The court of public opinion is now a critical battleground in modern warfare, according to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

China’s newly established Information Support Force is not just responsible for the PLA’s vast information network but also for spreading offensive disinformation, countering perceived foreign disinformation and ensuring loyalty across the military. 

The US and its allies need to take this seriously. China’s intentions and capabilities in the information domain are a military issue, not just a matter of public diplomacy.

The PLA now views the media as a ‘combat weapon’. It believes hostile disinformation is damaging command capabilities and could affect political and military outcomes

In April, China’s senior body of military decision makers, the Central Military Commission (CMC), disbanded the PLA’s Strategic Support Force and announced establishment of a new Information Support Force (ISF). This new force is tasked with engaging China in an information war with the United States and US allies.

But the ISF isn’t just about modernising information warfare. Its major mission is ensuring the PLA never turns against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In establishing the ISF on 19 April 2024, President Xi Jinping called on the new service to ‘adhere to information dominance’, ‘strengthen information protection’, ‘consolidate the foundation of the troops’ and ‘ensure that the troops are absolutely loyal’.

With recent corruption scandals threatening the integrity of PLA leadership, Xi has doubled down on suppressing internal dissent in the PLA.

It is clear he sees the ISF as not only a tool for modernising warfare capabilities but also as a mechanism for reinforcing the CCPs ideological control within the military. Since 2021, the PLA has an expressed intent to defend ‘against the enemy’s [psychological warfare] and incitement to defection’. This emphasis reflects a broader strategy to preserve power within the CCP by ensuring that its military remains a loyal pillar of the party’s authority and by countering foreign attempts at swaying Chinese public opinion.

The PLA claims the United States and its allies have deliberately used media and other communications tactics to fabricate discrediting information about their adversaries’ leaders, politicians and senior military officials. It calls this leadership-debilitating tactic ‘beheading with public opinion’ (舆论斩首) and says it can damage the prestige of China’s leaders and military officials, undermine their resolve and damage their decision-making capabilities.

With the creation of the ISF, the PLA is now determined to neutralise these supposed Western tactics. To do so, PLA strategy authors Sun Jian and Mei Zhifeng are calling on the PLA to ‘attack and defend at the same time’ on the information battlefield.

To defend against the foreign tactics, the PLA plans to dispel what it calls ‘rumours’ and the US’s ‘sinister intentions’ by cutting off their dissemination chain and strengthening Chinese public opinion countermeasures. The PLA also wants to counterattack by exposing ‘the false veil of democracy and freedom [the United States] has constructed’, and to sway Chinese public opinion against the US by creating a situation in which China has the moral upper hand. They say this can be done by highlighting contradictions in US foreign policy and domestic issues, such as political divisions and social inequality, to create an image of moral superiority for China.

China has even said it intends to sow public discord and ‘incite separatist and confrontational activities’ in its adversaries. It may be thinking of acting much as Russia does. There is compelling evidence that bots backed by Russia are disseminating disinformation in the United States.

Creating a separate information support force within the PLA shows China’s seriousness in operating within the information domain. In CCP documents, the PLA views the information domain as equal in importance to the physical domains of air, land, sea and space. It even talks about conducting operations in these physical domains to enable operations in the information domain.

This way of thinking about information warfare as a battlefield itself is at odds with the way the United States and their allies view the concept. They instead see it as mainly a means to support conventional operations. In US doctrine, information operations—such as cyber warfare, psychological operations and propaganda efforts—are often used to enhance the effectiveness of traditional military strategies.

In a speech on 8 October 2024, Xi expressed a desire to ‘improve the ability to guide public opinion’. By manipulating the information domain to manage the public’s perceptions, Xi can better influence public opinion and prevent any challenge to the monopoly power the CCP has over China.

The ISF will likely play a significant role in PLA information warfare in the future, and the US and its allies should watch intently to see how the organisation shapes up.