Playing the victim can be a potent weapon in the modern art of cognitive warfare

SEOUL, South Korea — Embracing the role of victim is sometimes the quickest path to victory in cognitive warfare.

The NATO military alliance defines cognitive war as “activities conducted in synchronization with other instruments of power to affect attitudes and behaviors.”

With the Western public acutely sensitive to accusations of neo-imperialism and racism and to news reports of civilian casualties and big-power bullying, playing the victim card can ignite powerful emotions that impact democratic policymaking.

Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to appreciate the tactic. His ruling Communist Party has used the theme of China’s “Century of Humiliation” to forge unity and nationalism. Under that rubric, textbooks, museum signage and TV/cinema output illustrate China’s victimhood at the hands of aggressive imperialist powers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Mr. Xi is now seeking to transition Chinese victimhood from domestic to global terrain.

“The strong should not bully the weak,” Mr. Xi told the World Economic Forum on Monday. “Decisions should not be made by simply showing off strong muscles or waving a big fist.”

Warming to his theme, he said, “Multilateralism should not be used as a pretext for acts of unilateralism.”

That sounds like a barely veiled complaint about U.S. efforts to weave a web of intraregional security alliances to contain Beijing’s expansionism. Still, the claim to victimhood is a tough sell for the world’s second-largest economy and military power that clashes with its neighbors over borders from the Himalayas to the East China Sea.

Jay Tarriela, a spokesman for the Philippine Coast Guard, is not buying it.

“I fail to see how China deserves to play the victim card of being bullied,” Mr. Tarriela wrote Tuesday on the social media site X.

“The majority of small economies around the globe tread carefully when dealing with China’s unlawful activities and provocative behavior,” he said. “China asserts their dominance in the region by flexing their muscles through the deployment of the PLA Navy, China Coast Guard, and Chinese Maritime Militia.”

Chinese officialdom has shown signs of concern about the negative perceptions of its policies. At a conference last month, academics were urged to produce marketable narratives for China’s claims to large swaths of the disputed South China Sea.

Ukraine and Gaza

For all its claims of victimhood, China is not fighting a hot war. Matters are deadlier in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, two polities with opposing approaches to the demands of cognitive warfare.

Urban combat is a tactical advantage for defenders. The Palestinian militants of Hamas and the conventional forces of Ukraine have used that insight in different ways.

The Ukrainian military has taken on Russian invaders in a series of fortified towns and cities, including Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar. With the exception of Mariupol, which was cut off in enemy territory, Kyiv has largely evacuated its urban battlegrounds before commencing combat.

Assaults along the more than 600-mile-long front line have led to heavy Russian casualties. Although Ukrainian forces continue to sustain airstrikes nationwide, Kyiv’s strategy has avoided mass civilian deaths.

“Ukraine, as a legitimate sovereign state, has the duty to protect its people, so it has no real choice but to displace civilians from the enemy’s line of advance,” said Gastone Breccia, a professor of military history at Italy’s Pavia University.

In Gaza, Hamas has deployed the opposite strategy.

After the deadly terrorist rampage into southern Israel on Oct. 7, Hamas fighters retreated swiftly into urban, densely populated Gaza with their hostages. Their defensive ploy was to entrench among the civilian population, turning the terrain, de facto, into a massive human shield.

As Israel’s armed forces blasted their way forward with minimalist rules of engagement and massive firepower, Palestinian civilian casualties skyrocketed. Strengths and weaknesses have played out in the emotional and tactical arenas.

Ukraine is outgunned and outnumbered by Russia, but the defiance and stoicism of its defenders contrast with the military weakness of Hamas — a militia, not an army.

Unable to resist Israel militarily, Ismail Haniyeh, the Qatar-based Hamas political bureau chairman, has promoted civilian suffering as an element in the cognitive struggle.

Speaking on Al Jazeera just weeks after the October attack, the Hamas leader said: “The blood of the children, women and elderly … we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution.”

Despite the brutality of Hamas’ initial terrorist assault, the victimhood of Palestinians played directly to anti-imperialist and racial discrimination themes popular in some Western academic and political circles.

“Gaza perfectly fulfills the bad/good pattern inherited from the decolonization era,” Mr. Breccia said.

Reeling from images, footage and the publicizing of Palestinian civilian casualties, world opinion has swung mainly against Israel. Street protests have erupted and protest camps have multiplied with criticisms of Israel and accusations of genocide.

Precedents

Military scholars point to the French Indochina War and America’s experience in Vietnam as landmark conflicts in modern cognitive warfare.

In the first conflict, the “dirty war,” France’s imperialist record generated domestic sympathy for Vietnam’s communist resistance, setting off domestic political upheavals. When the U.S. took over the fight, its firepower and related destruction and civilian deaths — all captured on color TV — produced the same blowback back home.

France suffered a military defeat; the U.S. did not. In both cases, the will to fight eroded and the communists achieved their strategic objectives.

Those wars “marked a great divide between the era when mass civilian casualties were scarcely relevant, and our present time, when winning or losing wars is determined by the resilience of public opinion, which in turn is deeply affected by images of innocent victims,” Mr. Breccia said.

China’s subtler tactics, short of direct military action, are taking territory inch by inch across the Indo-Pacific, but Beijing has gained far less traction in the cognitive battle to win over public opinion or to claim the mantle of victim.

For many, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has seized the moral high ground by forbidding his forces to escalate in the face of Beijing’s aggressiveness. In a series of public relations coups, Manila invited Western reporters aboard a vessel that was hit with water cannons from Chinese ships. It also distributed footage of Chinese rammings and boardings of Philippine vessels.

Cognitive war defeat appears to be a source of rising frustration inside China.

The nationalist Global Times, which has close links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, accused Mr. Marcos on Feb. 29 of “attempting to play the victim card, portraying China as ‘bullying’ the Philippines in the South China Sea to garner more international support and exert pressure on China.” It returned to the “unfair bullying” theme in articles in March, May and July.

Beijing may be opening a new information front. This week, Chinese TV channel CGTN broadcast what it said was an exclusive, English-language report from Second Thomas Shoal, which China disputes with the Philippines. Targeting the environment, a pressure point for Western audiences, CGTN called a grounded vessel on the reef, a makeshift base for Philippine marines, a “tumor.” It cited scientific studies saying the Philippine installation had polluted nearby coral.

CGTN also claimed that Manila seeks to upgrade the 328-foot-long, 50-foot-wide hulk into a permanent base, “an infringement of territorial sovereignty.” It neglected to mention that the shoal lies 164 miles off the coast of the Philippines and 864 miles from the coast of China.