China’s great power competition with the United States is not limited to ships, missiles, satellites, cyberattacks, or even economic rivalries. According to America’s top military commander in the Indo-Pacific, Beijing is also fighting in the battlefield of the human mind.
That warning came from Admiral Samuel J. Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, in recent testimony before Congress on America’s military posture in the region. Much of Paparo’s testimony focused on the fact that “China continues to pursue its rapid military buildup and modernization,” and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) regularly conducting “persistent, provocative pressure operations.”
Paparo also cautioned that Beijing “will not rule out the use of force against Taiwan” and that its actions near the island are “not just exercises but rehearsals for potential forced unification.” His broader message was that the Indo-Pacific is now the decisive theater for American security, and the United States must deny China the ability to achieve its objectives through military aggression.
But buried in the testimony was another kind of warning. Paparo said that the changing character of warfare is being shaped by “information, influence, cognitive, and cyber operations” that achieve strategic effects by “shaping perceptions and disrupting decision-making.” This brief comment deserves far more attention than it has received.
The phrase “cognitive operations” may sound technical. It is not. It describes one of the most important fronts in modern warfare – and in communist ideology.
Cognitive operations are efforts to influence how people perceive reality, process information, make decisions, and ultimately act. While propaganda tries to persuade you, cognitive warfare goes deeper by seeking to shape the mental environment around you so that confusion, fear, anger, despair, and distrust do the work of the enemy before a shot is fired.
Communist movements have always understood propaganda and cognitive war as more than just public relations. Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet apparatus that followed them viewed the minds of their own people and their enemies as a combat arena. The point was not merely to defend communism, but to demoralize opponents, divide societies, erode trust in institutions, and convince free peoples that their own system was decadent, hypocritical, and doomed.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has inherited that tradition and adapted it to the digital age. Early Soviet leaders saw the most important battles as mental or even “spiritual warfare.” Today, that same struggle has migrated from pamphlets and staged demonstrations to social media feeds, viral videos, deepfakes, online mobs, and algorithmic manipulation.
A former propaganda official who asked to remain anonymous told this author that some CCP officials speak of this struggle in terms that echo biblical language: “We do not fight bodies, but seek to conquer the heart-mind’s emotion and desires, as they drive action.”
One secret Cold War-era Soviet Communist Party document which I was able to review offers a useful window into the mentality behind cognitive war campaigns. Marked May 1982 and attributed to the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the document was titled, “A manifesto for broadcasting Soviet victories and persuading the West its own system is doomed to collapse.”
The document called for operatives to “plant seeds of doubt in educated minds, provoke suspicion against leaders, and portray capitalism as a glittering prison.” The youth were to be “nudged toward hopelessness,” while the public would be driven toward either “fierce anger or overwhelming despair.”
Former high-ranking CCP and PLA officials, after reviewing this document, observed that “Beijing has absorbed all Soviet propaganda principles, simply adapting them for the digital age.”
Dr. Sung Xinyi, formerly of the CCP International Liaison Department, explained the difference between information warfare and cognitive warfare. “Information warfare manipulates facts and news to sway opinions, while cognitive warfare goes further, targeting people’s ability to process and understand information,” he said. “The link is close, but cognitive warfare attacks how people learn, not just what they think.”
“In one case, the focus is on shaping your beliefs; in the other, it overwhelms you with emotions few can endure,” Dr. Sung explained. The goal is “to steer you into action, following the propagandist’s script before you even realize it.”
Social media has made this easier, faster, cheaper, and more scalable than ever. During the Cold War, Soviet-backed operatives had to organize protests, distribute leaflets, and cultivate radicals. Today, hostile regimes can inject narratives directly into the lives of millions through phones, videos, fake accounts, influencers, and coordinated online outrage.
Previously, “people might join protests or foment unrest for just an hour or two weekly before moving on,” said PLA defector Lt. Col. Quán Chāngpǔ, who was formerly involved in war planning before defecting in the early 1990s. “Now, agitation can be sustained non-stop.”
Asked what narratives the CCP might currently push against Americans, Dr. Sung pointed to three major themes:
1.) The idea that China is on the rise while the U.S is in decline.
2.) The claim that China stands for peace as the West fuels chaos.
3.) The argument that Western civilization is responsible for many of the world’s current ills, from colonization to inequality.
Taiwan offers one of the clearest examples of how this works. Paparo warned Congress that China’s actions near Taiwan are rehearsals for possible forced unification. But Beijing’s campaign against Taiwan is also psychological, political, informational, and cognitive.
Taiwanese lawmaker and former criminology professor Shen Pao-yang has warned that Beijing has recently shifted toward encouraging Taiwanese distrust of the United States. Lee Der-tsai, a former security adviser, cited one false Chinese report claiming Taiwanese celebrated the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister. The apparent purpose was to sow discord between Taiwan and Japan.
That is cognitive warfare in action. It does not always look like a tank crossing a border. Sometimes it looks like a rumor, a fake story, a viral video, a forged document, or a carefully targeted narrative that makes allies distrust one another.
This is why Paparo’s brief reference to “cognitive” operations matters. It was not an incidental phrase, but rather a recognition that the battlefield is expanding.
The CCP wants Americans to believe their country is in irreversible decline, U.S. allies to doubt American resolve, Taiwan to feel isolated, and young people in the West to believe their civilization is uniquely evil and unworthy of defense. It wants anger where unity is needed and despair where confidence is required.
Americans do not need to panic over every online argument or assume every protest is foreign-directed. But they do need to understand the game being played. Beijing is not merely competing economically or militarily. It is competing for control over the very minds of Western citizens.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
