What we are witnessing here is in fact following a strategy of warfare developed by the Chinese Communist Party over 20 years ago. In 1999, two officers of the People's Liberation Army, Qiao Liang (乔良) and Wang Xiangsui (王湘穗), published a book entitled Unrestricted Warfare. At that time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Tian'anmen massacre were ten years ago, and seven years earlier, Deng Xiaoping's trip to Shenzhen had revived the course of economic reform that would make China an economic miracle country at the beginning of the 21st century. But the party was afraid that the exchange of capital and information, the increasing human exchange, even with the West, would undermine its role as autocrat. It believed it had to keep an eye on all perceived or actual threats so that it would be spared the fate of its former counterpart in the Soviet Union. To this day, the fall of the CPSU of the Chinese Communist Party is a warning, a kind of trauma.
Unrestricted Warfare emerged from the feeling of a permanent siege from outside. China had followed how the USSR, especially in the seventies and eighties, had entered into an impossible to win arms race with the USA and lost it. As a consequence, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui developed a new concept of warfare. Although China was already upgrading its own stock of conventional weapons at that time, the two authors argued that "In today's world there is nothing that cannot become a weapon, and therefore we must sharpen our understanding of weapons with an awareness that transcends all boundaries. (...) An artificially induced stock market crash, a hacker attack, a rumor or scandal that crashes the enemy's currency exchange rate or exposes its leaders on the Internet, all these things now belong in the arsenal of weapons of a new kind.
So anything could be a weapon and anything could be a battlefield: Information technology, public opinion, trade, finance, international law, a flood, a cultural exchange, a UN conference, a mobile phone network construction treaty, an archaeological discovery in Xinjiang and so on. To this day, there is always only one goal: the strengthening of the Chinese one-party state order.
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