A security guard (R) and a police officer (L) secure the area at the entrance to Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound of the Chinese Communist Party, in Beijing on May 18, 2020. Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is partial to the number three for cultural and superstitious reasons. As it turns out, that would appear to apply to Xi Jinping, too, as noted in part one of this three-part series.
A few of his “campaign of threes” have included:
Three major economic initiatives.
The historic third resolution at the sixth plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP.
A campaign for a rare third five-year term as communist leader.
An effort to be elevated to the personal status of “third paramount leader” with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
But Xi’s most grandiose leveraging of the number three has been the initiation and/or furtherance of the three threes of warfare against the United States (and, by extension, the rest of the world) in a dramatic departure from the relatively peaceful policies of Deng and his successors. Xi’s three threes of warfare are directly aimed at elevating China to world leadership while destroying its primary adversary, the United States.
Part one of this series summarized the first three warfares; below are the next three.
Information Warfare
Data and information are the lifeblood that control modern society. All sorts of industries, government organizations, and militaries are dependent on timely and accurate information to support decision-making processes, including societal infrastructures such as electric power production, money flow, air traffic, oil and gas, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and many other industries.
To control data and information—and to be able to corrupt it and gain economic and geopolitical advantages—is a primary objective of the CCP’s information warfare campaign that is being waged against the United States and other countries.
The result of such control is “information dominance.” Information dominance in a military context means to achieve a superiority over an adversary in knowledge and understanding of the battlefield at the strategic, operational, and/or tactical levels of war. Extended to other spheres of human endeavor—for example, economic, political, and geopolitical—the concept can be used in virtually any context to gain advantage over a competitor, as all decision-making is founded on knowledge and understanding of relevant data, including that related to competitors and adversaries.
The Chinese communists (Chicoms) recognize this full well and have invested enormous resources to gain total information dominance in the international arena in order to improve decision-making related to the achievement of all of their geopolitical and economic goals and objectives.
Another key objective of CCP information warfare is to simply control all data and information everywhere, which amounts to limiting the exchange of data and information among citizens and entities to that which is approved by the Chinese state—and only the state.
Domestically, the free exchange of ideas is antithetical to the CCP and cannot be tolerated because free information exchange undermines CCP control and authority. For example, domestic Chinese tech companies are being forced to comply with a harsh new data security law that will also create problems for U.S. and multinational companies doing business in China. As with other aspects of Chinese legal warfare discussed in the first part of this series, the CCP seeks to extend that data security law to the rest of the world.
A logo of Tencent, a Chinese multinational technology conglomerate holding company, is seen during the World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China, on Nov. 23, 2020. Aly Song/Reuters
Opinion Warfare
The CCP uses all means to influence and shape public opinion to accomplish communist geopolitical and domestic objectives, including state-run media, movies, documentaries, podcasts, books, pamphlets, leveraging of “purchased” foreign media, etc.
A good example of an integrated campaign is the ongoing CCP exploitation of COVID-19 to shape world opinion. The CCP early on decided to exploit the pandemic for its own advantage: economic, geopolitical, and psychological.
The coordinated covid-related messages to the world have been relentlessly repeated to shape the regime’s desired pro-CCP narrative. There has been a constant deluge of agitprop from state-run media covering every facet of the coronavirus “pandemic” over the last 18 months: fear-mongering, social distancing advocacy, mask mania, feigned CCP altruism, condemnation and undermining of the United States on all topics, blame-shifting on the origins of the virus, exportation of “Chinese methods” in handling the virus, claiming leadership on pandemic response (regarding vaccines, personal protective equipment, testing, etc.), exploitation of international institutions like the World Health Organization, pushing multilateralism, and other messaging aimed at showcasing CCP leadership to Chinese citizens and the rest of the world.
Tedros Adhanom, director general of the World Health Organization, shakes hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Jan. 28, 2020. Naohiko Hatta/Pool/Getty Images
Economic Warfare
Xi’s premier strategic initiatives are in the economic arena, with a principal goal being China’s ascendancy as the dominant producer of industrial goods in the world. Xi envisions communist China as the world’s economic superpower, with his personal prestige tightly intertwined with the success of the nearly $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that, so far, involves debt-trap investment in 138 countries around the world.
The BRI goal is to develop a global infrastructure controlled by the Chinese regime. The infrastructure elements are largely focused on the development of transportation assets that can later be exploited by Beijing to transport the resources and raw materials needed to fuel Chinese manufacturing concerns, as well as support the exportation of finished Chinese goods to overseas markets around the world, including roads, ports, railroads, bridges, etc.
BRI investments also include renewable energy projects, communications infrastructures, and cultural exchanges. BRI-related infrastructure investments—in reality, these are loans from CCP-controlled state banks and not grants—come with strings attached. Those loans must be paid back. Frequently, the provisions of those loans allow China to gain control of a country’s BRI-funded infrastructure and/or natural resources if/when loans are defaulted, generally through long-term leases of those assets. And that is CCP economic warfare!
There are other facets of Chinese economic warfare, including a continuing push to control and manipulate the world’s strategic commodities. A strategic commodity is a raw material or agricultural product that is considered critical to a nation’s economy, such that the economy would suffer significantly if that commodity’s trade and supply is interrupted in any way. Strategic commodities are the natural resources that fuel a nation’s economy. Examples include rare earth elements, oil, natural gas, gold, silver, copper, livestock, rice, wheat, and corn.
The Chicoms have been successfully acquiring control of strategic commodities for years, while building up strategic reserves as both an inflation hedge and also as a means of market manipulation to influence targeted countries like the United States. Gaining control of Afghanistan’s lithium reserves positions China to control and manipulate battery production for decades. Furthermore, China is implementing a Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN). A blockchain is a type of database that stores information in “blocks” that are securely “chained together.” The implementation of a global BSN capability would enable the CCP to monitor and control all economic/trade transactions of users around the world—on CCP terms.
Build the infrastructure, build the manufacturing capacity, control the natural resources and strategic commodities, and ascend to economic superpower status—this economic warfare strategy is working, as China is already the number two largest economy in the world.
Conclusion
The preceding are the second three of the three threes of warfare being conducted by the CCP against the United States and the rest of the world. Part three will conclude the series with a discussion of the final three CCP warfares.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Stu Cvrk
Author
Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.
