How Beijing Repackages U.S. Public Diplomacy as “Cognitive Warfare”

In September 2025, China’s Xinhua Institute released a report with an unusually blunt title: Colonization of the Mind—The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare (PLA pdf}. It has become the foundational piece from the Global South Media and Think Tank Forum in Kunming, with printed copies placed in the hands of foreign guests and a full-state-media escort of photo ops and coverage.(Xinhua News)

The document is best interpreted less as neutral research and more as a canon text for how Beijing wants its elites, its partners and its military to think about American information power. The full English report, posted through Xinhua’s own portals and People’s Daily infrastructure, shapes “historical facts,” “operational systems,” and “international harms” in support of what it calls U.S. “mental colonization.”(PLA pdf)

At the same time, a parallel Chinese-language ecosystem describes the report as a systematic dissection of the “deep historical causes, complex practical system and grave international harms” of U.S. thought colonization, and calls on countries—“especially those in the Global South”—to escape ideological shackles and regain cultural confidence.(xinhuamyanmar.com)