China (Washington Insider Magazine)— Last week on Capito Hill, a necessary but little-noticed hearing occurred. House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has participated. The issue was China’s disinformation movement against the West. The chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, spoke out about 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 mentioned from a handbook of “military-political work” that President Xi invokes to encourage his aides: “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.”
Chinese President Xi and his “no-limits strategic partner,” Vladimir Putin, plainly seek to “crush” nothing less than the rules-based post-World War II international system led by the United States. China and Russia, with their autocratic allies, North Korea and Iran, see information warfare as a crucial element in their approach.
The US and other Western nations have belatedly aroused to the more traditional factors. These include multi-dimensional challenges from communist China and its revisionist partners.
Last week, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said that the U.S. and China are “in a competitive relationship.” This statement was following their militaries and economies. He did not cite the extreme ideological struggle that Beijing is actively waging daily. There is no satisfactory, broad-based response from Washington.
The Trump and Biden administrations recognized the threat of China’s stranglehold over Western economies. Despite the complaints of many in the business world, it launched a campaign to decouple vital supply-chain parts from China. Europeans, aiming to maintain economic ties with China in non-strategic dimensions, call it de-risking.
In the military realm, the U.S. and its allies are prudently harmonizing their defense abilities. It is in reaction to Beijing’s enormous military buildup and aggressive acts. However, China continues to develop its abilities and to support its strategy of intense pressure on the West. It includes deploying the psychological component of a new Cold War.
Chinese leaders plan to acquire their objective not simply via economic entanglement and military pressure. They prefer conquering the West’s will to fight. “The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas.”
Xi’s handbook was planned to guide China’s leadership. It includes powerful notes for the West. Washington and its allies once acknowledged the decisive role of communicating truthful information. The movement of speaking democratic truth to totalitarian power and persecuted populations was instrumental in succeeding the original Cold War. Across U.S. administrations, that plan needs to be renewed to win the recent fatal challenge from the world’s guiding authoritative powers.
Gallagher and his observers showed that China waged Cold War II against the West and especially had the information theater to itself. The difference in access to the Chinese and American public offers the ongoing one-sided Cold War.
Moreover, It was apparent by comparing two topics in the testimony of Miles Yu of the Hudson Institute. He informed the committee that, from its beginning, Twitter was blocked from China. Yet, he also stated that China’s TikTok is violently deployed in America as “a powerful tool for the CCP to maximize their disorder description of American democracy and praise China as a guarantor of peace and stability.”
Gallagher further stated, “Cognitive warfare is not something we tend to think about here in the West. We have ideas like soft power, but they’re not a national strategy. We don’t do propaganda here. … How do we fight back on the battlefield of people’s minds while staying true to our values?”
Ambassador Burns also expressed in his interview, “No one in his right mind wants a war between America and China.” But the route to avoid that disaster is to entertain and defeat the information war China is already waging against the USA.