Classic Form: Use a third party to attack your enemy. This conserves your own strength, provides plausible deniability, and can turn your enemy's allies or assets against them.
Modern Version: Co-opt Western corporations, international institutions, legal systems, and activist groups to carry out the CCP's objectives. The CCP does not need to censor a critic directly when it can manipulate PayPal, YouTube, or a university's HR department into doing it for them under the guise of enforcing "community standards" or "diversity" policies.
AI-Powered Execution: AI conducts mass-scale analysis of public figures, influencers, and corporate entities to identify the perfect "borrowed sword." It profiles them for psychological vulnerabilities (e.g., ego, greed) or financial dependencies on the Chinese market. Once a target is identified, AI-driven dialogue systems based on reinforcement learning can deliver tailored narratives, "leaks," or inducements to manipulate these third parties into acting in the CCP's interest, all while maintaining perfect plausible deniability.
CCP Application: The CCP uses private corporations like Huawei and TikTok to gather data on foreign populations, avoiding direct state-to-state confrontation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CCP successfully pressured the World Health Organization (WHO) to delay warnings and praise Beijing's authoritarian lockdowns, effectively borrowing the WHO's global credibility to validate its own narrative and cover up its initial mishandling of the outbreak. China also allows American companies to build vast digital platforms and then acquires the data through purchase or breach, using the U.S.'s own infrastructure to build behavioral profiles of its citizens.
Collaborators: Corporate boards that enforce "community standards" that conveniently align with the CCP's censorship demands to protect market access. International institutions that fear offending Beijing and thus compromise their own missions. University administrators who expel China critics under the pretext of maintaining a "harmonious" campus environment.
Counter: Mandate radical transparency regarding foreign funding and influence in all public and private institutions. Build and support alternative platforms for finance, communication, and research that are resilient to CCP co-option. The CCP's primary tactic is to turn our own open systems into weapons against us; the counter is to reclaim and secure those systems.