China’s media warfare is, in many ways, the most pernicious. Its goal is to shape public opinion in a way that leads unwary viewers to accept China’s version of events. Heritage Foundation scholar Dean Cheng describes such warfare as a “constant, on-going activity aimed at long-term influence of perceptions and attitudes;†and its use follows Halper’s maxim that “it is not the best weapons that win today’s wars but rather the best narrative.â€
The tip of China’s media warfare spear is the Chinese Central Television Network (CCTV)—with a major facility in Washington, D.C. This is a faux twenty-four-hour news channel shrink-wraps China’s propaganda around healthy doses of CNN-style pure news while reaching over 40 million Americans along with hundreds of millions more viewers in the rest of the world.
As a case in point of the power of CCTV, when an incident breaks out between China and the Philippines over disputed reefs in the South China Sea, CCTV is there first to quickly advance China’s narrative—often before the Western media are even on to the story. In a similar vein, when tensions mount over the Senkaku Islands, CCTV will quickly launch a strong offensive blaming “right wing nationalists†in Japan for any incident or escalation.
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