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Chinese Psychological Warfare

IND151

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Views of Psychological Warfare in Modern China

Both Western and Chinese historians have concluded that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) effectively used psychological warfare against their nationalist opponents during the Chinese civil war. The communists knew their nationalist opponents and the terrain intimately, thus fulfilling the first essential precondition for action. They also had considerable ability to control the flow of information. In the end game that led to the final communist victory in 1949, communist leaders exploited nationalist beliefs that their opponents were stupid, cowardly, weak and in retreat, and then used a complex blend of maneuver, propaganda and rumors, while maintaining secrecy, to encourage nationalist leaders to split their army and attack from the wrong direction.11

The relative isolation of China from the West from the 1950s through the 1970s provided little opportunity for deception in day-to-day, government-to-government issues. However, in a broader perspective, much of the propaganda directed against Moscow and Washington during the 1960s and 1970s after the Sino-Soviet split appears to have been primarily a deterrence strategy aimed at achieving long-term behavior modification in a form of psychological warfare.12 China had lost its major ally and lay weakened by the economic chaos and internal political struggles of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The propaganda of that period was one element of a successful national strategy that kept both potential adversaries at bay while gradually engineering the rapprochement with the United States that resulted in readmission to the United Nations and diplomatic recognition by Washington. In 1981, Harlan Jencks predicted that as China expanded contact with the outside world and gained more "foreknowledge" of potential adversaries, China would likely use deception more frequently and effectively.

Since the late 1970s, China has focused on building up its national strength, wealth, international prestige and power. Tens of thousands of China's brightest students have studied abroad, the largest number in the United States. Thousands of official, academic and business-oriented Chinese delegations travel abroad annually. The global village of the electronic age, from CNN to the Internet, has provided China with unprecedented access to knowledge about the world. Thus, the essential precondition for action and foreknowledge, has become a concrete reality.

Moreover, the world media is now presenting China as a far stronger nation than at any time in the last two centuries. Although Chinese official spokesmen often critique the Western press as being anti-China, in fact a drumbeat of positive press emphasizes China's growing economic and military strength. One of the earliest examples of this genre coincided with the US election in November 1992, that The Economist predicted if China's economy continued to grow at the same rate for the next 20 years that it had over the previous 14, it would become the largest on earth.13 A year later, former New York Times Beijing Bureau Chief Nicholas Kristof published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "The Rise of China," predicting that within a decade China's "rapidly improving army" might have the strength "to resolve old quarrels in its favor."14 In the war of words, such appraisals are considerable force multipliers.

New Proposals for Psychological Warfare

A recent Chinese proposal to promote psychological warfare revealed the military implications of media-control programs. The details are laid out in a November 1994 article in the Liberation Army Daily, the flagship publication of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The article, written by Liu Yinchao, PLA 65th Group Army commander, states that psychological warfare is now the "fourth kind of warfare," after ground, sea and air warfare.34 Liu indicated that psychological warfare will play a major role in China's strategic policy in the new era. While the article appears to be a proposal, the fact that it appeared in the Liberation Army Daily, and Liu's senior status in the PLA strongly implies that the ideas have complete official support.

Liu outlines four basic objectives of psychological warfare:

  • To attack and influence the target's policy makers, causing their position to waver and make them choose a policy which is in fact disadvantageous to themselves.
  • [I believe the intrusions on our in ladakh is part of this strategy.]
  • To instill fear and awe in the minds of enemy soldiers, destroy their mental equilibrium and boost the morale of one's own troops.
  • To create panic among the adversary's civilian population by inducing fear of war, war weariness and antiwar feelings.
  • To obtain the sympathy and support of neutral states, solidify coalitions among allied states and strengthen the desire for victory in one's own country.
Comparing the psychological warfare of earlier times with the modern era, Liu proposes that psychological warfare should now be carried out across the spectrum of national activities, including strategy, military technology, politics, diplomacy, religion, economics and propaganda and should use every available means to demonstrate national strength. In addition, increased military strength and technological capability are required to support psychological warfare and will serve as deterrents. In future wars, the overall distribution of power will play a major role, while actual engagement will play a relatively small role. The special characteristics of warfare in the future will be long distances and high speed.

Modern communications technology, which keeps the battlefield commander informed of major political and diplomatic developments and military movements, can also be harnessed to raise the influential power and deceptiveness of psychological warfare operations. Higher-speed, more destructive precision weapons enhance psychological warfare's deterrence and coerciveness. Liu suggests that the PLA develop a psychological warfare doctrine, adopt enhanced training and carry out supporting research to build up an elite cadre of specially trained personnel and psychological warfare units assigned to the group armies and divisions. Using new communications technology, they would be linked by a psychological warfare command system network. Liu further proposes enhanced training programs in which troops incorporate psychological warfare operations during live-fire exercises.

Although Liu's article stresses incorporating modern weapons and communications technology into the development of psychological warfare doctrine, traditional Chinese views on strategy and deception support his proposal. Liu emphasizes the objective of forming a force to defeat others without fighting. In his view, the traditional axiom that "it is better to attack the enemy's mind than to attack his fortified cities" will still be the "infallible law" of the military strategist.

