Projecting ‘Hybrid Warfare’: Western Discursive Representation of Chinese Foreign Policy

Abstract

China is the single largest state-based international actor that is a major threat to the continued hegemony of the United States’ unipolar order. As such, a campaign of obstructive foreign policy is being waged against China through the obstructive marketing of China as a sinister threat and unreliable actor against the ‘rules-based order.’ By attempting to undermine China’s soft power potential, it is hoped that China’s global rise can be constrained and contained. Drawing on an integrative type of literature review, this article examines attempts at ‘knowledge production’ through geopolitically subjective interpretations and representations by the U.S. and its allies of the modern type of geopolitically-influenced international conflicts - hybrid warfare. In the English language imagination, hybrid warfare is a politically charged and loaded term that assumes ill intent by the user upon the intended victim. According to the research estimates by foreign experts, the current foreign policy of international activities by China displays a hybrid character. The country is publicly accused of carrying out operations in the economic, cybernetic, geographical, geopolitical, psychological, information and ideological spaces. Currently, the notion of “Chinese hybrid warfare” is starting to become an increasingly popular mass communicated trope. However, the aggravation of Sino-American relations against the backdrop of the South China Sea, the Taiwan issue and the Russian special military operation gives us an opportunity to predict that China will increasingly be projected as an increasingly dangerous source of hybrid threat in the Western-centric discourse to contain its global rise and by default to try to preserve US global hegemony through a negative information campaign.