China and “Unrestricted Warfare” Against the the United States: A Scholarly Analysis of Long-Term Erosion Strategies Targeting the Liberal World Order

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Introduction

Over the past two decades, the concept of “Unrestricted Warfare” (超限战) developed by Chinese military officers has been repeatedly invoked to explain the strategic relationship between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States. In particular, it is used by strategists and policymakers in liberal democracies to interpret how China seeks advantage over a militarily superior rival. The concept suggests that a weaker power can defeat or weaken a stronger adversary if it is willing to expand the notion of “war” beyond the battlefield into non-military domains such as finance, technology, cyber operations, information, lawfare, and other tools that traditionally were not treated as acts of war.

This article aims to (1) summarize the core ideas of Unrestricted Warfare as put forward by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui; (2) review how contemporary scholars interpret the concept; (3) present empirical evidence that China has adopted practices consistent with this framework to weaken U.S. structural advantages; and (4) highlight important scholarly caveats, so that the argument does not collapse into one-sided propaganda but remains grounded, balanced, and evidence-based.

1. Origins of the “Unrestricted Warfare” Concept

1.1 Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s 1999 Book

The book Unrestricted Warfare was written by two officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, and first published in 1999 by a PLA publishing house. Its publication by a military press indicates that it was not merely a fringe personal essay, but at least a tolerated and influential piece of strategic thinking within the PLA discourse.

The starting question of the book is straightforward: when global warfare is shaped and dominated by a superpower such as the United States—which holds overwhelming advantages in conventional military power, technology, and economic reach—how can a weaker state such as China compete? The authors propose to “unrestrict” warfare from the purely military domain and instead mobilize all available instruments of national power. This includes financial warfare, trade warfare, legal warfare, media and information warfare, attacks on critical infrastructure, and other methods that exploit systemic vulnerabilities of the adversary.

1.2 Contemporary Scholarly Readings

Wójtowicz and Król (2021) provide a systematic account of the concept, arguing that “unrestricted warfare” should be understood as a framework that views war as “the use of all resources of the state” to achieve political objectives, rather than restricting war to kinetic operations. In their reading, the book highlights the importance of attacking the structural vulnerabilities of an opponent—such as financial fragility, dependencies in supply chains, technological chokepoints, and asymmetric legal regimes—rather than confronting superior military power head-on.

Military journals and analyses in the United States, such as those published in Military Review, confirm that the book has had enduring influence in global strategic debates. It has been used to reframe modern warfare as “the coordinated use of military and non-military means” to coerce an adversary, thus blurring traditional boundaries between war and peace.

2. Not an Official “Master Plan”, But a Highly Influential Frame

A major debate in Western scholarship is whether Unrestricted Warfare should be treated as a formal top-down blueprint for Chinese national strategy. Analysts at the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), including Josh Baughman, warn that elevating a single book to the status of “China’s master plan” is an over-reading that risks misinforming policy.

At the same time, Baughman and others acknowledge that the book reflects a significant current of PLA thinking about expanding the use of non-military tools in strategic competition with the United States. Similar ideas appear in numerous PLA writings and Chinese security publications post-1999, indicating that elements of the concept have been absorbed into a broader strategic culture, even if not codified in a single “official doctrine” document.

In other words, Unrestricted Warfare is best understood as a conceptual lens that enlarges the strategic imagination of Chinese planners. Western analysts have found that this lens is useful—indeed, often necessary—for making sense of China’s observed behavior across cyber, economic, technological, and information domains in its rivalry with the United States.

3. Key Characteristics of “Unrestricted Warfare”

Across the original text and later academic analyses, at least four core characteristics can be distilled:

1. Integration of military and non-military instruments. War is no longer separable from peace. Every domain of interstate interaction—financial markets, technology supply chains, media systems, digital platforms—can become a “battlefield.” Unrestricted warfare thus legitimizes the use of non-military means as primary tools of conflict.
2. Targeting structural vulnerabilities. Rather than challenging U.S. military power directly, the framework emphasizes exploiting systemic weak points: public debt, dependence on open information environments, critical infrastructure interdependence, and reliance on digital systems that can be exploited through cyber operations or information manipulation.
3. Protracted “war of attrition” over decisive short wars. The objective is not a quick, decisive victory, but long-term erosion of the adversary’s economic health, social cohesion, public trust in institutions, and alliance networks, until it loses the ability or will to maintain leadership of the international order.
4. Blurring lines between state, private sector, and organized crime. Tools of unrestricted warfare do not need to be wielded by uniformed military units. State-owned enterprises, nominally private firms, overseas networks, and even criminal organizations can be leveraged—directly or indirectly—to advance state objectives, creating layers of plausible deniability.