Another byline article in the October 1996 Liberation Army Daily reiterates these views. This article notes that although the "content" of US psychological warfare during the Gulf War differed from that used by China, the forms are similar. The author also stresses that China should learn how to apply psychological warfare techniques within the realm of information warfare.35



Psychological Warfare in the Taiwan Straits
The first news leaked to the world press in early 1996 regarding China's alleged plan to launch a "limited attack" on Taiwan of one missile strike per day for 30 days following Taiwan's elections if Lee Teng-hui, the leading Kuomintang candidate, was elected. China officially denied the story, leading some observers to assess the threat as "merely psychological warfare." A commentator from Singapore who used the term "psychological warfare" to describe these threats believed China was unlikely to carry out the missile attacks because China had a very low probability of success in a full-scale invasion of Taiwan and attacks on Taiwan after the election would be pointless. The purpose of the threats, he reasoned, was to rattle Taiwan's leaders, temper Lee Teng-hui's efforts for greater official recognition and perhaps intimidate the US Congress so that it would refrain from inviting Lee for an official visit after his election.36

In some respects China's actions and policy lines seemed baffling and contradictory. For example, as China launched its live-fire exercises in the Taiwan straits in March 1996, a typical commentary carried the headline, "Is China Being `Reckless' or Calculating?" This sense of confusion arose because China's show of force and bellicose jargon were carried out against a backdrop of careful planning. China had fully prepared for the exercises by giving its Asian neighbors, shipping companies and airlines advance notices as required under international law. China further upheld international law by treating Taiwan as a sovereign nation; it avoided crossing into what Taiwan considers its territorial waters or airspace.37 The United States responded with its "prudent" and "precautionary" deployment of two carrier battle groups in the waters off Taiwan during the live-fire exercises, sending a signal to Beijing of its intention to defend its valid interests in the region.38

Immediately after the election of Lee Teng-hui, who won decisively, China suspended its exercises and switched to more conciliatory rhetoric toward Taiwan. The official Xinhua News Agency made a point of declaring Lee's win a big victory for reunification forces and declared that Lee had disavowed Taiwan independence during his campaign, omitting the fact that Lee has always disavowed Taiwan independence.39

A most insightful analysis of this series of events was presented by noted China scholar Andrew Nathan of Columbia University. In his view, China planned the exercises as part of a coercive strategy to escalate military pressure, test US resolve and locate Taiwan's breaking point. The Chinese have assessed that only the United States can frustrate their ambitions. The timing may have been planned to confront Taiwan before the US delivered 150 F-16 fighter aircraft to Taiwan in 1998.

Nathan suggested that China's key objectives included the following:

  • Control over Taiwan's access to arms that could be used in self-defense against China.
  • Veto power over diplomatic activity to consolidate Taiwan's international status.
  • Keeping Chinese options open, rather than resolving the issue immediately.
  • Demonstrating to Taiwan that the US aid might not be forthcoming in a crisis.
Nathan concludes that if it suits China's interests in the future, it might select any of a number of possible military actions short of invasion, including harassing shipping and air traffic, attacks on offshore islands and full or partial blockade of Taiwan. More likely, merely threatening these actions would intentionally create a crisis, arouse panic and economic disorder and thereby gain leverage to control the situation.40

Nathan describes China's threats and actions as "psychological terror" against Taiwan. Indeed, most of his conclusions fall neatly within the psychological warfare objectives specified by the 1994 Liberation Army Daily article. For example, Nathan's assertion that China was testing US resolve matches Liu's first objective of causing US policy makers to waver. The threats of missile attacks were clearly intended to create panic and the fear of war among both the civilian population and the military. Finally, China's actions to isolate Taiwan diplomatically follows the guise of obtaining sympathy and support among neutral states and solidifying support among allied states.

https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDgQFjAC&url=http://www.c4i.org/china-murray.html&ei=m7dPU-SFEMb4rQeKpoHIBQ&usg=AFQjCNG_F2JnxOeSpYiPLj6ugSg0ex9ULA

@Capt.Popeye @Dillinger @sandy_3126 @sancho @XiNiX
 
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SUMMARY
In recent years, China has demonstrated an intense
fascination with information warfare (IW). The potential
advances in Chinese IW doctrine and capabilities have
direct implications for U.S. national security. The ability of
China to conduct information warfare against the United
States in peacetime, confrontation, or conflict could pose
severe challenges to defense planners. Yet, American
understanding of China’s approaches to IW within the
academic and defense communities remain shallow. This
lack of understanding, both stemming from the extreme
secrecy surrounding China’s military programs in general
and the nascent stage of development in IW in particular,
could invite ugly strategic and operational surprises for the
United States.
As an initial step to clarify the future direction of
Chinese IW and to identify new areas for further research,
this monograph explores Chinese perspectives of
information warfare through a sampling of the burgeoning
open literature circulating in China. The monograph
provides a preliminary assessment of these Chinese
writings and analysis. It demonstrates some linkages and
parallels to America’s current debates on IW, the
Soviet-U.S. competition, Clausewitz’s classic dictums, and
Chinese strategic culture. The monograph concludes with
implications of future developments in Chinese IW for
American policy

What is IW?
Since the concept of IW emerged in the mid-1990s as a
topic of heated debate, its definition remains in a state of
continual flux. Scholars, think tanks, and the U.S.
Government have all struggled to provide an intellectual
construct for the study of IW
. Efforts to grapple with this
“exotic” type of warfare continue today, and little consensus
has yet emerged. The intellectual fever to come to grips with
IW has also spread to China, resulting in similar degrees of
disagreement over the meaning of IW. The
conceptualization of IW in the Chinese context has been
even more confused given that Beijing, by the nature of its
opaqueness, has not published any official documentation of
IW as a guide for national policy. There is no discernible
taxonomy that can be meaningfully used to accurately
depict Chinese IW. Only China’s open sources, many of
which are of dubious quality or reliability, have offered
some clues on Chinese thinking.

https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&r...poHIBQ&usg=AFQjCNEwzTeFkBYm1FLzBWtROCSY1U-d7A
 
What psychological warfare base on US perspective and interpretation of an article written in general view by China senior military commander. This isn't China military blueprint on pschological warfare, just some interpretation then connect to some past event for the writer to draw a conclusion. Nohting important to take from this article.
 

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