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[OPINION] Going viral: It doesn’t matter if nobody believes China

Mark Payumo

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[OPINION] Going viral: It doesn’t matter if nobody believes China
'If the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) understands that it cannot master the world, the world can master the CCP and China'

The following essay was first published in The Strategic and Warfare Studies Initiative’s official site

The world will never be the same after COVID-19, not because people sheltered in place and reacquainted themselves with traditional family bonding, but because China opened a new front in information warfare. It is global in scale and one that Beijing has laid the groundwork for a decade prior to the pandemic. As it unravels, it underscores one fact that we already know: that the world continues to fail in responding to Chinese global statecraft that may threaten civil liberties as we know it.

Information warfare precisely poses this threat, where the receiving end of damages is primarily a nation’s populace, the government, and its military, arguably in that order. The 21st century has introduced new rules of warfighting where kinetic military movement has become merely secondary to achieving victory. Employment and protection of information flow is paramount.

What is information warfare?

Adding insult to injury is that both in and out of military circles there is a potpourri of different definitions of the term “information warfare.” But one that perhaps lends itself to effortless appreciation is what Dan Kuehl of the National Defense University refers to as “a conflict of struggle between two or more groups in the information environment.” As the Xi Jinping Thought guides Beijing to “open up and advance theoretical, practical, and institutional explorations,” it is likely that China subscribes along these lines with Chinese characteristics.

The stark ideological contrast between China and the US, along with the world’s democracies, is common knowledge. But before the pandemic, the lure of new money from China was becoming increasingly impossible to resist. 

In the middle of the US-China 5G controversy, London decided in January 2020 to allow Huawei to take part in their country’s 5G mobile infrastructure, even as it implies that the Chinese company is a “high-risk” vendor. On the same month just days later, Italy – the hardest hit by the pandemic with over 14,000 deaths as of this writing – declared the year 2020 as the China-Italy Year of Culture and Tourism, supposedly a year-long celebration of half a century of China-Italy diplomatic ties that brought considerable Chinese tourist spending in the country. In 2019, it exceeded $720 million, a 40.8% year-on-year increase.

Expeditionary information campaign

Given Beijing’s long history of employing its propaganda machinery to achieve strategic ends, this was certainly a narrative that it had an upper hand in and would logically desire to maintain. No other country has such a preoccupation on preserving national unity as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although Beijing may have succeeded in brainwashing its people into forgetting the Tiananmen Square massacre, the world does not.

Rightly so, spreading misleading information through propaganda on a global scale is relatively new territory for the CCP. Nevertheless, it appears that it has no choice given how it lost face in a series of indictments: concealment of the outbreak’s extent; underreporting; cover-up of asymptomatic cases that tested positive for COVID-19; and selling defective test kits and substandard face masks to various countries. (READ: US report accuses China of covering up coronavirus numbers)

Unlike domestic brainwashing, influencing global narratives proves to be more complicated, and we have seen the CCP’s global information warfare sputter as it shifts between Italy and the US in deflecting blame for the pandemic. As Beijing arrives on the global information front line, however, they came prepared, notably with valuable experience from their repeated information attacks on Taiwan over the years in order to influence the latter’s political landscape. This also includes their build-up of forces on social media that is orchestrated by Chinese online marketing firms, at times involving entrepreneurs with previous work experience inside Beijing’s foreign propaganda department.

Twitter is well aware of China’s influence operations. They have suspended 5,000 suspected Chinese state-controlled accounts and released data about them. ProPublica has analyzed and tracked millions of interactions between 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts with an interrelated network of more than 2,000. (READ: China expels US journalists in biggest crackdown in years)

It doesn’t matter if nobody believes China

Going beyond subtle manipulation on social media, Chinese diplomats have ostensibly been deployed on the information trenches as the information environment outside China’s borders is considerably hostile to the CCP. But for the Chinese who are members of a society that has existed for thousands of years, they think in fundamentally different time scales. They view history as a cyclical process of decay and rectification and they can be expected to grow in harmony with the global information landscape rather than completely master it.

So it doesn’t matter if nobody believes China. They would logically expect that soon enough it will no longer matter that COVID-19 came from Wuhan along with their illicit wildlife trade. After all, the World Health Organization rightly urges that disease names may not include geographic locations such as cities, countries, regions, and continents.

Everything will normalize under the context of Chinese benevolence to the world. The charm offensive will then continue with Chinese technology giants such as Huawei leading the charge, who has direct involvement with the CCP’s human rights violations and surveillance against the Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Lee Kuan Yew assured that America – the world’s best counterweight to China – will be displaced in the western Pacific, but not in the world. But even this world role is increasingly becoming complicated as evidenced by the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) acquiescence to Beijing following Daryl Morse’s “improper remarks” noted by the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). The CBA pays $300 million to stream the NBA in China.

The world can master China

Nonetheless, there is a light at the end of the tunnel so long as the world’s democracies pursue the following: give Taiwan a voice as a world model for countering Chinese information attacks; uphold freedom of speech and the press; counter Chinese economic stranglehold by diversifying the global supply chain; and act on reputable studies that map China’s electronic surveillance and employment of artificial intelligence.

If the CCP understands that it cannot master the world, the world can master the CCP and China. At the same time, the leader of the free world must decouple itself from the false illusion of a durable Pax Americana. Given the world community’s differing versions of world order, what we now have is a durable disorder.

Washington must begin to reimagine national and global security in longer time scales, one where the Chinese have been present for millennia. Real threats to the free world whether a pandemic or the prospect of war have demonstrated that a bipartisan consensus is possible, and that political polarization can converge towards the center. Given China’s domestic challenges, there is a real chance that eternity will favor freedom, and not socialism and communism with Chinese characteristics. – Rappler.com

Mark Payumo is an international security analyst. He is a former Philippine Army Special Forces Officer and graduated from the Philippine Military Academy in 2006.

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