China’s Political Warfare: The Fight for Taiwan on the Information Battlefield
China is at war. While annexing Taiwan is China’s immediate objective, defeating America is its ultimate goal. General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly stated his intent to “reunify” Taiwan with China. A successful takeover of Taiwan would grant China a power projection platform into the Pacific, threatening America’s allies and partners. It would also challenge the United States in the long-term, threatening to displace the U.S.-led rules-based international order.
To achieve these ambitions, China wages political warfare against Taiwan and the United States. Political warfare is “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of [a major kinetic] war, to achieve its national objectives” (i.e., from using economic coercion to employing propaganda campaigns), and it is inextricably linked with information warfare. On the information battlefield, China spreads propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation; sows discord within democratic societies; and exerts transnational repression.
China’s political warfare poses an existential threat. It is designed to defeat both countries without fighting a major kinetic war—specifically, without Taiwan and America fighting back. China’s victory ultimately means destruction of democratic governance, freedoms, and sovereignty of both Taiwan and the United States.
Last October, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability reported that the U.S. government is unprepared to “identify, counter, and deter” China’s political warfare. As America prepares to defeat China’s kinetic warfare, it must concurrently prepare to defeat China’s political and information warfare. Failure to prepare allows China to continue unabated its elite capture; malign influence and interference; and expansionist aggression, thus threatening Taiwan, the United States, and other democracies around the world.
This article addresses China’s political warfare against Taiwan and the United States and provides recommendations for the new Trump administration on how to counter and defeat China’s political warfare.
Target: Taiwan
China intends on subjugating Taiwan and uses political warfare to undermine Taiwan’s sovereignty. China’s political warfare against Taiwan is a party/state-civil society effort, directed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP’s modus operandi is to generate propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation to divide and conquer adversaries. Its political warfare against Taiwan is broad and includes information warfare, cyber warfare, media warfare, legal warfare, gray zone operations, hybrid warfare, and cognitive warfare.
China overtly and covertly influences a multitude of actors to do its bidding through united fronts, a Leninist strategy that involves “co-opting,” “demoralizing,” and “subverting enemy elites.” The CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Political Work Department plan and coordinate influence operations, to include elite capture and deception. Party/state-controlled media outlets like Xinhua News Agency and PLA Daily disseminate propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.
The CCP has reportedly co-opted Want Want snack company chairman Tsai Eng-meng, who owns a major media outlet called China Times. Outlets such as China Times publish pro-China content and censor information critical of the CCP. China targets the Taiwanese population via social media platforms, and uses content farms, LINE (a popular communication app in Taiwan), TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube to spread propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. Chinese so-called netizens and the “50-Cent Army” flood the cyberspace with propaganda. Co-opted YouTube personalities parrot propaganda, by stating, for example, that Taiwan is a part of China or that China is not committing genocide against the Uyghurs.
Narrative Building
China builds narratives that instill fear, create confusion, and sow the seeds of doubt among the Taiwanese. Such narratives include that the previous “independence-leaning” Tsai Ing-wen administration was not legitimate, the “reunification” of Taiwan with the mainland is inevitable, and Taiwan cannot count on America in the event China invades it.
China desires to increase support for “re-unification” within Taiwan and uses cognitive warfare to stoke fear and confusion within the Taiwanese people. For example, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing influenced domestic and foreign news outlets to publish articles postulating that the PLA may invade Taiwan while major world powers were distracted with controlling the pandemic’s spread.
Currently, the most salient narrative is “America Skepticism Theory,” which the CCP uses to drive a wedge between Taiwan and America. The narrative asserts that the United States exploits Taiwan as a “tool” against China and will “abandon” Taiwan in an event of war. To undermine U.S. credibility, China points to examples of America’s unreliability, such as its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. These narratives impact the Taiwanese people’s trust in the United States. Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies “American Portrait” survey indicated roughly an 11 percent decrease in trust of the United States among Taiwanese respondents between 2021 and 2022. While the survey did not definitively conclude reasons for the decrease, it seems likely that China’s political/information warfare played a role in undermining public trust in America’s security commitments.
