Question: Which war-fighting capabilities have been more effective at advancing China's territorial ambitions in the twenty-first century?

1. “Kinetic” weapons like destroyers, fighter jets, and ballistic missiles
2. “Nonkinetic” weapons like psychological warfare, media warfare, and legal warfare

Here, just as the pen can often be far mightier than the sword, it may well turn out that China's “three warfares” will prove to be far more effective at expanding China's maritime and land boundaries than any arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles or any fleet of Chinese aircraft carriers. Because this is true—and because in their own ways, the three warfares are highly escalatory—it is important for our detective story that we gain a more sophisticated understanding of what these three warfares entail.

The three warfares were first officially recognized as an important war-fighting capability in 2003. That's when China's Central Military Commission, in conjunction with the Chinese Communist Party, officially approved the strategy.

The definitive work on the implications of the three warfares for Chinese force projection has been authored by University of Cambridge professor and former White House advisor Stefan Halper. In a report to the Pentagon, Halper describes the three warfares as “a dynamic three-dimensional warfighting process that constitutes war by other means.”1

To Halper, the three warfares represent a particularly potent nonkinetic form of attack in a modern era in which it is increasingly difficult to use kinetic military force to advance territorial goals. Indeed, as Russia's adventurism in the Ukraine has demonstrated, any such unlawful display of kinetic force is likely to draw immediate condemnation—along with economic or other sanctions from one's trading partners.

So just what are the three warfares? The first is “psychological warfare,” the goal of which is to deter, demoralize, or otherwise shock an opponent nation and its civilian population and thereby discourage the opponent from fighting back. As Halper describes the scope of China's psychological warfare: “It employs diplomatic pressure, rumor, false narratives, and harassment to express displeasure, assert hegemony and convey threats.”2 Halper notes further that “China's economy is utilized to particular effect.”³

Thus, for example, when China imposes an economic boycott on Japan for rare earths or bans Chinese tourism, it hopes to coerce a Japanese populace that is hungry for prosperity and struggling with economic stagnation into acquiescing to China's territorial demands regarding the Senkaku Islands. In a similar vein, when China sends large flotillas of civilian ships to surround a contested area like Scarborough Shoal or Second Thomas Shoal, its “cabbage strategy” goal is to intimidate the Philippines and force its military to back off in the face of overwhelming numbers.⁴

The second of the three warfares is “media warfare.” Its goal is to shape public opinion both domestically and internationally in a way that leads unwary media consumers to accept China's version of events. Its use follows Stefan Halper's maxim that “it is not the best weapons that win today's wars but rather the best narrative.”⁵

Heritage Foundation scholar Dean Cheng describes such media warfare as a “constant, on-going activity aimed at long-term influence of perceptions and attitudes.”⁶ As Halper puts it: The goals are to “preserve friendly morale; generate public support at home and abroad; weaken an enemy's will to fight; and alter an enemy's situational assessment.”

While China engages in media warfare across the spectrum—books, movies, magazines, the Internet—it has invested particularly heavily into turning its Chinese Central Television Network (CCTV) into a global propaganda force. In fact, in the same year Chinese military and political leaders first embraced the three warfares in 2003, CCTV inaugurated a faux twenty-four-hour news channel designed to directly compete with the likes of the BBC and CNN for the hearts and minds of the world.

In 2011, China substantially upped the media-warfare ante when it set up a major studio in Washington, DC, replete with non-Chinese “white face” and “black face” American anchors and reporters. The beauty of such a faux-CNN news model is that CCTV can shrink-wrap its propaganda around healthy doses of pure news while reaching over forty million Americans—along with hundreds of millions more viewers in the rest of the world.

Thus, when yet another incident breaks out between China and the Philippines involving the dispute over Scarborough Shoal or Second Thomas Shoal, CCTV is there to quickly advance China's narrative—often before the Western media are even on to the story. In a similar vein, when tensions mount over the Senkaku Islands, CCTV will quickly launch a strong offensive blaming “right-wing nationalists” in Japan for any incident or escalation.

The last of the three warfares is “legal warfare,” also known as “lawfare.” China's strategy here is to operate within the existing legal framework to effectively bend—or perhaps rewrite—the rules of the international order in China's favor.

Consider, for example, China's insistence that it be able to restrict freedom of navigation within its two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone as defined by the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. In fact, this claim has no legal basis within the context of the actual Law of the Sea Treaty language—the treaty is quite clear on this point. Yet China repeatedly and falsely asserts the opposite—in the spirit of the oft-repeated axiom that “if you say it enough, they will believe it.”

Still another example of China's aggressive lawfare is the use of bogus maps to support its territorial claims—a tactic at least one commentator has dubbed “mapfare.”7 For example, in 2012, China outraged many of its Asian neighbors by including a map inside of new Chinese passports depicting many of the disputed areas in the South China Sea as sovereign Chinese territory. In this way, China sought to use such clever cartography to both bolster and mark its territorial claims. And so the three warfares go.

Here, then, is the broader point. If we are to believe scholars like Stefan Halper and Dean Cheng, China's use of legal, media, and psychological warfare is a new form of aggression that China is using to advance its expansionist and revisionist goals. From this perspective, the beauty of the three warfares in today's modern age is that they offer a new form of nonkinetic weaponry to achieve goals that in earlier times could only be realized through kinetic force. Moreover, the three warfares combine in a highly synergistic way.

Fig. 18.1. White-hulled paramilitary ships like the China Marine Surveillance vessel in the foreground are at the tip of the Chinese spear in the East and South China Seas. This boat tussles with a Japanese Coast Guard vessel in Japan's territorial waters near the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. (Photograph by the Asahi Shimbun. Used with permission from Getty Images.)

For example, in many of its territorial disputes with its neighbors in the East and South China Seas, China first asserts false territorial claims based on vague history—that's the legal warfare. It next projects nonkinetic force in the forms of everything from white-hulled civilian fleets to economic boycotts—that's the psychological warfare. Finally, it seeks to win the media battle by controlling the narrative—in this case, portraying a “peaceful China” as a victim of foreign-power domination during its century of humiliation that is only trying to right a historic wrong.

Viewed through this lens, China's deployment of the three warfares in pursuit of its expansionist ambitions is revealed for what it is—a new type of warfare not yet recognized as such by China's opponents. However, it is clearly aimed at achieving expansionist and revisionist goals that were previously only achievable through the use of kinetic military force.

If this interpretation of China's behavior is indeed correct, our “will there be war” question is in some sense definitively answered. To wit: China is already waging war against America and its allies on the new nonkinetic battlefields of the three warfares in much the same way Chinese cyberwarriors are prosecuting their undeclared war in cyberspace.

Given this reality, it may well be long past time that institutions like the Pentagon in America and other defense ministries in Asia expand the scope of their national security missions to include the development of strategies to directly combat the three warfares.