cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/49411206
China likely launched a major cognitive warfare campaign six days after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, speaking in November of last year, made a remark on a possible contingency involving Taiwan, according to analysis by The Yomiuri Shimbun and Sakana AI. The Yomiuri and the AI developer analyzed criticism of Japan by China on social media.
China seems to have decided how to respond to the situation while observing reactions in Japan.
This is the first time that cognitive warfare by China against Japan has been brought to light by analyzing a massive volume of social media posts using AI technology.
In cognitive warfare, people are influenced with fake information and narratives into which a speaker’s own viewpoints and assertions are mixed in, all to create a situation advantageous to one’s own country. Cognitive warfare is regarded as the sixth field of battle, after land, sea, air, space and cyberspace.
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The Yomiuri Shimbun and Sakana AI analyzed about 400,000 posts criticizing Japan on X and Chinese social media platform Weibo, published from late October last year to January this year. Those posts by major accounts affiliated with the Communist Party of China, such as the accounts of Chinese government organizations and government-affiliated media, were then extracted out.
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Few posts attacking Japan were found from Nov. 7 to 9. They briefly grew in number on Nov. 10, the day China’s Foreign Ministry criticized Takaichi’s remark, but there were fewer again on Nov. 11 and 12, before a sudden surge from Nov. 13. China did not immediately react against the remarks. After six days of ‘silence,’ the Chinese government summoned Japanese Ambassador Kenji Kanasugi in Beijing on Nov. 13, and this is understood to have been the signal for the full-scale start of cognitive warfare. Views of posts that criticized Japan across X increased sharply from Nov. 14.
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Posts criticizing China also increased on X from Nov. 8 to 12. Most of these posts expressed anger at Xue Jian, the Chinese consul general in Osaka, who reacted to Takaichi’s remark by saying in an X post, “There would be no choice but to cut off that filthy head without a moment’s hesitation.”
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