Classic Form: Pretend to be incompetent, confused, or harmless to lower the enemy's guard and make them underestimate you. While they dismiss you as a fool, you maintain full strategic awareness and prepare your real move.
Modern Version: Behave erratically and unpredictably on the world stage—engaging in "wolf warrior" diplomacy, purging high-level officials without explanation, issuing contradictory policy statements—while methodically executing a coherent, long-term strategy in the background.
AI-Powered Execution: This is strategic deception powered by data. An AI can generate a continuous stream of chaotic or contradictory public statements and policy announcements, creating a high volume of noise. While the adversary's intelligence analysts are tied up trying to make sense of this "madness," the real strategic moves—which the AI has already calculated as optimal and which are being executed quietly—proceed without detection. The CCP can outwardly portray itself as technologically behind or organizationally confused, while secretly building the world's most advanced digital control system.
CCP Application: President Xi Jinping's sudden purges of his foreign minister and defense minister, or the seemingly erratic crackdowns on entire industries, create an image of instability and internal turmoil. This "madness" leads many Western analysts to dismiss China as a brittle or irrational actor. This underestimation provides cover for the CCP to continue its methodical military modernization, global infrastructure expansion, and technological infiltration. The perceived chaos is a smokescreen for calculated strategy.
Collaborators: Western analysts and commentators who mistake the CCP's deliberate feints for genuine instability, consistently underestimating the regime's strategic discipline. Wall Street investors who, seeing the apparent chaos, bet on both collapse and recovery, injecting volatility that further masks the CCP's true direction.
Counter: Study the pattern beneath the chaos. Ignore the noise of the daily headlines and focus on the consistent, long-term trends in military spending, technological development, and strategic acquisitions. Prepare for the second, calculated move, not the first, distracting one. The mask of madness only works if the audience believes the performance.