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This work presents the results of a conference that brought together experts to evaluate issues of structure and process in the People's Liberation Army.

In this article, I examine the ROC president's discursive response to PRC efforts to limit Taiwan's future possibilities and undermine confidence in Taiwan's future. I argue that the capacity to imagine the future, and perceiving agency to affect future outcomes, is crucial for national resilience. Since Taiwan is routinely exposed to factors known to cause reduced self-efficacy and morale – uncertainty, threat, marginalization, restricted agency, circumscribed action repertoires – it is crucial that Taiwanese people have a meaningful sense of “what are we striving for?” and confidence that they have the agency to realize these aspirations. The article sets out an empirical examination of discursive constructions of the future as a vector for enhancing cohesion and resolve in Taiwanese society. Foregrounding a novel dimension in the study of Taiwan, the article contributes both an interpretivist account of President Tsai Ing-wen's discourse and opens a new avenue for research on the largely neglected issue of futurity in cross-Strait relations.

Exaggerated fears about the paralysis of digital infrastructure and the loss of competitive advantage contribute to a spiral of mistrust in U.S.-China relations. In every category of putative Chinese cyber threat, there are also considerable Chinese vulnerabilities and Western advantages. China has inadvertently degraded the economic efficiency of its networks and exposed them to foreign infiltration by prioritizing political information control over technical cyber defense. Although China also actively infiltrates foreign targets, its ability to absorb stolen data is questionable, especially at the most competitive end of the value chain, where the United States dominates. Similarly, China's military cyber capacity cannot live up to its aggressive doctrinal aspirations, even as its efforts to guide national information technology development create vulnerabilities that more experienced U.S. cyber operators can attack. Outmatched by the West, China is resorting to a strategy of international institutional reform, but it benefits too much from multistakeholder governance to pose a credible alternative. A cyber version of the stability-instability paradox constrains the intensity of cyber interaction in the U.S.-China relationship—and in international relations more broadly—even as lesser irritants continue to proliferate.

States pursue their cooperative and competitive goals using both public and private policy tools. Yet there is a profound mismatch between the depth, variety, and importance of covert activity and what scholars of International Relations (IR) know about it. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how adversaries struggle for influence within the covert sphere, why they often retreat to it, and when they abandon it. It focuses on secrecy among adversaries intervening in local conflicts and develops a theory about secrecy's utility as a device for creating sustainable limits in war. Drawing on insights about secrecy and face-work from the sociologist Erving Goffman, I show that major powers individually and collectively conceal evidence of foreign involvement when the danger of unintended conflict escalation is acute. Doing so creates a kind of “backstage” in which adversaries can exceed limits on war without stimulating hard-to-resist pressure to escalate further. An important payoff of the theory is making sense of puzzling cases of forbearance: even though adversaries often know about their opponent's covert activity, they often abstain from publicizing it. Such “tacit collusion” arises when both sides seek to manage escalation risks even as they compete for power and refuse to capitulate. The article evaluates the theory via several nested cases of external intervention in the Korean War. Drawing on newly available materials documenting the covert air war between secretly deployed Soviet pilots and Western forces, the cases show how adversaries can successfully limit war by concealing activity from outside audiences. Beyond highlighting the promise in studying the covert realm in world politics, the article has important implications for scholarship on coercive bargaining, reputation, state uses of secrecy, and how regime type influences conflict behavior.

From the earliest years of the Internet's creation, cyberspace has been distinguished from other types of political space because of three unique qualities: (i) its ability to mobilize users, particularly \"outsiders\" including those who have not been easily included in political systems using conventional means; (ii) its ability to quickly provide large quantities of information of uncertain or unregulated quality; and (iii) its ability to shrink distances between users, in some sense rendering conventional physical geography irrelevant. This paper presents three lenses for interpreting the significance of these developments: Utopian, liberal, and realist. Evolving doctrines of cyberwarfare as put forth by China, Russia, and the United States in particular stress the ways in which cyberspace presents a unique security threat which may present greater advantages to nonstate actors engaged in unconventional warfare. Differing economic, political, and security policies derive from each lens.

