Cognitive Warfare Masterclass: China’s Doctrine for Strategic Narrative Superiority

CRC
Dec 29, 2025
1 min read

Athena Tong analyzes China’s actions in the Western Pacific as strategic, consistent, and systemic. The objective is to compress the operational and political space of states Beijing treats as challengers and to entrench new “normalities incrementally.” Tong frames this pattern as the practical application of the PLA’s “Three Warfares,” amplified through FIMI, where narrative dominance, psychological pressure, and legal framing reinforce one another.

Key Takeaways:

In the Philippines (Scarborough Shoal/Second Thomas Shoal), she shows how maritime incidents—collisions, blockades, water-cannon attacks—are first shaped through information operations to secure interpretive advantage and cast China as a rule- and environment-protecting actor. Presence and calibrated escalation then impose immediate pressure on decision-making and rules of engagement. This is coupled with legal framing that shifts the reference point: environmental and development claims are used to support asserted jurisdiction and to push sovereignty and self-determination principles into the background.

With Japan, Tong links the normalization of Chinese presence around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands to a parallel influence line focused on Okinawa. Digital influence operations amplify local grievances over the U.S. military footprint and manufacture the appearance of organic grassroots momentum, reinforced by historical revisionism. Routine transits and persistent presence function as stressors that raise response costs, while the “routine law-enforcement” label provides the accompanying legal logic.

For Taiwan (Kinmen), Tong describes a particularly tight coupling: information pressure and ambiguity shape expectations, while recurring incursions and administrative jurisdictional claims ratchet up pressure without crossing into open hostilities. On the legal plane, she highlights attempts to narrow Taiwan’s diplomatic and legal room for maneuver, including the strategic misrepresentation of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to bolster Beijing’s “One China” framing.

[Full Report Below]