Abstract
The Commandant of the Marine Corps has identified the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an existential threat to the United States in the long term. To successfully confront this threat, the United States must relearn how to fight on the political warfare battlefield. Although increasingly capable militarily, the PRC employs political warfare as its primary weapon to destroy its adversaries. However, America no longer has the capacity to compete and win on the political warfare battlefield: this capacity atrophied in the nearly three decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Failure to understand China’s political warfare and how to fight it may well lead to America’s strategic defeat before initiation of armed conflict and to operational defeat of U.S. military forces on the battlefield. The study concludes with recommendations the U.S. government must take to successfully counter this existential threat.
Highlights
The Commandant of the Marine Corps has identified the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an existential threat to the United States in the long term
The PRC is fighting this war for global influence and control to achieve its expansionist China Dream.[4]
The PRC’s weapons include coercion, corruption, deception, intimidation, fake news, disinformation, social media, and violent covert operations that rely on physical assault, kidnapping, and proxy army warfare
Summary
The world has seen Beijing’s political warfare apparatus engaged in a massive global effort “aimed at redirecting blame [for the COVID-19 crisis] away from China and sowing confusion and discord among China’s detractors.”[11]. A 2018 Hudson Institute study provides an apt, if somewhat informal, description of PRC political warfare goals, target audiences, and strategies: With the United States, whose geostrategic power the Party perceives as the ultimate threat, the goal is a long-term interference and influence campaign that tames American power and freedoms, in part by limiting and neutralizing American discussions about the CCP. Liberal values such as freedom of expression, individual rights, and academic freedom are anathema to the Party and its internal system of operation.[62]. OCAO’s mission statement maintains that it works “to enhance unity and friendship in overseas Chinese communities; to maintain contact with and support overseas Chinese media and Chinese language schools; [and] to increase cooperation and exchanges between overseas Chinese and China related to the economy, science, culture and education.”[77]
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