China’s ‘three warfares’ in Xinjiang

"Utilisation of deception and manipulation of information has a long lineage in Chinese strategic culture as illustrated by Sun Tzu’s oft-quoted maxim that ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting’. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) history as a clandestine and revolutionary organisation extended this by making ‘political warfare’ central to its modus operandi. But it was the US military’s display of technological superiority in such conflicts as the First Gulf War, the 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the 2003 invasion of Iraq that propelled the systematic development of China’s information war strategy.

The lesson of these conflicts for Chinese military strategists was that ‘non-military operations and non-kinetic capabilities’ were central in fighting and winning contemporary conflicts. This lesson was central to the argument of a 1999 treatise Unrestricted Warfare by Air Force colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui.

In it they assert that contemporary warfare was characterised not by using ‘armed forces to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will’ but rather by using ‘all means … to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests’. To successfully conduct such ‘unrestricted warfare’, ‘all boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war [and between] military and non-military will be totally removed’."