Joshua Philipp, the award wining investigative reporter for the Epoch Times has a virtual sit-down with Patrick Bet-David about China’s unrestricted warfare and how it could lead to collapse of China in one year.
Partial Transcript
Patrick Bet-David: So what is your biggest concern? What’s your biggest concern with China today? You are so deep into it. What’s your biggest concern?
Joshua Philipp: So, when it comes to the way I view the Chinese regime it’s maybe a bit different from a lot, how a lot of people view it. The Chinese regime regards the United States as it’s number one enemy. The very existence of a country that, you know, is based on the ideas of say individual rights, does defend internationally, to some extent, human rights, does believe in this idea that if given basic freedoms people can create a prosperous society.
These things are antithetical to the narratives and the practices of the Chinese Communist Party. It tells people that they are not capable of creating a harmonious and functioning society if people are given freedom like we have here. And so challenging that, attacking the United States, undermining this perception, is a huge part of what the Chinese regime is doing. And when it comes to their systems of warfare, of course when we think war normally we think tanks, guns, soldiers, you know, jets, missiles, these kinds of things.
When you’re dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, they’re talking about culture, they’re talking about drugs, they’re talking about business warfare, cyber. They’re talking about the basic perceptions, things like they have the Three Warfares Doctrine, psychological warfare media warfare and legal warfare, how do you, how do you alter international perceptions of issues, how do you manipulate the say basic perceptions of a country in order to support or oppose what they want you to support or oppose.
Patrick Bet-David: You said psychological warfare, media warfare, what was the third one?
Joshua Philipp: Legal warfare. So yeah, the Three Warfares Doctrine, that would be part of the Three Warfares Doctrine.
Patrick Bet-David: Go through each one of them.
Joshua Philipp: So I’ll use the South China Sea is an example because this is a very clear example that’s playing out. The Three Warfares Doctrine is actually adopted into the Chinese military’s strategy. It is an officially adopted military strategy and it’s based on three points. It’s based essentially around manipulating the psychological and legal standpoints in order to obtain objectives. This sounds complicated, let me explain it.
Now on the surface psychological warfare is not necessarily propaganda, it’s not necessarily misleading you, psychological warfare is altering the conclusion you come to when observing information. It is changing the way you perceive something. Media warfare and manipulation and control of say news outlets, social media, any outlet of information. Legal warfare is the manipulation of legal systems. They called Lawfare sometimes. Let’s look at this in practice, okay.
So, when you look at the South China Sea, the Chinese regime use this to the tee as a military strategy. What do they do? They start going into the South China Sea building military bases, building artificial Islands, putting up missile defense systems, you name it, very hostile actions, even challenging other nations, putting up an air defense zone, saying other countries can enter the airspace without checking with them first. This is, you know, it’s conquering, traditional conquering. That’s what they’re doing. Just taking territory saying it ours saying nobody can come in unless they tell us first and we give them permission.
But how did they take it? That is where the three warfares come in. On the psychological warfare part, they created a narrative, and what was the narrative? The narrative was one of historical ownership of the region, one that painted China as a victim and gave them, of course, their perceived rights, and even say justified actions, of going in and taking this territory. They said they had historical ownership of this region, it was taken from them unjustly by Japan by these different deals after World War II. That was the narrative they used.
Then they, what do they do after that? They go into the media warfare element. It’s very easy to manipulate the media, extremely easy. If you’re a country like China, all you need to do, a well two things. one is you have your former officials are current officials go to any big news outlet and tell them I got an exclusive story for you. I’ll tell you the real story of it’s happening in China and they’re going to publish everything that person says.
The other one is, if a media writes a critical story on China is talking about it, they can easily just have, you know, an academic or, say, a top-level Chinese official go to them and say your article was racist, your article was offensive, and you know you don’t understand China. Have you ever been to China? How dare you write about my country. And that journalist is going to get on his knees and say everything that person tells him, he’s going to be eating out of their hands, and you see it all the time. And so that’s media warfare.
And then when you get into legal warfare, that’s maintaining the battle within the legal realm so that it does not enter the diplomatic or political, sorry, the diplomatic or the hot war realm. And so again, South China Sea, you have the Chinese regime taking military action, building military bases, being, you know, taking very hostile action against other ships, sinking, sometimes even ramming, and there were cases where, for example, other ships from other countries being sunk, mainly fishing fishing fishing vessels and things like that, very hostile actions regardless though. But they kept it from entering the military realm by maintaining it as a legal battle, and so they locked it in the international courts. Eventually of course the courts found, ruled against China said it does not have historical ownership of this territory, but by that time they already mostly won the international battle of perception. And in addition to that they said, well in Chinese law, by our laws, we still have rights to do this and if you want to challenge us, come to China’s courts, come to our courts and challenge us. And of course, they were, they control the court system down to the most minoot levels. There is no way you going to win a battle in China like that.
How is U.S. being bullied by China right?
On many fronts. So, if you want to get into the broad picture of it, the say, the type of real bullying, if you would ask me, that’s when you get into things like economic theft, you get into things like culture, you get into things like drugs. Um, you know again what they call unrestricted warfare, and its based, this is actually the name of a book. A lot of China experts talk about it as being kind of the basic framework through which China has waged an unconventional war on the United States. So in 1999 two Chinese colonels wrote a book called Unrestricted Warfare where they proposed a new system of war without morals, and it’s based on a very simple way of thinking. Now, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty, the gist of it, we can go on forever talking about all the different forms of unconventional war they run, you know, names, across the board, everything you could think of being targeted. But it comes down to this, it’s a perception of saying what would you want to achieve through warfare and how can you achieve those exact same goals without engaging in open combat? And so for example, culture warfare. A, you know, China’s, of course, gained significant control over Hollywood, not just through, say, manipulations, say forcing them to abide by Chinese laws when it comes to censorship and propaganda if they want to get their films into China, which is a huge market for Hollywood, especially right now when, you know, films aren’t doing as hot, add to, for example, buying up, buying up parts of ownership,say, in production houses talent houses, buying AMC theaters, for example, these types of things. They can then control what is shown in our movies, for example, it they want to get into China, they can’t show China in a negative light. They can’t show the U.S. military in a positive light, if they want to get into China. They need to maintain, say, at least one scene in China, they have to have at least one Chinese actor or actress and so on, certain requirements for that. And of course the Chinese regime Xi Jinping, actually back when they launched a lot of these operations, came out and said the United States culture war on China and said that they needed to retaliate. They talk about this stuff openly. When it comes to drug warfare for example. How do you destroy the moral fabric of a society? We talk about things like these synthetic drugs, Fentanyl, that comes from China. But what’s actually not well known is that most of our drugs come from China. The drug cartels in Latin America, they get their precursor chemicals from China. In fact, there’s been some reports saying that they have any manufacturing because a lot of the labs that they’re getting their precursor chemicals from, for things like methamphetamine and other drugs, are coming from Wuhan, the epicenter of this virus. And so you name it, across-the-board, this is the real way they’re bullying America.
Ecstasy is coming from China?
I haven’t heard Ecstasy, but a lot of these synthetic ones would, yes.
About Joshua Philipp
Joshua Philipp is an award-winning investigative reporter with The Epoch Times and host of ‘The China Report’. He is a recognized expert on unrestricted warfare, asymmetrical hybrid warfare, subversion, and historical perspectives on today’s issues. His 10-plus years of research and investigations on the Chinese Communist Party, subversion, and related topics gives him unique insight into the global threat and political landscape.
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