‘In Xi Jinping’s view, the war has already started on the most important battlefield: your mind,’ Mr. Gallagher said.
TikTok is a key tool in communist China’s strategy to manipulate Americans and undermine the United States’ ability to respond to crises, according to experts and lawmakers.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, will likely use TikTok in its effort to wage “cognitive warfare” against the United States, said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.).
“The CCP calls it ‘cognitive domain warfare,’ part of their larger political warfare strategy,” Mr. Gallagher said in prepared comments for a Nov. 30 hearing of the House Select Committee on the CCP.
Mr. Gallagher, who chairs the committee, said that the United States was struggling to respond to the threat, as the nation had no grand strategy or apparatus for confronting propaganda from authoritarian powers.
“Cognitive warfare is not something we tend to think about here in the West. Sure, we have ideas like soft power, but they’re not a national strategy,” Mr. Gallagher said.
“On the ‘smokeless battlefield’ of people’s minds, we don’t have a standing military at all.”
CCP Seeks ‘Mind Dominance’
The Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Power Report (pdf), which distills the Defense Department’s most authoritative assessments of China’s strategy and capabilities, highlighted the development of the CCP’s new method of psychological warfare.
It said that the CCP and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), were developing and deploying methods for conducting cognitive warfare to win military advantage.
“As the PLA seeks to expand the reach of its influence operations around the world and to seize information dominance on the battlefield, it is researching and developing the next evolution of psychological warfare called cognitive domain operation[s] (CDO) that leverages subliminal messaging, deep fakes, overt propaganda, and public sentiment analysis,” the report stated.
“The goal of CDO is to achieve what the PLA refers to as ‘mind dominance,’ defined as the use of propaganda as a weapon to influence public opinion to effect change in a nation’s social system, likely to create an environment favorable to China and reduce civilian and military resistance to PLA actions.”
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