The Chinese regime is engaged in hybrid unrestricted warfare against the United States in a bid to subvert and ultimately defeat it, according to a cyber security expert.
‘Unrestricted means that the Chinese communists follow no rules. And hybrid warfare just means it’s achieving military objectives through nonmilitary means,” Casey Fleming, CEO of intelligence and security strategy firm BlackOps Partners, recently told the “China in Focus” program on NTD, sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.
This doctrine of warfare is multifaceted, Fleming said.
“There’s well over 100 different methods of asymmetric hybrid warfare: economic warfare, financial warfare, drug warfare, psychological warfare, cognitive warfare, all those types of things,” he said.
“Cognitive is, of course, psychological warfare, information warfare, and artificial intelligence, quantum computing.”
Those methods aim to subvert and weaken American society and institutions.
The Chinese Communist Party seeks to dismantle America’s value system by promoting anti-religion, anti-family, anti-police, and racially divisive issues, the expert said, adding that the regime will amp up “everything that can divide us” while “taking away everything that holds us together.”
Fleming cited Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok as an example of the regime’s efforts at cognitive warfare.
“Some folks call Tiktok ‘digital fentanyl,’ because what’s happening is folks are getting dopamine hits when they’re going on Tik Tok. And it keeps them on Tiktok looking at subversive messaging, psychological information, and it gets them addicted to it,” he said.
“Not only that, it reprograms their brains, so where they’re not critical thinkers or their critical thinking is reduced and so on,” he added.
Fleming described TikTok as a “weaponized military application” aimed at weakening and dominating the minds of the adversary’s population.
“So folks need to understand that hybrid warfare is really what is underfoot today. It’s in your living rooms, it’s in your offices, it’s happening all day, every day to weaken our country.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Tiktok for comment.
Given the threats posed by the CCP, the expert urged for the United States to fully decouple from China.
“The laws have to be written to the end result of stopping all funding going into China or you will face extremely severe penalties,” he said, noting that American investments into China ultimately aid the CCP.
He also called on the United States to ban Chinese applications and other technology that pose national security risks or could harm children.
“We have to stop this continual feed of money to build this anti-American regime and anti-free world regime,” Fleming said.
“We need to put laws in place where we stop enabling the Chinese Communist Party to destroy our way of life, our freedom, and our children’s freedom.”