Hybrid warfare is the most common term used by commentators to describe the complexity and multifaceted character of contemporary warfare. Hybrid warfare refers to coercive methods of strategic competition that take place below the threshold of conventional military conflict and is usually applied to the blend of military and non-military methods of warfare employed by the Wests principal adversaries, Russia and China. The term hybrid warfare has evolved from an essentially military concept to one that potentially embraces all the instruments of state power. Hybrid warfare remains an ill-defined and contested term, and there are many other buzzwords, such as irregular warfare, hybrid threats, and gray zone aggression, that are used to describe the same phenomenon. This article examines the evolution of thinking on hybrid warfare and these related concepts. It highlights the challenges that scholars and practitioners have faced in trying to define and apply these terms in the policy environment in a manner that promotes common understanding and strategic coherence.

Since the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war started recently, there is a lack of peer-reviewed scholarly literature directly discussing the war and the use of information warfare. [...]this article presents its findings mainly through content and documentary analysis of official and media publications in Russian, English, and Chinese. Information Warfare The term information warfare, or information war, was developed by Russia and is widely used. Since the early 1990s, Igor Panarin has been leading the discussion of information warfare.2 He considers information warfare a psychological 1 Andrew Anthony, \"March in Support of Ukraine in London: Everything Was Turning Blue and Yellow,\" The Guardian, March 27, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/27/march-in-support-of-ukraine-in-london-everything-was-turning-blue-and-yellow. [...]it actively develops information warfare to gain the capability of influencing public opinions and counteracting Western influence. [...]China emulates Russia by using information campaigns to promote pro-China narratives, such as during the Covid-19 pandemic, to confront the West.11 Meanwhile, the West, especially the United States, has considered Russia and China a threat to the Western-dominated world order. [...]in the eyes of Western scholars or governments, the term information warfare represents the weaponized spread of pro-Russia and pro-China information to gain the Western audience's support.12 Take the United States National Security Strategy as an example.

Online health-related misinformation poses a serious threat to public health. As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic aggravated the spread of misinformation regarding COVID-19, relevant research has surged. To systematically summarize Chinese and English articles regarding health-related misinformation about COVID-19 on social media and quantitatively describe research progress. Using bibliometrics, we systematically analyzed and compared the characteristics of scientific articles in English and Chinese, examining article numbers, journals, authors, countries, institutions, funding, and research topics, and compared changes in popular research topics. This study analyzed 1,294 articles, revealing a significant increase in article numbers and citations during the COVID-19 pandemic (1.94 times and 2.95 times, respectively, compared to pre-pandemic data). However, high-impact articles were scarce and the field lacked a core group of authors and collaborative networks. China had the largest number of papers (n=266) and funds (n=292), but articles in English exceeded by far those in Chinese (1,131 vs 163, respectively). Regarding article topics, the transformation from qualitative small-data analyses to quantitative empirical big-data research has been realized. With the maturity of natural language processing technology, in-depth mining of massive user-generated content has become a hot spot. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the research focus to shift from misinformation-related health problems to social problems involving the sources, content, channels, audiences, and effects of communication networks. Using artificial intelligence technology like machine learning to deeply mine large amounts of user-generated content on social media will be a future research hot spot.

The rapid increase in China’s outward digital presence on western social media platforms highlights China’s priorities for promoting pro-Chinese narratives and stories in recent years. Simultaneously, China has increasingly been accused of launching information operations using bot activity, puppet accounts, and other inauthentic activity to amplify its messaging. This paper provides a comprehensive network analysis characterization of the hashtag influence campaign China promoted against the US-hosted Summit on Democracy in December 2021, in addition to methods to identify different types of actors within this type of influence campaign. China uses layers of state-sponsored accounts, bots, and non-bot accounts to promote its messaging. Lastly, we describe how China uses localized campaigns under a more extensive umbrella campaign for information diffusion toward targeted audiences.