Chinese information operations and information warfare

The United States is a notable exception by having its information warfare doctrine unclassified and available on the internet; the information warfare doctrine of most countries is classified. Hence, current information about Chinese policy and doctrine is not freely available. This section summarizes the information available. The reader will note that most of this information is of US origin, and most of it is five or more years old. Notable exceptions are the publicly released versions of annual reports to the US Congress.

A July 1998 conference held in San Diego, sponsored jointly by the RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy and the Taiwan-based Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, "brought together Chinese military experts to discuss the non-hardware side of the People's Liberation Army's modernization."[5] In his presentation, James C. Mulvenon stated: "Chinese writings clearly suggest that IW is a solely military subject, and as such, they draw inspiration primarily from U.S. military writings. The net result of this "borrowing" is that many PLA authors' definitions of IW and IW concepts sound eerily familiar."[6]

The father of Chinese IW, Major General Wang Pufeng, wrote "Information war is a crucial stage of high-tech war.... At its heart are information technologies, fusing intelligence war, strategic war, electronic war, guided missile war, a war of "motorization" [jidong zhan], a war of firepower [huoli]—a total war. It is a new type of warfare."[7]

In a strategic analysis paper for the Indian Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses written in 2006, Vinod Anand examines the definitions of Chinese Information Warfare.[8] He notes that although Chinese understanding of IW was initially based on western concepts, it has increasingly moved towards evolving its own orientation.

In December 1999, Xie Guang, the then Vice Minister of Science & Technology and Industry for National Defence, defined IW as:

“IW in military sense means overall use of various types (of) information technologies, equipment and systems, particularly his command systems, to shake determination of enemy’s policy makers and at the same time, the use of all the means possible to ensure that that one’s own systems are not damaged or disturbed.”[8]

In two articles in the Liberation Army Daily, dated 13 June and 20 June 1995, Senior Colonel Wang Baocun and Li Fei of the Academy of Military Science, Beijing, noted several definitions. They concluded:

'We hold that information warfare has both narrow and broad meanings. Information warfare in the narrow sense refers to the U.S. military's so-called "battlefield information warfare," the crux of which is "command and control warfare." It is defined as the comprehensive use, with intelligence support, of military deception, operational secrecy, psychological warfare, electronic warfare, and substantive destruction to assault the enemy's whole information system including personnel; and to disrupt the enemy's information flow, in order to impact, weaken, and destroy the enemy's command and control capability, while keeping one's own command and control capability from being affected by similar enemy actions.'[9]

They went on to state:

The essential substance of information warfare in the narrow sense is made up of five major elements and two general areas.

The five major elements are:

• Substantive destruction, the use of hard weapons to destroy enemy headquarters, command posts, and command and control (C2) information centers
• Electronic warfare, the use of electronic means of jamming or the use of antiradiation [electromagnetic] weapons to attack enemy information and intelligence collection systems such as communications and radar
• Military deception, the use of operations such as tactical feints [simulated attacks] to shield or deceive enemy intelligence collection systems
• Operational secrecy, the use of all means to maintain secrecy and keep the enemy from collecting intelligence on our operations
• Psychological warfare, the use of TV, radio, and leaflets to undermine the enemy's military morale.

The two general areas are information protection (defense) and information attack (offense):

• Information defense means preventing the destruction of one's own information systems, ensuring that these systems can perform their normal functions. In future wars, key information and information systems will become "combat priorities," the key targets of enemy attack.
• Information offense means attacking enemy information systems. Its aims are: destroying or jamming enemy information sources, to undermine or weaken enemy C&C capability, and cutting off the enemy's whole operational system. The key targets of information offense are the enemy's combat command, control and coordination, intelligence, and global information systems. A successful information offensive requires three prerequisites:
  • 1) the capability to understand the enemy's information systems, and the establishment of a corresponding database system;
  • 2) diverse and effective means of attack; and
  • 3) the capability to make battle damage assessments [BDA] of attacked targets.
    — Senior Colonel Wang Baocun and Li Fei of the Academy of Military Science, Beijing, 1995.[9]

Also quoted are some of the more general definitions. For example:

• "Information Operations (IO) are specific operations and are considered to be at the core of IW ... IO is a manifestation of IW on the battlefield. It can be both of the defensive and offensive types, and can be conducted at the strategic, operational, campaign and tactical levels at times of peace, wars and crises."[8]
• Information operations are not only used in times of war, but also in times of peace.[1]

Not included in these definitions is the emphasis that the PLA places on asymmetric warfare, particularly using information warfare to compensate for technological inferiority.[1] This list also omits an element that plays a large role in Chinese IW and IO: computer network operations.[10] Also not addressed is the role of "informationization" in the development of Chinese capabilities. These are discussed in the following sections.

In a 2001 paper in the U.S. Military Review,[11] T L Thomas examines the writings of Major General Dai Qingmin (Director of the PLA's Communications Department of the General Staff responsible for IW and IO), Senior Colonel Wang Baocun (of the PLA's Academy of Military Sciences) and others on the ways that China is employing "Electronic Strategies" to realise the benefits of asymmetric warfare.

Thomas also summarises the April 2000 issue of the Chinese journal China Military Science which contains three articles on information warfare subjects. The only article written in English ("The Current Revolution in Military Affairs and its Impact on Asia-Pacific Security," by Senior Colonel Wang Baocun) presents a quite different approach to an article Wang Baocun wrote only three years previously where he presented a description of IW which contained the elements of Soviet/Russian military science.

In the article "On Information Warfare Strategies", by Major General Niu Li, Colonel Li Jiangzhou and Major Xu Dehui (of the Communications and Command Institute), the authors define IW stratagems as "schemes and methods devised and used by commanders and commanding bodies to seize and maintain information supremacy on the basis of using clever methods to prevail at a relatively small cost in information warfare."[12]

Information warfare is a subset of informationization.[8] As a result of technological advancement, China has now entered an era where Informationization is the military concept of the present and future. Informationization "entails embracing all the opportunities and technologies the Information Age can offer and integrating them into military systems".[13]

China's 2004 White Paper on National Defense outlines the importance of informationization.

"The PLA, aiming at building an informationalised force and winning an information war, deepens its reforms, dedicates itself to innovation, improves its quality and actively pushes forward the RMA with Chinese characteristics with informationalization at its core."[8]

The U.S. Department of Defense's 2009 Annual Report to Congress on "Military Power of the People's Republic of China" defines local wars under conditions of informationization as "high intensity and short duration fighting against high technology adversaries" ... "capable of fighting and winning short-duration, high-intensity conflicts along its periphery against high-tech adversaries".[14] Additionally, local war under informationization is an effort which seeks to fully develop and link land, air, sea, space and the electromagnetic spectrum into one system.[15] China's military strategy is focused on fighting and winning "informationized local wars."[16]

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• Chinese intelligence activity abroad
• List of cyber warfare forces
• Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic