China’s Media Warfare seeks global totalitarian thought control

Editor’s Note: This article in the Sunday Guardian Live features an interview with Professor Kerry K. Gershaneck, author of CSP’s recent monograph, Media Warfare: Taiwan’s Battle for the Cognitive Domain.

Alexandria, Va.: In this edition of “Indo-Pacific: Behind the Headlines”, we speak with Prof Kerry K. Gershaneck. Prof Gershaneck, author of the influential book, Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting”, is a former US Marine officer with extensive national-level experience in strategic communications and counterintelligence.

He has been a Visiting Scholar (Taiwan Fellow) at the National Chengchi University in Taipei for more than three years and was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Thailand’s Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy and the Royal Thai Naval Academy for six years. We talk to him about the findings in his new book, Media Warfare: Taiwan’s Battle for the Cognitive Domain.

Q: You’ve recently published a book about China’s Media Warfare against Taiwan. What is Media Warfare and how does China’s Media War against Taiwan affect India?

A: Media Warfare is central to China’s goal of achieving totalitarian thought control in its quest for global dominance. Media Warfare involves weaponizing all forms of media to shape public opinion in order to weaken its adversaries’ will to fight while ensuring strength of will and unity on the Chinese Communist Party’s side. To this end, Beijing leverages all instruments that inform and influence public opinion, such as social media, newspapers, radio, movies, television programs, books, video games, education systems, and global media networks.

China’s Media Warfare against Taiwan is expansive. It entails means such as co-opting individual journalists and media organizations, Social Media Warfare that effectively serves as online terrorism, military psychological warfare, election interference, subversion of the education system, purchase of key opinion leaders, and coercion of the business community. Beijing exploits media across these broad fronts to disseminate a wide array of propaganda, misinformation, covert disinformation, and fake news.

India and other democracies will benefit from this book because Taiwan is often the test bed for China’s general Political Warfare operations. Media Warfare is a central pillar of China’s Political Warfare. Consequently, the Media Warfare strategies, tactics, and techniques that China finds effective against Taiwan will eventually be used in other countries. India and other countries would do well to study how China employs Media Warfare to try to undermine Taiwan’s democratic institutions, fracture national unity, demoralize the public and military, and create social instability in pursuit of its goal of annexing this sovereign country.

Armed with this knowledge and the recommendations in the book, India and democracies worldwide can better detect, deter, counter, and defeat China’s potentially lethal Media Warfare.

Q: How has China employed Media Warfare regarding the Covid-19 pandemic?

A: As the Covid-19 pandemic began to engulf China and the world, Beijing’s global Political Warfare apparatus aggressively attempted to deflect blame for the virus from China. Beijing generated false stories assigning blame for the virus to the United States, and used its media apparatus to discredit, divide, and scare those who attempted to properly investigate the origins of the outbreak. Concurrently, Beijing used the virus to intensify military and diplomatic pressure against Taiwan and attempted to demoralize and panic its people.

Beijing attacked Taiwan on a number of levels. For example, it aimed its Media Warfare apparatus directly at the people of Taiwan, with a disinformation campaign designed to spread panic and undermine support for the Tsai administration’s response to the outbreak. Early on in the pandemic, Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau reported that the vast majority of “fake news” cases in Taiwan related to the pandemic originated from the Peoples Republic of China.

Of particular interest, social media outlets aligned with China tried to use Covid-19 for voter suppression in the national elections in early 2020. For example, the theme of many Facebook postings was “beware getting pneumonia on election day” and “voting is risky.” These “friendly reminders” contained false allegations of a high number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Taiwan, with postings such as “Taiwan’s epidemic is out of control” designed to induce general panic and distrust.

At the military and diplomatic levels, while the world was distracted by Covid-19, Beijing ratcheted up its threats to take Taiwan by force as it massively increased its aviation incursions and other menacing military operations against Taipei. Media Warfare plays an important part of China’s intimidation strategy: Beijing uses its own propaganda to advertise the increased incursions as it conveys its threats and narratives via media coverage within Taiwan and globally.

Regarding military intimidation, one Media Warfare tactic China has employed is to get foreign publications to generate uncertainty and fear that Beijing may be pushed by “nationalist fever” of its citizens to invade Taiwan during this opportune time. This South China Morning Post headline is indicative: “Loud calls on social media urge Beijing to strike while world is busy with coronavirus crisis, but observers say the authorities do not want to be rushed.”

Beijing reinforced this political warfare gambit with a prominently highlighted Global Times article in May 2020 that asserted that, after three decades of Beijing espousing “peaceful re-unification,” the Chinese Communist Party policy no longer called for that reunification to be peaceful. To put a more blunt point to this “news”, Global Times then ominously threatened that military force remains a “final solution” for the worst-case scenario.

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