Wars are no longer fought in the trenches, with tanks or even with nuclear weapons. Wars in the age of information and technology are won by those who are able to impose their narrative, their story, and who manage to convince the masses of their particular version of reality.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has 70 years of experience in controlling narrative. Since its rise to power in China in 1949, the CCP has completely destroyed traditional Chinese culture with the aim of imposing a new culture, which is designed to perpetuate itself in power indefinitely and suppress any dissension: Party Culture.
The Cultural Revolution, The Four Olds or the Great Leap Forward, were initiatives that stripped the Chinese people of the cultural references and even the traditional means of production of their millenary civilization and indoctrinated them with an invented history in which the ‘glorious party’ was the only valid reference and the communist regime the only possible form of state.
Communist theory is based on atheistic theory and class struggle. Its ideology is irreconcilable with capitalist ideology, universal values and freedom. Therefore, from the communist point of view, a real “win-win” situation, or a real coexistence between the capitalist world and the communist world, is not possible. The mission of the CCP is to replace the “old” world with the new communist world.
Under this strategy, the CCP exports “communist culture” to the world under the name of ‘Chinese culture’ or ‘traditional Chinese culture’. However, these terms hide the culture of the CCP or a deformed Chinese culture to fit communist characteristics.
“With a culture warfare taking place on the unlimited battlefield in the information age, the traditional army and weapons can no longer provide national security at the high strategic level, nor can they safeguard national interests and sovereignty. War is now beyond the reach of the military. It is increasingly becoming the work of politicians, philosophers, cultural leaders, scientists and even bankers. This is the culture war in the era of globalizing information,” explained a Chinese state media in 2009, according to China Scope.
To achieve this goal, the CCP has implemented an ambitious strategy of infiltrating Western cultural, academic, media and intellectual circles with the aim of creating a ‘New International Cultural Order’.
The establishment of Confucius Institutes in Western universities, economic agreements with the main media, the creation of social clubs for the elites (such as China Club Spain) or the International League of Silk Road Theatres are some of the actions undertaken and millimetrically designed and controlled from Beijing through an organ of the party dedicated exclusively to cultural subversion in the West using soft power: The United Front.
The objective is to weave an intricate and invisible network of individuals and institutions sympathetic to the Beijing regime or dependent on it in some way.
Once that network is dense enough, it will be the Westerners themselves who will apply the CCP’s censorship on issues uncomfortable for the regime: the repression in Tibet and Xinjiang, the two-decade persecution of the spiritual practice of Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) or the constant harassment of the Republic of China (Taiwan) which the CCP considers part of its territory.
Meanwhile, in Western media, universities, even in Hollywood industry, the image of the communist regime in Beijing is being whitewashed and relations with the CCP are being normalized as if it were just another democracy, softening the image of what is probably the most iron-fisted and murderous dictatorship in the history of mankind.
What is increasingly clear is that the CCP does not intend to play by the rules of the game of democratic countries, but rather is quietly gaining influence, economic, strategic and military weight to end up imposing its rules of the game on the West, which basically consist of there is no law but the party’s interests.
