ports, that connected Chinese seaports to countries in the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, South Pacific, and Mediterranean Sea.
It was not illegal for Americans to participate in the program. “The Thousand Talents Plan is not traditional espionage,” the CIA’s Mark Kelton said to me. “But the Chinese are essentially trying to recruit people as agents of influence, as well as building their knowledge base on key technologies.”71
Since coming to power, Xi—with the support of Zhang and other leaders—attempted to expand Chinese power and weaken the United States and its international partners through a range of irregular activities: building islands through clandestine means, waging cyber espionage that targeted most Americans, coercing countries using transnational projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, expanding information and intelligence collection through China’s Digital Silk Road and Huawei, and co-opting US scholars and students through programs like the Thousand Talents Plan.
Although Zhang was one of the few Chinese military officers with any combat experience, his views on warfare had dramatically evolved since the late 1970s and 1980s when he fought Vietnam. Back then, warfare had been largely conventional. Now it was predominantly irregular and occurred daily, if not hourly.
As many Russians now understand, they did not lose on a conventional battlefield. They lost in the hearts and minds of Russians, Eastern Europeans, and others across the globe who became disillusioned with the disastrous performance of communism.
George Kennan was right, Panarin said: “It was Kennan, a person who lived in Russia for many years, who accurately defined the direction of the main attack in the information war against the USSR.”4
But the broader point is unmistakable: a growing body of Russian history now argues that the United States won the Cold War through irregular means.
National Security Decision Directive 75, “U.S. Relations with the USSR,” bluntly stated that US policy toward the Soviet Union would consist of three interrelated objectives: to reverse Soviet expansionism by competing on a sustained basis in all international arenas, to promote change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system, and to engage in negotiations with the Soviet Union (when feasible) that protected and enhanced US interests.15
“U.S. policy must have an ideological thrust which clearly affirms the superiority of U.S. and Western values of individual dignity and freedom, a free press, free trade unions, free enterprise, and political democracy over the repressive features of Soviet Communism.”
Moving forward, US foreign policy must be grounded, first and foremost, in protecting the freedom of Americans from external enemies, advancing US prosperity, and setting an example for governments and populations overseas.
One step is to build a twenty-first-century open-source information service with congressional aid. The United States should start by translating materials from its main competitors—such as China, Russia, and Iran—and making them publicly available.
In addition, the US government needs to increase the resources devoted to educating its diplomats, soldiers, and spies in Chinese, Russian, and Persian language, history, politics, and culture.
The issue is not whether to focus on conventional or irregular aspects of competition. Both are important, as Secretary of Defense Gates reminded me.32 The challenge, then, is to find an equilibrium.
Yet the United States today is far too heavily weighted toward conventional war.35
“We are building a military for the struggle we want to have. We are not building a military for the struggle we are going to have—and we are having right now.”43
In their professional education curriculum, military schools need to include more about Chinese, Russian, and Iranian irregular activity, as well as such issues as irregular warfare, influence operations, denial and deception, and economic coercion.
The United States needs to devote substantial resources and expertise in influence campaigns to compete directly with China’s three warfares (san zhong zhanfa), Russia’s active measures (aktivnyye meropriyatiya) and asymmetrical actions (asimmetrichnym), and Iran’s soft war (jang-e narm).
The US government lacks an integrated information campaign or organization to combat Russian, Iranian, and Chinese propaganda and disinformation.
