Today, the United States is locked in a deepening great power rivalry with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In recent years, this contest has taken on many names. It was defined as “great power competition” during the Trump administration’s first term in office,[1] and subsequently first as “long-term strategic competition” and then as “managed competition” during the presidency of Joseph Biden.[2] In the second Trump administration, the terminology has shifted significantly, as has the emphasis. At their May 2026 summit in Beijing, President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the need for “strategic stability”—that is, the management of bilateral relations through a more predictable strategic relationship.
Nevertheless, Washington today is clearly competing with Beijing across a number of domains, from supply chains to artificial intelligence to infrastructure provision to parts of the developing world. To date, however, one arena has received remarkably short shrift: the information domain. In recent years, the U.S. has failed to adequately track, let alone contest, the PRC’s activities in the information space, whether in the context of Chinese messaging to foreign audiences or its adroit use of propaganda and disinformation.
Those activities are voluminous, and a full cataloguing of them remains beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, the pages below seek to outline the ideological drivers of China’s approach to information, as well as the extensive technological infrastructure it has erected in pursuit of dominance in the “cognitive warfare” space.
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