How Communist China does your thinking for you

Editor’s Note: CSP Senior Fellow Grant Newsham’s new book, When China Attacks: A Warning to America, is available for purchase now on Amazon, click here to learn more.

When China talks about winning without fighting, it essentially means without us fighting back. And that comes down to getting into our heads and disabling us from the inside.

On November 28, 2020, Di Dongsheng, vice dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin University in Beijing, gave a videotaped lecture in which he said:

Why did China and the U.S. used to be able to settle all kinds of issues between 1992 and 2016? It’s just because we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence . . . for the past thirty years, forty years, we have been utilizing the core power of the United States.

He went on to say he was miffed when Donald Trump took office. China’s friends in Washington and on Wall Street couldn’t get the U.S. administration to back off from its efforts to challenge China like they had with previous administrations. “During the U.S.-China trade war, [Wall Street] tried to help, and I know that my friends on the U.S. side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t do much.”

Professor Di had higher hopes for the new Biden Administration: “But now we’re seeing Biden was elected, the traditional elite, the political elite, the establishment, they’re very close to Wall Street.” Perhaps he had reason to be optimistic—given the number of new appointees (many of them Obama Administration veterans) who came from “old friend” consulting firms that had serviced PRC clients.

Peter Schweizer’s books include detailed accounts of Chinese influence in Washington, D.C., highlighting the psychological dominance China has accumulated over many years. This has resulted in U.S. policies and actions (or inactions) in Beijing’s favor.

The Most Important Warfare

Ultimately, psychological warfare is the most important of the political warfare techniques, so we will look at it first. Chinese psychological warfare seeks to change an opponent’s thinking and behavior in a way that is favorable to PRC interests and objectives. Through non-kinetic means, it aims to weaken the opponent’s will and ability to resist. Successful Chinese psychological warfare makes the other side more accommodating and less willing or able to resist. There is a point at which, even if you realize the danger and are willing to “go kinetic,” you think there is no point—it’s futile. It doesn’t matter how big a stick you have if you aren’t willing to use it.

When China talks about winning without fighting, it essentially means without us fighting back. And that comes down to getting into our heads and disabling us from the inside. Most people have heard of psychological operations, or psyops.

Many of us think we are too smart, too well educated, and too discerning to be influenced by psychological warfare. But if you’ve ever said or thought any of the following, you’ve been influenced by Chinese psyops:

• COVID-19 couldn’t possibly have come from a Chinese laboratory
• China wants to reunify with Taiwan
• The United States must have China’s help on climate change, North Korea, and so forth
• We simply have to be invested in the China market
• China won’t like it
• To make China an enemy, treat it like one
• How can I criticize China, given what the West has done?
• China is no longer communist. It is capitalist.
• Criticizing the CCP is racist
• China’s rise is “peaceful” and “inevitable”
• Chinese culture isn’t compatible with democracy
• China is militarizing/aggressive/expansionist because of the trauma of a century of humiliation
• Fentanyl is just payback for the opium wars
• China is not expansionist. It has never attacked its neighbors.
• China is just doing what all great powers do
• We welcome a strong China—the only thing worse is a weak China with nuclear weapons
• You can’t say that about China! You will offend Chinese people

All of these downplay or excuse threats posed by the People’s Republic of China and justify inaction, lethargy, or compliance in the face of outrageous, inhumane CCP behavior. It’s all part of being conditioned to think the PRC is either not a threat or it cannot be resisted, as that will only make things worse.

Psychological Warfare and the Military

If you didn’t pass the test, don’t worry. Neither did America’s premier warfighters, the U.S. Marine Corps. At military exercise Dawn Blitz 2013, for the first time ever, the Japanese sent a small amphibious group to Southern California to train with the Marines and the U.S. Navy. Beijing was unhappy.

I was quoted in the press:

Colonel Grant Newsham, who is the Marine liaison to the Japanese military, said improving [Japan’s] military training was essential to strengthening the United States Asia-Pacific strategy. ‘If the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that when democracies are able and willing to defend themselves it preserves peace and stability. Most Asian countries welcome—even if quietly stated—a more capable (Japanese force) that is also closely allied to U.S. forces,’ Newsham explained to the Associated Press.

Seemed pretty uncontroversial—just a basic reporting of facts. However, the Marine Corps ruling class and its public affairs commissars went berserk.

“You can’t say that!”

“The Chinese will be mad!”

“They will think we’re containing them.”

If the United States Marines were too scared to say something that might upset the Chinese Communists, you knew PRC psychological warfare was working well. How well? Five years earlier, the Marine Corps had fallen for Beijing’s assurances that it had peaceful intentions, and dispatched U.S. Marine commandant, General James Conway, to visit the Chinese Marine Corps. He gave a speech encouraging the PLA Marines to master their profession. Unfortunately, they took his advice.

Too much of the American defense establishment has been conditioned over the years (with Chinese help) to believe that it faced no real threat from the PRC, and that engagement and understanding would solve any problems. America’s political class wasn’t much different, but had even more of a preference for accommodation. The American business and financial classes were mostly in the bag for China—lulled by Chinese promises of access to the lucrative China market.

To its credit, the Marines (and the rest of the U.S. military) have mostly awakened to the Chinese threat in recent years. But it took them a while. In the meantime, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army pulled off the biggest, fastest defense buildup since World War II—and probably in history. And they haven’t stopped.

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