Military

CHINA’S ‘THREE WARFARES’ IN PERSPECTIVE

China introduced the concepts of public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare when it revised the “Political Work Guidelines of the People’s Liberation Army” in 2003. Knowledge of these “Three Warfares” — as they became known in Chinese military writings — slowly dispersed to Western security analysts. Just as Russia’s coercion of Estonia, Georgia, and then Ukraine catalyzed a discussion of hybrid warfare, China’s actions in the South China Sea spurred a conversation about the “Three Warfares” that reverberates to this day. For many Western analysts, the “Three Warfares” concept has become a proxy for understanding Beijing’s influence operations, or explaining Chinese “hybrid warfare.”

But this is the wrong approach. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with which the “Three Warfares” are most closely associated, is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The PLA is the party’s army; the party is not an extension of the PLA. Unlike a national army dedicated to the defense of a state and its people, the Chinese military’s purpose is to create political power for the party. When analysts look at the PLA, they are looking at it as a military — at its warfighting capabilities and the resulting security implications. It is a purely military view that lacks a clear concept for appreciating political warfare.

Those concerned with Beijing’s efforts to shape foreign countries’ perceptions need to start with the CCP. Mao Zedong himself critiqued the prevailing Western approach long before the “Three Warfares” were introduced, attacking those who did not understand the need for the PLA to serve as the party’s backbone. In the Gutian Conference Resolution, otherwise known as On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party, Mao stated that those who held the purely military view “think the task of the Red Army … is merely to fight. They do not understand that the Chinese Red Army is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of the revolution … The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to … help [the masses, i.e. CCP] establish revolutionary political power.” The party leads, the PLA follows. The purpose of influence operations is political power.