A U.S. Campaign to Exploit Beijing’s Weaknesses

(Nicholas Harrington – Center for Strategic & International Studies) The United States must wage a more offensive and entrepreneurial campaign to compete with China. Crucially, this campaign must exploit the increasingly detrimental means by which China’s President Xi Jinping and the CCP control China. This campaign can capitalize on CCP vulnerabilities, anticipate predictable reactions, and position the United States to successfully advance its national security priorities. The CCP is vulnerable because it prioritizes narratives over facts, is built on endemic corruption, suffers excessive strongman rule, is paranoid about U.S. intentions, and has few friends to help reduce its dependence on the United States and allies. The United States should shape its political, economic, military, and intelligence operations to exploit these weaknesses in ways that embarrass the CCP and ensure China remains too weak, distracted, or insecure to dominate East Asia. U.S. operations should include exposing CCP hypocrisy, extracting and releasing factual data, conducting sabotage operations to hinder China’s illicit activities, and pursuing more aggressive intelligence operations in instances where CCP officials are particularly incentivized to hide bad news. This article explains the stakes underlying the U.S.-China contest and articulates a foundation for a U.S. campaign based on the CCP’s core vulnerabilities. It determines that China’s responses to U.S. hybrid warfare activities are fundamentally predictable and therefore exploitable. It concludes with key principles that U.S. policymakers should adhere to if they carry out this campaign. Other work on U.S.-China relations and gray zone activities largely focus on means by which the United States can defend against China’s operations. China exploits tensions inherent to the open, democratic society of the United States; the United States’ approach should likewise exploit China’s Communist dictatorship. – A U.S. Campaign to Exploit Beijing’s Weaknesses