The Indian factory of Wistron, a major iPhone foundry, is rumored to be in riot due to labor rights dispute, and Apple has put it on the watch list. Photo: taken from Muniswamy Official Facebook page
The Sunday Guardian earlier published an article by British academic Cleo Paskal, reminding the world that the Chinese Communist Party is waging a political warfare that many countries do not realize they are in. The mob attack on Wistron’s iPhone manufacturing plant in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru last year may have been funded by the Chinese Communist Party.
Pascal, who works at the Royal International Institute (Chatham House) and is a senior researcher on Indo-Pacific issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, noted that the Chinese Communist Party sometimes fights a maneuvering war, but its strategy has been a political one from the beginning. She noted that the Chinese Communist Party is extremely good at political warfare. Many countries around the world not only don’t fight back, they don’t even realize they are at war.
Pascal cited a new book published last year by Professor Kerry K. Gershaneck, who served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer and is currently a research fellow at National Chengchi University, Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to Give Up the Army Without a Fight. Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win without Fighting”), points out that the CCP’s political warfare is essentially “all-encompassing, unrestricted warfare. Its goal is to defeat the enemy and bend it to Beijing‘s will.
The CCP’s political warfare encompasses: legal warfare (using international and national laws, institutions and courts to influence CCP decisions), economic warfare, biological and chemical warfare, cyber attacks, terrorism, public opinion/media warfare, psychological warfare, espionage, bribery, censorship, deception, subversion, blackmail, “disappeared”, street violence, assassinations, proxies, public diplomacy, and hybrid warfare.
Pascal points out that the Chinese Communist Party considers itself to be engaged in a political war with the United States and its partner countries and allies. The world may end up losing this war if it thinks it is out of its hands.
The CCP’s political warfare encompasses a number of characteristics: (1) a strong central command to wage political warfare operations; (2) a “clear vision, ideology, and strategy” for conducting political warfare; (3) the ability to influence, coerce, intimidate, divide, and subvert hostile nations, either explicitly or implicitly, to force them to do their bidding or to collapse; (4) a tight bureaucratic control of the domestic population; (5) a thorough understanding of the hostile nations against which the political warfare is being waged; (6) coordinated operations with an all-encompassing array of political warfare tools; and (7) a willingness to accept the high risks associated with participating in political warfare activities.
Countervailing actions that countries that do not want to stand idly by include (1) developing a national strategy to address political warfare; (2) establishing national institutions to address political warfare; (3) using precise terminology to identify the Chinese threat; (4) providing better analytical, investigative, and legal training for personnel with these responsibilities to identify, track, and expose CCP political warfare activities; and (5) increasing the costs of CCP intervention, such as expelling diplomats; (6) regularly expose covert and overt CCP political warfare operations; (7) take legal action against CCP officials and affiliates involved in civil rights violations; (8) investigate, disrupt, and prosecute CCP political warfare activities; and (9) encourage academic research focused on countering CCP political warfare.
Citing the CCP’s attacks on India as an example, Pascale pointed out that the CCP’s funding of a number of NGOs in the U.S. and its funding of mobs to attack a Taiwanese manufacturing plant in Bangalore were both political wars launched to weaken India.
She noted that there is currently little resistance to the CCP’s political warfare and its goal of “giving up without a fight. Countries should take action, including “discussions among like-minded countries, investigations of political warfare operations against democracies, training and sandbox exercises, research and analysis of political warfare against the CCP. And the participants who should work together to confront the CCP’s political warfare should include academics, journalists, and legal experts in addition to policymakers, Congress, civil servants, and diplomatic, military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel.
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