At a time when the very idea of universal, objective truth is more contested than ever, China’s hybrid warfare strategy presents a challenge that is not just geopolitical, but also moral and civilizational. Although Antonio Gramsci, one of the foremost Marxist philosophers of the 20th century, died in 1937, long before the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, his writings articulate some of the essential concepts for understanding Chinese hybrid warfare against the West today. In his seminal text Prison Notebooks, Gramsci moved beyond the purely materialistic worldview of orthodox Marxism, as articulated by 19th and early 20th century figures like Karl Kautsky and Marx himself, articulating what would come to be known as “Neo-Marxism.” Overly purely material factors, Gramsci emphasized the relevance of the intellectual and spiritual superstructure of Western societies as expressed by culture and religion, noting that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution template would not hold sway in the West owing to the insurmountable influence wielded by Western cultural institutions. This forms the basis of his most strategically enduring concept in the 21st century: the War of Position.
War of Position
Gramsci described two forms of societies in the West: political society and civil society. The former employs physical coercion to secure obedience from the citizens and hence its authority is based on fear; in contrast, the latter generates acceptance for the rule of the bourgeoisie by creating what he calls ‘consent‘. This ‘consent’ is obtained through religious, media, and educational institutions and informs the dominant reasoning of the age, which Gramsci calls the new ‘common sense’. Therefore, when the bourgeoisie rules with the ‘consent’ of the masses based on the ‘common sense’ generated by the cultural institutions of a society, it is called ‘hegemony’.
This, Gramsci realized, is what made revolutionary changes profoundly difficult for the West. The solution is a strategy he deemed the “War of Position,” a long, protracted struggle in which the social and cultural elements of a society must be brought under control before an assault on the political regime can be considered.
While orthodox Marxists like Marx or Kautsky believed primarily or exclusively in material tactics against the bourgeoisie, such as strikes or seizing the means of production, Gramsci, as a Neo-Marxist, sought to launch a sustained, overarching assault on the institutions of civil society in order to overthrow the bourgeois value system. His aim was to instill among the masses a new form of class consciousness that would enable them to embrace a socialist mindset. He argued that in the absence of the War of Position, even if the communists did manage to overthrow a capitalist political regime, the remnants of a capitalist mindset would continue to exist via the institutions of civil society.
China’s Gramscian Lesson
Given its Leninist-Maoist foundations, China takes neo-Marxist thinkers more seriously than Western policymakers do. Chinese hybrid warfare (‘unrestricted warfare‘) as articulated by the Chinese military officers Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, is strongly rooted in Gramscian War of Position, emphasizing information and narrative warfare. Apart from the conventional dimension of war, which China is currently utilizing via naval patrols, air incursions and cyber operations, the CCP also uses psychological methods of warfare to undermine the unity of the West.
China wages information warfare through its network of think tanks, news channels, and social media platforms. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and newspapers like the Global Times, among others, work round the clock to peddle anti-Western narratives on the most divisive issues of the day. Articles are regularly published on subjects such as climate change, immigration, and religious issues in order to paint the worst possible portrait of America and her allies.
The book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media succinctly describes the information warfare undertaken for the purpose of discrediting Western institutions and governments.
Ajit Maan, a noted American counterterrorism expert and author of Narrative Warfare, has articulated the principles and methods of China’s psychological warfare against the West, of which the primary angle of attack is the digital public sphere. There, electoral processes, academic institutions, and the media are attacked in order to render them impotent, replacing a shared ‘common-sense’ with conspiratorial counter-narratives. The goal is simple: to undermine the West’s trust in its own institutions, thereby achieving the ultimate Gramscian goal of securing hegemonic consent for a Chinese-led 21st century. After all, if the West stands for nothing good, what is the point of fighting against the revisionist axis arrayed against it?
The cognitive assault targets the moral-ethical foundations of the West, seeking to sever the bonds of trust in institutions, particularly religious institutions, and the shared classical liberal values that inform American civil society at the deepest levels. Their goal: obfuscate the truth in order to cause moral confusion.
The CCP is playing the long game: it seeks to engage the West in a drawn-out struggle in which the institutions of the Chinese state and its proxies work to undermine America via disinformation campaigns, something on full display with the Chinese interference in the 2024 US presidential election.
Building Counter Hegemony
Reinhold Niebuhr reminded us that realism without a moral core degrades into cynicism, an attitude manifestly inadequate to supply the moral and spiritual strength necessary to sustain a prolonged conflict, cold or hot. Therefore, the need to tackle the Chinese War of Position only becomes more pressing each day. The West must learn from Gramsci’s playbook and work toward the shoring-up of its own moral narrative. This will involve busting disinformation initiatives, working through a robust network of think tanks and media portals, and collaborating with big tech companies to help the citizens exercise caution around divisive narratives encountered online. The remaining centrists in American and Europe must work to articulate and rally around the core Western values of individual political and economic liberty and religiously informed virtue to thwart attempts by the CCP and other authoritarians to remake the world in their image.
