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.

In this report, the authors explore possible future cooperation scenarios in which the Russian Armed Forces and the People's Liberation Army could operate together as coalition partners. The authors examine historical patterns of Russian and Chinese alliance behavior as well as current military-to-military engagements between these two militaries that include exercises, training events, such operational activities as joint maritime and air patrols, and high-level exchanges. Given these military engagement trends, three scenarios that illustrate how Russian and Chinese forces might operate together under different strategic and operational circumstances are then examined. These scenarios are then used to identify the prospects and pitfalls for future Russian and Chinese military cooperation in conflict and to explore implications for U.S. policymakers, commanders, and planners.

This report describes the potential role of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in strategic competition. Understanding the national security implications of both international CBDC developments and a potential U.S. CBDC is a central component of President Biden's March 2022 Executive Order 14067 on "Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets." This executive order mandated an assessment of foreign CBDCs and their potential effect on U.S. finance, as well as effects on national security and financial crime — concerns that are overshadowed by the relatively advanced stage of China's CBDC. This report contributes to the discourse that has emerged from that executive order by describing whether and how the more advanced stage of China's CBDC project might advantage China, how decisions regarding the international governance of CBDCs might affect U.S. national power, and how the design choices of a U.S. CBDC might affect its capabilities as an instrument of national power.

The way in which a military organization plans for and conducts logistics can provide critical insights into how capably the military can achieve its operational objectives. Assumptions are often made about the capability of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to carry out and sustain high-end operations, but missing from that discussion is an assessment of how capably its logistics systems and processes perform, which affects how well the military might operate in actual conflict. A review of literature on China's evolving military capabilities indicates that little attention has been given to the topic of the PLA's logistics capabilities, particularly understanding and analyzing the PLA's approach to some key subfunctions of logistics, such as maintenance. The People's Liberation Army's growing ability to project and sustain power will rely on its logistics capabilities, systems, and processes. The PLA is rapidly modernizing its military systems, which requires sophisticated maintenance management practices to keep pace with and maintain much more complex systems. An assessment of PLA progress in these capabilities requires an understanding of the PLA's approach to maintenance, which includes an assessment of its maintenance apparatus and how it operates within their system. In this report, the authors look at the PLA's historical approach to maintenance, identify critical reforms that affect maintenance practices, and highlight key themes related to the PLA's current maintenance capabilities.

The authors identify tasks that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would likely be assigned by Chinese leaders to achieve strategic goals both in peacetime competition with the United States and in a hypothetical low-intensity conflict. The authors then analyze potential vulnerabilities in the PLA's execution of those tasks and how the United States could leverage those vulnerabilities to disrupt China's strategic goals, focusing on the potential for peacetime competition to erupt into a broader low-intensity conflict featuring smaller, indirect, or hybrid confrontations that span the world. The authors expand on a comprehensive list of potential PLA missions developed in prior research and explore vulnerabilities in the PLA's execution of the specific tasks required to achieve Beijing's strategic objectives. Across these missions and tasks, they identify five sets of vulnerabilities that, if disrupted, could affect Beijing's ability to achieve its goals: fears of domestic instability after PLA actions, risk of escalating conflict, harm to China's reputation, the PLA's limited ability to support partner states, and the PLA's limited ability to project power. These vulnerabilities provide a sense of the potential pressure points that the PLA could face in accomplishing its objectives. Options for the United States to leverage these pressure points include deterring harmful PLA actions by shaping perceptions of how those actions might affect China's interests, exploiting the consequences of PLA actions to deter Beijing from repeating similar actions, and exploiting PLA weaknesses in power projection and partner support to weaken confidence in the PLA and discourage similar operations.

The U.S. and Chinese militaries have been shaped by a distinct set of direct and indirect experiences. The U.S. military has focused its energy and resources on combating terrorism and performing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in 2023, U.S. emphasis on major power competition contends with other national security priorities, including current crises and continued deployments around the globe. The People's Liberation Army (PLA), on the other hand, has largely focused its military modernization and restructuring to prepare for a regional conflict that would likely involve U.S. military intervention. Despite having no combat experience since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, the PLA has conducted an in-depth study of all aspects of the U.S. military's technological and operational capabilities — including its organization, command and control, logistics, joint operations, and concepts of operation — since the 1990s. The dichotomy presented by the experiences of both militaries raises several questions about how they are preparing for the possibility of a major power conflict. Since 2001, the U.S. military has gained significant direct combat experience, but has done so against technologically inferior, nonpeer adversaries. In contrast, the PLA had no direct combat experience. Even though its concepts of operation are designed to fight a major power, these concepts are largely derived from indirect observations and lessons from U.S. operations since 1991. The ways that each side gains and processes experience and incorporates it into training will heavily affect readiness for and performance in a future war.

Taiwan remains an important potential flashpoint between China and the United States. Given the geographic distance between the United States and Taiwan and the military challenge of defeating a major attack by China, an accurate assessment of Taiwan's ability to sustain a defense can be a critical factor for U.S. decisionmakers and planners. In this report, the authors develop a framework for assessing a country's capacity to resist a large-scale military attack. In that framework, a country's ability to withstand such an attack depends on four variables: political leadership and social cohesion, military effectiveness, durability, and military intervention by an ally. The authors then use that framework to assess Taiwan's capacity to resist an attack by China for 90 days — a posited minimum amount of time required for the United States to marshal sufficient forces to carry out a major combat intervention in East Asia. An accurate assessment of Taiwan's ability to withstand a large-scale attack by China could help U.S. decisionmakers and planners better anticipate and respond in such a situation.