CHINA`S GREAT STRIDES IN INFORMATION WARFARE- ATTAINING GLOBAL COMPTENCY

Chinese scientists and thinkers have been studying the idea of information warfare with significant interest since the 1990s. They really began to provide explanations and information about information warfare (IW) as early as 1985. Chinese military kept a careful eye on the Gulf War's development once it began in 1991. Many military institutes in China focused their post-war research on the operations Desert Storm and Desert Sword, which they saw as signalling the change from the industrial to the information ages. The Gulf War, according to a Chinese commander, "compelled many Chinese strategists to realise the way of war-fighting was experiencing a fundamental transformation and a new form of military was about to emerge from the fading industrial age." The Gulf War served as a case study for Chinese researchers looking at future conflicts since it underlined the increasing importance of IW. Following the NATO air combat over Kosovo, Chinese interest in this area increased even further.

It's noteworthy to note that the majority of Chinese analysts refer to information warfare as "information war" rather than "information warfare" as most Western analysts do. Chinese military experts view IW as the actual conflict, in contrast to American military experts who view it as a method of combat. Wang Pufeng, a Chinese information warfare expert, stated that "information warfare refers to a kind of operation and operational pattern, while information war refers to a kind of operation and war pattern." Shen asserts: "In a military sense alone, information warfare refers to both sides' attempts to win the initiative of the conflict through their control over the flow of information and intelligence. Many see him as the founder of Chinese information warfare. Both sides intend to utilise information to their fullest advantage in order to completely employ military deception, operational secrets, psychological warfare, electronic warfare, and other forms of warfare in order to destroy the enemy's information systems, stop the flow of their information, and fabricate false information in order to have an impact on and weaken their ability to command and control their forces. At the same time, they must take care to prevent the opponent from causing the same harm to their command-and-control system. In his book The Third world War - Total Information Warfare, he identified the primary goals of IW as undermining the enemy's cognitive and trust systems because "whoever controls information society will have the opportunity to dominate the world." Additionally, the enemy succeeds if the general public loses trust in the government or military.

In Chinese military discourse, the idea of information warfare (IW) has been a topic of considerable attention. Beijing may be harnessing the political will to spend significant resources to building IW doctrines and capabilities, according to the intensive discussions and debates taking place inside China's defence sector. Many analysts have speculated if China would succeed in becoming one of the world leaders in IW due to its prospective capacity to take advantage of the information revolution and its steady development. American defence strategists might face a difficult task as a result of China's emphasis on IW. The United States military discovered that in two cyberattack drills conducted in 1997 and 1999, a gang of hackers "using publicly available resources was able to prevent the United States from waging war effectively."

The first exercise was based on a military situation on the Korean Peninsula, according to the Pentagon. The exercise's outcome was sobering: a series of cyberattacks on military and civilian networks rendered American command and control at the highest levels of leadership paralysed. Since the Asia-Pacific is crucial to U.S. national security interests, it is conceivable that IW may provide China the ability to obstruct American military operations there. As a result, the path of China's IW strategy directly affects US foreign policy.

Chinese strategists predicted that information warfare will eventually co-occur in the physical, informational, and cognitive realms in a number of publications they released in the early 2000s. These strategists expected that the cognitive domain would gain significance over time and eventually take centre stage in conflict. Since then, a lot of the work that has been published over the past 20 years by Chinese strategists has been based on the notion that war occurs in the physical domains of land, sea, air, and space; the information domain of communication networks and the information in it; and the domain of human cognition, which includes both the leader's determination as well as public opinion.

The domain of military conflict between large countries will ultimately be the cognitive one, rather than the physical, or informational. Fighting in a cognitive environment has a direct impact on the brain, affecting emotions, motivations, judgements, and behaviours as well as taking control of the brain of the adversary. The brain may end up becoming the major theatre of conflict in the future since it is the centre of cognition. The key to battle in the most important cognitive areas of future warfare is brain control.