4. Empirical Evidence: How Has China Applied “Unrestricted Warfare” Against the U.S.?

The key question is whether China’s actual behavior toward the United States aligns with the logic of unrestricted warfare. While motives are hard to prove definitively, a growing body of empirical evidence strongly supports the view that the PRC has systematically employed economic espionage, cyber operations, information manipulation, United Front work, and transnational networks in ways that map closely onto this conceptual framework.

4.1 Economic Espionage and Technology Theft

In 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) unsealed an indictment against four officers of the PLA for hacking Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the United States. The breach compromised sensitive personal data of approximately 145–148 million Americans, including names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and addresses, and was explicitly framed as both a cybercrime and an act of economic espionage.

U.S. government sources estimate that roughly 80% of federal economic espionage cases have links to the Chinese state or Chinese actors. A comprehensive CSIS survey of Chinese espionage cases in the United States since 2000 documents more than 200 publicly known incidents involving theft of trade secrets and sensitive technologies, from semiconductors and advanced materials to aerospace and biotechnology.

These are not random acts by isolated individuals. They reflect a pattern consistent with “technology warfare” as envisioned by Unrestricted Warfare, in which acquiring U.S. core technologies—legally or illegally—is a central means of rapidly closing or leapfrogging capability gaps across both civilian and military sectors.

4.2 Cyber Attacks on U.S. Government Data and Infrastructure

The 2015 breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is widely regarded as one of the most damaging cyber intrusions ever suffered by the U.S. government. The personal records of roughly 22 million current, former, and prospective federal employees and contractors were stolen, including highly detailed security clearance forms. Multiple U.S. intelligence assessments attributed the attack to Chinese state-linked actors.

The strategic value of this data is enormous: it allows Chinese intelligence to map the U.S. national security ecosystem, identify individuals who may be susceptible to recruitment or coercion, and understand networks of relationships across agencies. The OPM hack alone could support long-term influence, blackmail, and counter-intelligence operations against U.S. personnel.

In addition, the CSIS database of significant cyber incidents records numerous cases where Chinese state-sponsored groups infiltrated telecom providers, cloud services, and infrastructure entities in the U.S. and allied countries. For example, the group sometimes called “Salt Typhoon” has been reported targeting telecommunications networks in more than 20 countries, including the United States, to gain persistent access to communications data—precisely the kind of preparatory work envisaged under a long-term unrestricted warfare strategy.

4.3 Information Warfare and Disinformation

A 2021 RAND study documents that the PLA and Chinese party-state organs have been developing social media operations aimed at U.S. audiences and U.S. allies. These operations include the creation of fake accounts, amplification of divisive narratives, and targeted campaigns undermining trust in the U.S. military and political institutions.

A more recent RAND report (2024) describes how Chinese strategists explore the use of AI-driven tools—such as large language models—to generate tailored disinformation at scale, thereby enhancing the precision and plausible deniability of such campaigns. This marks an escalation from rudimentary troll farms to algorithmically enhanced cognitive warfare.

Public disclosures by major U.S. tech platforms in 2024–2025 corroborate these concerns: several have taken down coordinated inauthentic networks linked to China that were pushing politically divisive content, sometimes impersonating U.S. citizens, and leveraging AI to craft messages about U.S. elections and domestic controversies.

4.4 United Front Work and Political Influence Operations

The U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) has described the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department as a key instrument for influencing—and in many cases co-opting—overseas organizations, Chinese diaspora communities, business networks, academic institutions, and local politicians. The objective is to shape foreign discourses and decision-making in ways favourable to Beijing while marginalizing critics.

Cases involving former senior officials at U.S. institutions—including a former Federal Reserve economist alleged to have passed sensitive information to Chinese contacts—illustrate how financial incentives, talent programs, and other “soft” mechanisms can be deployed to gain access to strategic insights and policy debates from within.

4.5 Transnational Crime, Fentanyl, and Online Scams as Tools of Erosion

A 2025 USCC report on cross-border crime notes that PRC-linked networks have played a central role in online scam operations targeting Americans, with estimated losses of over US$5 billion in a single year. Many of these scam hubs are located in or near regions where China has significant economic or political leverage, including Belt and Road–connected zones in Southeast Asia. The report raises the concern that China can selectively tolerate or crack down on these networks as a form of bargaining leverage with foreign governments.

Alongside this, U.S. congressional and law-enforcement reports highlight that chemical precursors manufactured in China are a primary source for Mexican cartels producing fentanyl destined for the U.S. market, fueling an opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans annually. While direct state intent is difficult to prove, the net effect is social and public health devastation inside the United States—a result consistent with the “indirect, deniable attack on societal resilience” envisioned in unrestricted warfare.

