China's push to develop the world's premier fighting force extends beyond conventional and nuclear capabilities, with U.S. officials warning that Beijing is pouring resources into a mix of psychological warfare and cyber operations.
The goal in employing what are known in Beijing as cognitive domain operations, or CDO, is to influence the way China's adversaries think and behave, targeting everyone from the average citizen to senior officials.
China "views controlling the information spectrum in the modern battlespace as a critical enabler of information dominance early in a conflict," according to the Pentagon's China Military Power report, released Wednesday.
"The PLA [People's Liberation Army] probably intends to use CDO as an asymmetric capability to deter U.S. or third-party entry into a future conflict or as an offensive capability to shape perceptions or polarize a society," it said, adding that for Chinese military officers, "subduing the enemy without fighting is the highest realm of warfare."
The Pentagon's report does not state how much money Beijing has allocated for these efforts but says that the PLA has spent parts of the past six years looking at how to incorporate cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to produce deepfakes and other material to mislead the U.S. public.
It also says China has tasked some of its leading technology companies, including Baidu, Alibaba and Huawei, with using generative AI to produce better audio and video, in addition to more convincing text and images.
Successes and failures
The results, however, have been uneven.
U.S. intelligence officials repeatedly called out China, along with Russia and Iran, for trying to deploy AI-boosted influence operations in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November.
Some of the efforts, though, were described as clumsy.
"The quality is not as believable as you might expect," said a U.S. intelligence official at the time.
Earlier efforts, identified by tech giant Microsoft, described an improvement in Beijing's ability to produce "eye-catching content," though questions remained about the content's reach and impact.
U.S. intelligence officials have also said that Beijing's influence efforts have been hampered by what they describe as a struggle by Chinese intelligence to understand the American psyche with the same sophistication as other U.S. adversaries, such as Russia.
China has repeatedly denied such allegations, accusing the U.S. of calling out others for its own wrongdoing.
"For quite some time, the U.S. side has patched up all sorts of disinformation about threats of 'Chinese hackers' to serve its own geopolitical purposes," Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA in an email earlier this month regarding allegations that a Chinese-linked group known as Salt Typhoon had breached U.S. telecommunications companies.
"The US needs to stop its own cyberattacks against other countries and refrain from using cybersecurity to smear and slander China," he added.
Still, U.S. officials warn that aspects of China's psychological and cyber operations have met with an alarming amount of success, most notably the exploits of the hacking group known as Volt Typhoon.
Volt Typhoon has been "working to embed, burrow into our most sensitive critical infrastructure, not for espionage, but rather for disruption or destruction in the event of a major crisis in the Taiwan Strait," said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
'Induce societal panic'
"This is a world where a war in Asia could see very real impacts … across our nation, with attacks against pipelines, against water facilities, against transportation nodes, against communications, all to induce societal panic and to deter our ability to marshal military might and citizen will," Easterly added, speaking at a virtual cyber conference earlier this month.
The CISA director said U.S. cyber teams have worked with companies in the private sector to evict Volt Typhoon from their systems, but there still is a long way to go.
"We think what we've seen to date is really just the tip of the iceberg," Easterly said.
Pentagon officials echo those concerns.
"I think we're starting to see more emphasis in the cognitive space … not being only focused on our leaders but indeed on populations in a way that can be both corrosive to institutions we have but also is really, really hard to, frankly, prevent, deter," said Christopher Maier, the assistant defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
China and other adversaries such as Russia are "going to be a lot more aggressive. They're going to take a lot more risk," Maier said in response to a question from VOA during an event in Washington on Wednesday.
"They're going to try to message our population in ways that, frankly, we would find completely inappropriate and threatening," he said.
But Maier questioned whether such tactics will ultimately yield the desired results.
"The information tool is most useful when it's paired with physical actions and done in a more, if you will, tactical way. That's something that China and Russia could do," he said. "But those effects don't tend to last for long."
And, he said, now that the U.S. is on the lookout, China and others could have a harder time finding more success.
"I think they'll see opportunities to exploit what they'll perceive as vulnerabilities," Maier said, adding, "I'm not sure they're as vulnerable as they might think."
