This chapter offers a focused case study of the People’s Republic of China’s epistemic statecraft, arguing that the Three Warfares Strategy (TWS)—psychological, media (public opinion), and legal warfare—are embedded within a broader infrastructural strategy that seeks epistemic sovereignty rather than simple territorial dominance. Reading the Three Warfares through the book’s theoretical scope, the chapter traces how Beijing operationalises influence across the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, and emergent financial and digital corridors. Empirical pieces—the South China Sea lawfare, the Digital Yuan (e-CNY) pilots and mBridge cooperation, China’s Safe City and Digital Silk Road exports, and the Micius quantum programme—illustrate how legal argumentation, algorithmic governance, and material infrastructure interlock to produce long-duration patterns of legitimacy and dependence. The chapter contends that China’s model privileges synchronisation, moral provisioning, and infrastructural embedding: lawfare normalises presence; media and United Front mechanisms shape narratives and diasporic reach; and digital/quantum technologies institutionalise interoperability and surveillance-adjacent dependency. By juxtaposing China’s epistemic engineering with Western algorithmic hegemony, the analysis reveals a plural, civilisational logic of contemporary geopolitical competition and highlights normative tensions—debt, surveillance, and standards—that complicate China’s global provisioning. The chapter concludes that China’s Three Warfares, when integrated with digital and quantum infrastructures, constitute a persistent and distinct pathway to influence that reframes twenty-first-century sovereignty as a contest over meanings, protocols, and infrastructures.

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China’s Three Warfares: An Epistemic and Genealogical Countermodel to Algorithmic Hegemony

  • Saeed Ahmed

摘要

This chapter offers a focused case study of the People’s Republic of China’s epistemic statecraft, arguing that the Three Warfares Strategy (TWS)—psychological, media (public opinion), and legal warfare—are embedded within a broader infrastructural strategy that seeks epistemic sovereignty rather than simple territorial dominance. Reading the Three Warfares through the book’s theoretical scope, the chapter traces how Beijing operationalises influence across the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, and emergent financial and digital corridors. Empirical pieces—the South China Sea lawfare, the Digital Yuan (e-CNY) pilots and mBridge cooperation, China’s Safe City and Digital Silk Road exports, and the Micius quantum programme—illustrate how legal argumentation, algorithmic governance, and material infrastructure interlock to produce long-duration patterns of legitimacy and dependence. The chapter contends that China’s model privileges synchronisation, moral provisioning, and infrastructural embedding: lawfare normalises presence; media and United Front mechanisms shape narratives and diasporic reach; and digital/quantum technologies institutionalise interoperability and surveillance-adjacent dependency. By juxtaposing China’s epistemic engineering with Western algorithmic hegemony, the analysis reveals a plural, civilisational logic of contemporary geopolitical competition and highlights normative tensions—debt, surveillance, and standards—that complicate China’s global provisioning. The chapter concludes that China’s Three Warfares, when integrated with digital and quantum infrastructures, constitute a persistent and distinct pathway to influence that reframes twenty-first-century sovereignty as a contest over meanings, protocols, and infrastructures.