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.