The merging of "intelligentized" warfare—China's new military plan for 2019—with its existing military strategy of "informationized" warfare further strengthens the idea of cognitive warfare. Four essential characteristics of intelligent warfare—which emphasises the use of artificial intelligence—include improved information processing abilities, quick decision-making, the utilisation of swarms, and cognitive warfare. Chinese strategists have said that the emphasis of intelligentized warfare is human cognition and that influencing the cognition of the opponent directly may help accomplish strategic goals. According to Qi Jianguo, a former deputy chief of staff of the PLA, those who succeed in creating next-generation artificial intelligence technologies would be able to exert control over human cognition, which is the foundation of national security. Chinese strategists contend that the opponent may be made to give up their weapons and surrender by inflicting mental harm, disorientation, or hallucinations on them by direct brain interference or subliminal brain control.

Uncertainty surrounds China's plans for using future technologies to influence an adversary's brain. The PLA appears to be exploring intimidation by military action and the dissemination of false information when using the technologies at hand. The manoeuvring and deployment of soldiers to specified places, the readiness of strategic nuclear weapons units for actions, and the conduct of military drills for intimidation are all examples of intimidation. Disinformation could be transmitted on television and the internet. In order to cloud the commander's judgement, it also encompasses the deception of enemy information, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations.

It is challenging to predict when and how harmful such campaigns would be for the target state because IW entails leveraging and controlling ICT in the battlespace to be competitive and gain a strategic edge over opponents. Information is still a prevalent component of both conventional and cyber warfare strategies despite IW's evolving potential and practise in the digital era. Information is a weapon in information warfare (IW), while cyber warfare only takes place in a digital format, employs information as a weapon and targets an adversary's computer, software, and command and control system. IW and cyberwarfare differ in terms of operability, tactics, equipment, targets, and results. IW has a diffuse structure, is potentially significant, has wide-ranging impacts on several targets, and lacks any discernible pattern of connectivity.

China staged its greatest military drills in the Taiwan Strait when Nancy Pelosi was in Taiwan, utilised its digital dominance to propagate rumours, and violated the median, sparking the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, on the other hand, called the Chinese informational offensive against her nation "cognitive warfare tactics." According to Tsai, China has been employing "United Front Work" for a while to pressure Taiwanese citizens into voluntarily joining the mainland Chinese population. If they don't, Beijing will guarantee a split and unhappy Taiwan, making it an easier target for China.

The US and China disagree about China's continuous political pressure due to the rising US-China rivalry and Taiwan's role as a rift in the Sino-US relationship. President of the United States Joe Biden recently made a comment about defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion that represented this. As China exploits its economic might to sway other nations, despite Taiwan's GDP being barely 5% of China's, it continues to be a victim of Chinese economic statecraft. Taiwanese President Tsai responds to this by saying, "You would not put all your eggs in one basket," implying that Taiwan is reorganising its Chinese-dependent economic structure to lessen its need on China and build economic resilience. China has been waging a new influence campaign against Taiwan since August 2022. China began promoting its message of a peaceful unification of Taiwan with mainland China via new sorts of digital media, such as Reddit, which represented a departure from its conventional messaging. IW was defined as a goal for China in a white paper published by the China People's Liberation Army (PLA) titled "Grasp the new essence of "winning the good with evil" in the Information Age." IW has thus assumed a prominent position and been given precedence within Chinese military policy above traditional military might. The article makes the case that, in order to get the upper hand, one must suppress the opponent's information advantage as warfare has evolved from a mechanised conflict to an information attack.

The usefulness of surveillance technologies has improved for all nations as a result of ICT advancements. Due to China's technical hegemony, businesses like ZTE, Huawei, Dahua, China National Electronics Import and Export Corporation (CEIEC), and Hikvision find it simple to export their products to both democratic and authoritarian nations. Such changes show a "push and pull" dynamic. Such technological exports increase China's geopolitical advantage over the West. ICT is seen as being essential by Beijing for assuring economic growth and development in order to effectively implement Chinese foreign policy and strategy. The need for surveillance technology platforms for personal and governmental security has led to an increase in the export of such goods from China in recent years. Exporting such technology platforms to democracies and autocracies poses strategic issues since it may lead to the spread of the Chinese brand of digital authoritarianism around the world.