5. Strategic Interpretation: Does China View the U.S. as a Competitor or as an Adversary to Be Undermined?

Most of the evidence above does not come from explicit public statements by the Chinese government announcing an objective to “destroy” the United States. Rather, it emerges from patterns of behaviour over time. When interpreted through the lens of unrestricted warfare, these patterns strongly suggest that the CCP does not see the U.S. as just another economic competitor “playing by the same rules,” but as a structural rival whose power and legitimacy must be weakened across multiple domains.

Dallas Tueller, writing in Small Wars Journal (2024), argues that the critical issue is not the 1999 text itself, but the convergence between that conceptual framework and contemporary PRC behaviour: cyber theft of critical data, persistent economic espionage, information operations targeting U.S. domestic cohesion, and exploitation of criminal or grey-zone actors. Taken together, these actions amount to a practical implementation of unrestricted warfare—even if Beijing never labels it as such.

6. Scholarly Caveats and Limitations

To maintain academic integrity, several important caveats must be clearly stated:

• Intent is inherently difficult to prove. Most of the evidence concerns actions linked to Chinese state or state-adjacent actors. It supports the claim that China seeks to weaken U.S. advantages and exploit vulnerabilities. But it does not conclusively prove that Beijing’s ultimate aim is “total destruction” of the United States. The more cautious conclusion is that China sees the U.S. as its principal strategic rival and is willing to use many non-military tools to erode U.S. power and the liberal order it underpins.
• Great powers on all sides use covert and influence operations. The U.S. itself has a long history of intelligence activities, information operations, and political meddling abroad. Focusing solely on Chinese behaviour without situating it in the broader context of great-power competition may distort the analytical picture. What is distinctive in the PRC case, however, is the combination of authoritarian governance, tight party control, and willingness to exploit the openness of liberal societies.
• Distinguishing the CCP from the Chinese people. Critique of CCP and PLA strategy must be carefully distinguished from attitudes toward ordinary Chinese citizens, who are often themselves victims of the same authoritarian system. Responsible scholarship should avoid conflating “China” as a civilization with “the CCP” as a ruling party.

7. Conclusion

When the conceptual framework of Unrestricted Warfare is viewed alongside a growing body of empirical evidence—economic espionage, major cyber intrusions, influence operations, United Front activities, and PRC-linked criminal networks—it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the narrative that China is merely a benign competitor operating within the same liberal rules as the United States.

A more precise, academically defensible conclusion is that the Chinese party-state regards the United States as a structural and long-term strategic adversary whose power, cohesion, and normative influence must be eroded. It seeks to do so by mobilizing all available instruments of national power, many of them non-military, and by weaponizing the very openness of liberal societies—free flows of information, open markets, and transparent institutions—against them. This approach maps closely onto the logic of unrestricted warfare.

For U.S. and allied policymakers, recognizing this reality is not an invitation to xenophobia, nor a call for blind confrontation. Rather, it is a call for strategic clarity. The “battlefield” between China and the United States is not limited to the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait; it extends into data centers, financial markets, research labs, social media feeds, and local communities. Defending the liberal order in the 21st century therefore requires moving beyond a narrow focus on traditional military deterrence and developing robust defenses against unrestricted warfare in all domains of public life.

Selected References

• Air University, China Aerospace Studies Institute. (2022). Unrestricted Warfare Is Not China’s Master Plan.
• Baughman, J. (2022). “Unrestricted Warfare” Is Not China’s Master Plan. China Aerospace Studies Institute.
• CSIS. (2023). Survey of Chinese Espionage in the United States Since 2000.
• CSIS. (2023). How the Chinese Communist Party Uses Cyber Espionage to Undermine the American Economy.
• Department of Justice. (2020). Chinese Military Personnel Charged with Computer Fraud, Economic Espionage, and Wire Fraud for Hacking into Equifax.
• Harold, S. W., et al. (2021). Chinese Disinformation Efforts on Social Media. RAND Corporation.
• Liang, Q., & Wang, X. (1999). Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House. (English translation via C4I.org and archive.org.)
• Military Review. (2019). Précis: Unrestricted Warfare.
• Office of Personnel Management Data Breach (2015). U.S. congressional and media reports on the OPM hack attributed to Chinese actors.
• RAND Corporation. (2024). Dr. Li Bicheng, or How China Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media Manipulation.
• Tueller, D. (2024). The Invisible Frontline: The Nature of China’s Unrestricted Warfare and Why the US Needs a Strategic Wake-Up Call. Small Wars Journal.
• U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission. (2025). Report on PRC-linked scam networks targeting U.S. citizens and associated economic security risks.
• Wójtowicz, T., & Król, D. (2021). Chinese Concept of Unrestricted Warfare – Characteristics and Contemporary Use. Humanities & Social Sciences, 28(4), 165–176.