China's Information Operations Are Heating Up

China’s Information Operations Are Heating Up

Posted: June 6th, 2023

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.

OPINION — “China views psychological warfare, centered on the manipulation of information to influence adversary decision-making and behavior, as one of several key components of modern warfare. Chinese psychological warfare has evolved, driven in part by technological progress that brought new opportunities and in part by lessons learned from other militaries, but the core principles and objectives have remained relatively constant. The importance placed on psychological warfare is increasingly linked to Chinese military assessments that the cognitive domain will be a key domain of future warfare.”

That quote is from Chinese Next-Generation Psychological Warfare: The Military Applications of Emerging Technologies and Implications for the United States, written by the RAND Corporation’s Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, and published June 1, 2023 by RAND.

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