SEOUL, South Korea — In the never-ending global battle for public opinion, cognitive warfare offers victories that may not be won on battlefields. And sometimes embracing the role of victim is the quickest path to victory.
The NATO military alliance defines cognitive war as “activities conducted in synchronization with other instruments of power, to affect attitudes and behaviors.” With Western public acutely sensitive to accusations of neo-imperialism and racism and to news reports of civilian casualties and big-power bullying, playing the victim card can ignite powerful emotions that impact democratic policymaking.
Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to appreciate it: One tool his ruling Communist Party has used to forge unity and nationalism is the theme of China’s “Century of Humiliation.” Under that rubric, textbooks, museum signage and TV/cinema output illustrate China’s victimhood at the hands of aggressive imperialist powers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And now Mr. Xi is now seeking to transition Chinese victimhood from domestic to global terrain.
“The strong should not bully the weak,” Mr. Xi told the World Economic Forum on July 15. “Decisions should not be made by simply showing off strong muscles or waving a big fist.” Warming to his theme, he continued, “Multilateralism should not be used as a pretext for acts of unilateralism.”
That sounds like a barely-veiled complaint about U.S. efforts to weave a web of intra-regional security alliances to contain Beijing’s expansionism. But with China being the world’s second-largest economy and military power, clashing with its neighbors over frontiers ranging from the Himalayas to the East China Seas, the claim to victimhood a tough sell.
Jay Tarriela, spokesman for the Philippines Coast Guard, is not buying it.
“I fail to see how China deserves to play the victim card of being bullied,” Mr. Tarriela wrote on July 16 on the social media site X.
“The majority of small economies around the globe tread carefully when dealing with China’s unlawful activities and provocative behavior,” he continued. “China asserts their dominance in the region by flexing their muscles through the deployment of the PLA Navy, China Coast Guard, and Chinese Maritime Militia.”
Recent signs from Beijing suggest Chinese officialdom is concerned about the negative perceptions their policies have generated. At a conference last month, academics were urged to produce marketable narratives for China’s claims to large swaths of the disputed South China Sea.
Ukraine and Gaza
For all its claims to victimhood, China is not fighting a hot war. Matters are deadlier in Gaza and Ukraine, two polities with opposing approaches to the demands of cognitive warfare.
Tactically, urban combat is a tactical advantage for defenders. The Palestinian militants of Hamas and the conventional forces of Ukraine have used that insight in very different ways.
The Ukrainian military has taken on Russian invaders in a series of fortified towns and cities, including Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar. However, with the exception of Mariupol — which was cut off in enemy territory — Kyiv largely evacuated its urban battlegrounds before combat commenced.
Frontal assaults along the 600-mile-plus front line have led to heavy Russian casualties, and Ukrainians forces continue to suffer air strikes nationwide, but Ukraine’s strategy has avoided mass civilian deaths on the front lines.
“Ukraine, as a legitimate sovereign state, has the duty to protect its people, so it has no real choice but to displace civilians from the enemy’s line of advance,” said Gastone Breccia, a professor of military history at Italy’s Pavia University.
In Gaza, Hamas has deployed exactly the opposite strategy.
After the deadly terrorist rampage into southern Israel on Oct. 7, Hamas’ fighters and hostages retreated swiftly into urban, densely populated Gaza. Their defensive ploy there was to entrench themselves among the civilian population, turning the terrain, de facto, into a massive human shield.
As Israel’s armed forces blasted their way forward with minimalist rules of engagement and massive firepower, Palestinian civilian casualties exploded. Strengths and weaknesses play out in the emotional, as well as the tactical arena: Ukraine is outgunned and outnumbered by Russia, but the defiance and stoicism of its defenders contrast with the military weakness of Hamas, a militia, not an army.
Unable to resist Israel militarily, Qatar-based Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh has openly promoted civilian suffering as an element in the cognitive struggle.
Speaking on Al Jazeera just weeks after last year’s attack, the Hamas leader said: “The blood of the children, women and elderly, … we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution.”
Despite the brutality of Hamas’ initial terrorist assault, for many Western audiences, the victimhood of Palestinians played directly to anti-imperialist and racial-discrimination themes popular in some academic and political circles.
“Gaza perfectly fulfills the bad/good pattern inherited from the de-colonization era,” Mr. Breccia said.
Reeling from images, footage and the publicizing of Palestinian civilian casualties, world opinion has swung largely against Israel. Street protests have erupted and protest camps have multiplied, while criticisms of Tel Aviv and even accusations of genocide have arisen.
Precedents
Military scholars point to the French Indochina War, known in France as “La Sale Guerre” (“The Dirty War”), and America’s experience in Vietnam, as landmark conflicts in modern cognitive warfare.
In the first conflict, France’s imperialist record generated domestic sympathy for Vietnam’s Communist resistance, setting off domestic political upheavals. When the U.S. took over the fight, U.S. firepower, and related destruction and civilian deaths — all captured on color TV — produced the same blowback back home.
France suffered a military defeat; the U.S. did not. But in both cases, the will to fight eroded and the Communists achieved their strategic objectives.
Those wars “marked a great divide between the era when mass civilian casualties were scarcely relevant, and our present time, when winning or losing wars is determined by the resilience of public opinion, which in turn, is deeply affected by images of innocent victims,” said Mr. Breccia.
For today’s China, that means its subtler tactics short of direct military action are gaining territory, inch by inch, across the Indo-Pacific, but have gained far less traction in the cognitive battle to win over public opinion or to claim the mantle of victim in the conflict.
For many, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has seized the moral high ground, consistently forbidding his forces to escalate in the face of Beijing’s aggressiveness. In a series of public relations coups, Manila invited Western reporters aboard a vessel that was hit with water cannons by Chinese ships, and distributed footage of Chinese rammings and boardings of Philippine vessels.
There are signs that cognitive war defeats are a source of rising frustration inside China itself.
The nationalist Global Times, which has close links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, on February 29 accused Mr. Marcos of “attempting to play the victim card, portraying China as ’bullying’ the Philippines in the South China Sea to garner more international support and exert pressure on China.” It returned to the “unfair bullying” theme in articles in March, May and July.
Now, Beijing may be opening a new information front. This week, Chinese TV channel CGTN broadcast what it said was an exclusive, English-language report from Second Thomas Shoal, which China disputes with the Philippines. Targeting a pressure point for Western audiences — the environment — CGTN called a grounded vessel on the reef, a makeshift base for Philippine marines, a “tumor.” Citing scientific studies, it said the Philippine installation had polluted nearby coral.
CGTN also claimed that Manila seeks to upgrade the 328-foot long, 50-foot-wide hulk into a permanent base, calling that “an infringement of territorial sovereignty” neglecting to mention that the shoal in question lies 164 miles off the coast of the Philippines and 864 miles from the coast of China.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.