The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was initially concerned about the rise of social media, considering it a threat to the regime. The CCP has since come to embrace social media as a way to influence domestic and foreign public opinion in the CCP's favor. Even as Beijing blocks foreign social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter (now X), from operating in China, it actively seeks to leverage these and other platforms for both overt propaganda and covert cyber-enabled influence operations abroad. While the results have been limited so far, the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically improve China's capabilities moving forward, posing a greater threat to global democracies. Most research into Chinese social media manipulation focuses on its outputs to understand what Chinese actors are saying and doing on foreign social media. However, this research can analyze only what has already occurred and has been attributed to Beijing. This report contributes to public understanding of the CCP's foreign social media manipulation by exploring the inputs of Chinese strategy, operational planning, and capability development and looking forward to the potential implications of generative AI for Chinese social media manipulation. The authors leverage extensive original Chinese-language open-source primary materials to examine how the Chinese military approaches social media manipulation. Specifically, they focus on a Chinese military-affiliated researcher, Li Bicheng, to understand how the Chinese military has conceptualized and operationalized its approach to cyber-enabled influence operations.

Translation forms a crucial part of People's Liberation Army (PLA)-directed research. This is done to support influence operations, enhance cooperation with the Russian military, and even understand US policy discussions on social media. Recent research from institutions such as the PLA Strategic Support Force's (PLASSF) Information Engineering University indicates that the PLA can conduct cognitive domain operations against not just Taiwan or the United States, but almost anywhere—including authoritarian states such as Vietnam. The PLA has spent at least five years building corpora of foreign language texts to train machine translation tools, though the scarcity of quality resources has been an issue in creating useful tools. The extent to which LLMs will become an additional tool in this research is unclear. At least some PLA machine translation efforts rely on foreign open-source tools, such as Google Translate and DeepL.

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has come to recognize the important role of social media in modern conflict and peacetime operations. As such, PLA researchers have begun using the term "social media warfare" (社交媒体战) to describe the extension of non-kinetic military activities onto social media by two or more opposing sides. This term is part of an ongoing conceptual expansion of the scope of warfare in Chinese military thought in which social media is viewed as another space for conflict and not just another channel for distributing propaganda. While the term "social media warfare" does not represent PLA doctrine, its emergence does indicate that the Chinese military finds these activities important enough to raise awareness of them amongst its rank and file. Together with other evidence, this suggests the PLA is working to better incorporate social media into its operations. This article provides an overview of PLA thinking on social media warfare, including its emergence in PLA literature, its theoretical basis, and PLA lessons derived from observations of foreign examples of social media's role in modern warfare. This article does not seek to provide a comprehensive review of PLA thinking about social media's role in military operations, but outlines one part of this conceptual view.