Beijing should adopt a more assertive approach to global cognitive warfare, Chinese scholars said, calling for more action amid a great power rivalry.
The appeal was made by Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University, and Ding Zhuang, an associate research fellow at the institute, who said in a paper last week that China should improve its cognitive warfare system with strengthened “cognitive sovereignty”.
“It is necessary to move beyond the traditional, passive mindset of ‘cognitive defence’ and instead adopt the strategic concept of ‘cognitive sovereignty’,” they wrote, noting that this idea was essential for gaining an upper hand in the competition.
“We must not only build a ‘firewall’ to resist external cognitive infiltration, but also forge a ‘spear’ capable of taking the initiative and shaping an international public opinion environment favourable to our own interests,” they argued in last week’s issue of Think Tank: Theory and Practice, a bimonthly journal published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Nanjing University.
They said methods should include proactively setting agendas, introducing original concepts and creating Chinese narratives.
“We should actively compete for international discursive power, directing the focus of competition towards opposing discursive dominance and cognitive manipulation,” they said.
Influence over public opinion has become a pivotal arena of international competition as emerging economies seek a more active role in global governance.
In recent years, Beijing has engaged in an intense war of narratives with Washington, pushing to build soft power, promote its model of governance and “tell China’s story” in its own way.
In the paper, the scholars noted that as China’s international influence has grown, Western countries led by the US were “increasingly relying on tools of soft subversion and cognitive manipulation in their competition with China”.
They wrote that Western countries’ cognitive warfare against China relied on crafting narratives and cultural influence, and they used their global media dominance to stigmatise China’s policies, including the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s infrastructure-focused strategy to accelerate global trade.
“Therefore, accelerating the development of an integrated cognitive defence-and-offence system and comprehensively enhancing international discursive power has become an urgent and critical task of the times,” they wrote.
Highlighting the need to “fully break away” from long-standing Western-centric ways of thinking, they also noted that it was “necessary to maintain strong theoretical and cultural confidence, and to refine and elevate original concepts, theories and discourse systems from China’s own practices”.
In 2021, President Xi Jinping called for the establishment of a “Chinese discourse and Chinese narrative system” to promote Beijing’s messages internationally. This has led to increased use of Beijing’s preferred theories and terminology among officials, academics and media outlets.
Wang and Ding noted in their paper that China should seize the strategic opportunities of cognitive warfare.
“This includes proactively setting global agendas, innovating discourse systems and gaining definitional power, so as to make [China] a strategic force that guides the transformation of global governance systems,” they said.
“Only by placing cognitive security at the core of national strategy can a country secure the initiative in great power competition and shape an international environment conducive to peaceful development.”