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Post-2003, China has looked to a three-pronged strategy to "win without fighting" that comprises "media warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare". This is called 'Three Warfares'.

Indian strategists believe China has fully developed the concept of 'Three Warfares', and was "applying it to the Doklam crisis."

Within the 'Three Warfares', media is expected to influence opinion - domestically and internationally - in favour of China. It is a way to dictate the narrative to benefit the Chinese position.

CHINESE MEDIA AND THE DOKLAM CRISIS Specifically, Chinese media warfare becomes increasingly important to understand, because of how visible it became during the recent crisis. Indian media ran report after report based on Chinese coverage of the Doklam crisis.

Chinese media oscillated between threatening India, painting India as the aggressor, and portraying China as simply a defender of its territorial sovereignty.

For example: During the stand-off, the Chinese government warned India that it should learn from "historical lessons", in an indirect reference to the 1962 war that the latter lost. Defence Minister Arun Jaitley retorted, "The situation in 1962 was different and India of 2017 is different."

This led to angry Chinese media weighing in, via an editorial in state-run Global Times, threatening India with "greater losses than in 1962". The editorial demanded that India be taught "a bitter lesson".

Such aggressive rhetoric may be aimed at beating hostile countries into submission, an attempt to get them to toe Beijing's line.

SHOULD INDIA BE LISTENING? Is India giving excessive importance to our neighbour's media? According to Dr Alka Acharya, former Director, Institute of Chinese Studies, and Professor at Centre for East Asian Studies, JNU, we need to adopt a more nuanced and sophisticated way to pick up and leave out information - it is necessary to take more note of publications, opinion makers and scholars close to the Chinese government.

"We should be taking government- and party-controlled publications seriously. For instance, a publication like Global Times should be paid attention to, to understand the hawks in China. While it should not be considered sacrosanct, it is important to understand the dynamics and strains of the Communist Party of China," she says.

CHINESE MEDIA: CREDIBILITY IN THE FACE OF CENSORSHIP The influence exerted by Chinese media will remain directly connected to perceptions of its credibility. This is especially important to remember as the country looks to play a bigger role in international media - albeit with censorship firmly in place.

A 2013 survey by Joseph Weber & Linjun Fan, published in Human Rights Quarterly, brings forth some interesting findings about the perception journalism students in China hold about domestic and foreign media.

The thirty-nine question survey was conducted anonymously at eight Chinese universities.

In two separate questions, respondents were asked how true and accurate they thought news in Chinese state-owned media and foreign media was.

Only 54 of the 111 respondents (48.7 percent), said they "believed most of what they read or saw in Chinese state-owned media".

Originally posted here:
China's media warfare: Winning without fighting - Times of India