OPINION:
Late last March, the intelligence community’s Annual Threat Assessment startled observers of Taiwan Strait tensions by declaring that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not planning to invade Taiwan in 2027 and has no “fixed timeline” for annexing the self-governing democracy.
This apparent backtracking from the “Davidson Window” — Admiral Philip Davidson’s assessment that the PRC would be capable of invading Taiwan by 2021 — should not cause complacency, however.
The PRC has long been waging cognitive war, kindling skepticism of American commitment to Taiwan, using social media influencers to create societal division and promoting the inevitability of China’s rise and Taiwan’s annexation.
Prof. Kerry Gershaneck, a visiting scholar at Taiwan’s National Cheng Chi University, states that cognitive warfare encompasses a “systematic strategic attack on target populations to achieve whole-of-society mind superiority” aimed at achieving Chinese Communist Party (CCP) objectives “during both peacetime and combat operations.”
Sun Tzu’s Art of War states “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,” and cognitive warfare is consistent with a preference for winning without fighting.
That preference needs to be understood, however, in the context of CCP grand strategy to supplant American global leadership, sometimes called the 100-year marathon. Nor does such preference exclude military action. Cognitive warfare can thus be understood as a “softening up” of the target should an opportunity for decisive action present itself.
Kinetic warfare — especially a maritime invasion of Taiwan — nonetheless contains risks that may restrain the CCP.
The last major conflict involving the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was a short-duration, casualty-intensive 1979 ground invasion of Vietnam — the same year that the draconian one-child policy was formally decreed. A maritime invasion — where drone swarms darken skies and plow below the sea — would likely be exponentially higher. Given estimates that 70% to 80% of PLA soldiers are single male children, a full-on invasion of Taiwan would extinguish entire family lineages.
While the CCP does not care about human life — including PLA lives — it does care about regime stability, and such extinguishment threatens large-scale domestic unrest.
When coupled with concerns about the PLA’s own capabilities, as evidenced by compromised rockets attributable to upper echelon corruption and American military prowess demonstrated in Venezuela and Iran, waging non-kinetic war in the cognitive domain entails far less risk with potentially outsized rewards.
In 2003, the PRC’s Central Military Commission formally incorporated a “Three Warfares” strategy comprised of public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare as part of military doctrine.
Each of these three prongs have been applied toward Taiwan: propaganda-spouting social media influencers shape narratives about inevitable CCP victory, morale-eroding narratives promote skepticism about American commitment to Taiwan, and lawfare claims distort United Nations General Assembly 2758, which granted the UN China seat to the PRC but did not acquiesce to claims that Taiwan is part of China nor address sovereignty.
While Taiwan is the immediate target — as anchor of the first island chain restricting China’s navy from Pacific access should there ever be a shooting war CCP grand strategy ultimately necessitates the defeat of America.
How to overcome American power is set forth in a 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, written by two PLA colonels. Emphasizing asymmetric tactics, everything becomes a battlefield, including the cognitive domain.
What then can the United States and Taiwan do to counter an offensive designed to conquer the mind?
Beyond raising awareness of the CCP’s objectives and countering propaganda narratives with better and more accurate information — something Taiwan does well without censorship — the best defense is a good offense, targeting CCP vulnerabilities by engaging in truth-based counter-narrative warfare.
This includes exposing Party elites’ corruption (including members of Xi Jinping’s family, who squirrel away assets in the West) and distinguishing between the CCP and the Chinese people.
Other fruitful topics are:
• How the CCP inflicted calamities upon China’s populace from the Great Leap Forward to the Great COVID die-off
• Contrasting Taiwan’s democracy with mainland repression, as an example of “what might have been” had the Communists not won the civil war
• Spelling out the blood cost of war over the Taiwan Strait to the Chinese people, especially given American technological superiority recently demonstrated in Venezuela and Iran
• Targeting the fears of CCP members and PLA officers of purging by an increasingly paranoid Xi Jinping
• Questioning the legitimacy of CCP rule based on longstanding Confucian norms, as former premier Li Keqiang did before his untimely death
• Messaging directly to the Chinese people in languages like Tibetan and “dialects” such as Cantonese, which Beijing suppresses in favor of Mandarin.
But first one must overcome the willful blindness of business and political elites in the United States and Taiwan that continue to engage with Communist China as if it were a normal nation, not one that targets Taiwan first and ultimately American global leadership.
Only then can one begin a true counteroffensive for the Chinese mind.
• Piero A. Tozzi is senior director of China policy at the America First Policy Institute.
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