Central and Eastern Europe Cooperation Framework, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and through organizations which exclude traditional western partners, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). In August 2022, official PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs remarks to the FOCAC advanced a narrative that, unlike other potential foreign partners, Beijing respected the sovereignty of African nations and was committed to supporting sustainable development, food security, public health services, and foreign direct investment across the continent. In May 2022, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlighted the Forum for Senior Defense Officials from Caribbean and South Pacific Countries, last hosted by Beijing in 2019, as evidence of its strong security cooperation with the Solomon Islands.
The PRC government-affiliated entities use overt and covert messaging vectors, such as the internet and social media platforms, and military cyber capabilities during both peacetime and wartime. The PLA’s goals for social media influence operations include promoting narratives to shape foreign governments’ policies and public opinion in favor of the PRC’s interests and undermining adversary resolve. The PLA views social media through the prism of information dominance, and during a crisis could use digital influence operations to undermine enemy morale and confuse or deceive adversary decision makers. Most Chinese media platforms, including traditional and digital newspaper and television programs, are either state-owned or heavily influenced by Beijing to augment the CCP’s response to geopolitics and often take on a more aggressive messaging tone.
COGNITIVE DOMAIN OPERATIONS (CDO)
The creation of the PLA SSF in 2015 reflected that the CCP understands cyber operations as the primary means for psychological manipulation. As the PLA seeks to expand the reach of its influence operations around the world and seize information dominance on the battlefield, it is researching and developing what it believes to be the next evolution of psychological warfare, which it calls CDO. CDO blends previous Chinese concepts such as public opinion and psychological warfare with modern internet technologies and communication platforms, and is designed to achieve strategic national security goals by affecting a target’s cognition and resulting in a change in the target’s decision making and behavior. The PLA has recognized the importance of incorporating emerging technologies such as AI, big data, brain science, and neuroscience into CDO as PLA perceives that these technologies will lead to profound changes in the ability to subvert human cognition.
The goal of CDO is to achieve what the PLA refers to as “mind dominance, which the PLA defines as the use of information to influence public opinion to affect change in a nation’s social system, likely to create an environment favorable to China and reduce civilian and military resistance to PLA actions. The PLA probably intends to use CDO as an asymmetric capability to deter U.S. or third-party entry into a future conflict, or as an offensive capability to shape perceptions or polarize a society. Authoritative PLA documents describe one aspect of deterrence as the ability to bring about psychological pressure and fear on an opponent and force them to surrender. PLA articles
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