Election Interference
China’s political warfare against Taiwan goes farther than just building narratives: it also attempts to delegitimize democratic processes, institutions, and elected officials. China invests enormous resources to interfere with and influence Taiwan’s elections. That Taiwan is a vibrant democracy poses an existential threat to the CCP. In the 2018 midterm elections, the UFWD propped up the pro-China candidate Han Kuo-yu from the increasingly pro-unification Kuomintang in his bid for mayor of Kaohsiung. Through mass media campaigns, fake social media accounts, and infusion of non-attributable funding through united front organizations, Han was elected mayor of this traditional Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) stronghold. In the 2020 presidential elections, the UFWD propped up Han against incumbent President Tsai. When Han lost, China led a disinformation campaign claiming that the election results were skewed in President Tsai’s favor.
In the leadup to the 2024 election, China used misinformation and disinformation campaigns to discredit the DPP presidential nominee Lai Ching-te as a “separatist” who heightens cross-strait tensions that will lead to war. These campaigns likely involved the use of generative AI to create false personas and deep fakes that afford the image that “reunification” viewpoints are more widespread than they actually are. However, by electing Lai as president the Taiwanese demonstrated to China that they reject “reunification.”
Transnational Repression
As part of its global campaign to crush criticism and dissent, China executes pervasive and brutal transnational repression. Its targets include civil liberties activists and diasporic communities like the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Chinese Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners. For example, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in San Francisco in November 2023, the CCP funded and coordinated pro-CCP demonstrators, who violently attacked pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets. Further, enabled by digital colonization of Huawei and other enterprises, China conducts global digital surveillance to track dissidents and to pressure them into silence.
Political asylees who take refuge in Taiwan fear China’s repressive reach. Transnational repression has far-reaching consequences, and people risk having their rights stripped in democratic societies for daring to oppose Chinese propaganda. This was the case for Chen Siming, a political activist who was stranded in Taoyuan Airport in September 2023 after refusing to catch a connecting flight from Thailand back to China. Chen feared that if he returned home, he would be arrested because of his criticism of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. He pleaded with the Taiwanese government to not repatriate him. Taiwan allowed Chen to stay until he was granted political asylum in Canada.
What if China Attacks?
China’s ruler Xi Jinping has repeatedly told his military to prepare for kinetic war, and he expects to win that war. China’s increasingly aggressive gray zone operations—“coercive actions falling below the threshold of armed conflict, surpassing normal diplomatic, economic, and other activities to achieve national objectives”—around the Second Thomas Shoal, Scarborough Shoal, and Pag-asa Island—may trigger war in the West Philippine Sea. If China starts a war with the Philippines, America will engage in accordance with its Mutual Defense Treaty.
War could also start with a deliberate attack to annex Taiwan: Xi’s immediate goal to “unify” Taiwan is central to his vision of China’s “national rejuvenation.” Xi could realize his “China Dream” and obtain a power projection platform to break the first island chain. The PLA’s incessant joint air, maritime circumnavigation, and live-fire drills around Taiwan telegraph that if China cannot achieve “peaceful reunification,” it will attack.
China’s doctrine is to strike first, perhaps under the pretext of political provocation. With a well-prepared political warfare apparatus, China will frame the narrative during the opening salvoes of the war—delegitimizing the United States and allies and partners, and attempting to divide any coalition supporting Taiwan and the United States.
For example, through media warfare China will paint Taiwan as the villain and the United States as the interloper-aggressor. It will embed its propagandists and selected foreign reporters with the PLA on the front lines of the conflict. China watched as Hamas did this in its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and noted how embedding supported Hamas’ psychological warfare and propaganda. In a war to annex Taiwan, China will utilize foreign “talking heads” to legitimize its invasion. It will use multiple platforms to consolidate a pro-China coalition, employing social media influencers to post videos denouncing the U.S. coalition or political commentators to write “objective” articles that convey Beijing’s perspective of the conflict.
In addition, China will likely attempt to further isolate Taiwan by severing its remaining diplomatic or para-diplomatic relations with other countries. Just last year, China plucked Nauru from Taiwan’s list of remaining diplomatic partners. In a war over Taiwan, isolation may come in the form of co-optation of state leaders, but also from pressure from pro-CCP diaspora and United Front groups creating domestic upheaval. If China can successfully use propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation campaigns to galvanize protestors to support its cause, it could compel nations to abandon relations with Taiwan.
Finally, China will likely use transnational repression to coerce diasporic communities into fighting against the U.S.-led coalition. Instead of merely silencing these communities, it will attempt to impel them towards violence. Through digital surveillance and local agents, Beijing may threaten to blackmail or harass individuals and their family members. By weaponizing INTERPOL’s “red notices,” China may threaten to forcibly repatriate diasporic communities if they remain inactive during the conflict.
Recommendations
The Trump administration must urgently take the following steps to counter and defeat China’s political warfare. By failing to do so, America will lose this cold war with China, and may risk losing a kinetic war if China attacks.
First, correctly identify the threat. The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability made steps in the right direction by properly identifying China’s political warfare as an “existential threat.” However, the Department of Defense’s 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment, which guides military and civilian operators in combatting threats to America on the information battlefield, does not address political warfare at all. Although this is a broad strategy, it is vital to properly identify and name the threat, as U.S. State Department official George Kennan did regarding the Soviet Union’s political warfare in 1948.
Second, the administration should create a policy and supporting strategy to actively counter and defeat China’s political warfare. The strategy must be a whole-of-government and whole-of-society effort similar to the approach taken during the Reagan administration to defeat the Soviet Union in the first Cold War. The United States should go on the offense to counter China in this war. For example, on the narrative battlefield America should support the notion that Taiwan’s democracy is an alternative to the CCP’s totalitarian regime, which claims that the CCP speaks for all Chinese people and that only it can rule them.
Third, the Defense Department should institute systematic education regarding China’s political warfare. The 2023 strategy clearly emphasizes the need for education to prepare Public Affairs Officers and others for the fight. However, now nearly two years later the curriculum at the Defense Information School still fails to address China’s political warfare. Specifically, the Public Affairs & Communication Strategy Qualification Course prepares officers and senior non-commissioned/petty officers to be strategic communicators, yet it still provides no foundation on China’s political warfare goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics. If the Defense Department’s frontline strategic communicators are to play a meaningful role in implementing the strategy, then they urgently need education and training on China’s political warfare. Curriculum should include the history, theory, doctrine, and practice of China’s political warfare; political warfare mapping; and counter-political warfare objectives, strategies, and tactics.
Fourth, government agencies (Defense, State, Commerce, Education, etc.) should partner with civil society organizations with emphasis on those with a proven track record of success. Some long-established U.S. government-partner think tanks and research institutions can claim only theoretical knowledge, but Taiwan’s civil society organizations such as Doublethink Lab and Taiwan FactCheck Center actively identify and counter China’s political/information warfare on a daily basis. Further, Kuma Academy and Academia Formosana successfully promote greater awareness of malign influence among civilians through workshops and civil defense training.
Conclusion
It is essential for the United States to recognize that China’s political warfare is inextricably linked with its information warfare, and that this “combined arms, multi-domain” capability poses an existential threat to Taiwan and the United States. Further, although China seeks to win without fighting, its political/information warfare provides it a formidable advantage if it initiates a kinetic war. The United States is beyond the “admire the problem” phase: it is time to recognize the nature of the political/information warfare threat and to implement the recommendations herein to begin effectively fighting back.
