The "Three Warfares" should be a household term - and Americans should understand how Beijing exploits our grievances before the tactics become truly effective.

The Chinese Communist Party does not need Americans to support China. It merely needs us to turn against one another.

That is the unsettling lesson behind a suspected Chinese bot farm recently uncovered by X. The network reportedly contained approximately 200,000 inauthentic accounts. Within it, about 200 accounts were quietly inserting themselves into America’s increasingly bitter debate over artificial-intelligence data centers.

The accounts claimed data centers were raising household electric bills, exhausting the grid and allowing technology companies to grow rich at the public’s expense. Some distributed AI-generated cartoons intended to look like ordinary American political commentary.

China did not manufacture America’s opposition to data centers. Real Americans have legitimate concerns about electricity, water, farmland, noise, tax incentives and the concentration of corporate power.

That is precisely what makes the operation significant.

China did not invent the grievance. It recognized the grievance, entered the argument under false identities and attempted to make Americans angrier about it.

OpenAI uncovered a related operation in June. The company found China-origin users accessing ChatGPT through VPNs, writing prompts in Simplified Chinese and requesting English-language messages from the perspectives of purported Americans. OpenAI called the operation “Data Center Bandwagon” and assessed that its participants were probably associated with a private Chinese technology company serving provincial-government clients.

The campaign resembles the CCP’s doctrine of the “Three Warfares”: public-opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare. Its purpose is to shape what an adversary’s population believes, weaken its confidence and encourage political or legal decisions beneficial to China.

If Americans can be persuaded to block the infrastructure required for American AI, China does not need to sabotage that infrastructure. We will have stopped building it ourselves.

Why is this not a bigger story?

Our government certainly knows what China is doing. The State Department has warned that Beijing spends billions of dollars annually attempting to reshape the global information environment. American intelligence agencies have reported that China is increasingly adopting the Russian practice of exploiting social divisions. The FBI even maintains a Foreign Influence Task Force.

Yet most of the warnings are hidden in lengthy government reports, cybersecurity briefings, congressional testimony and corporate threat assessments. The information is technically public but functionally invisible.

Where are the public-service announcements? Why aren’t Americans being shown how foreign operators impersonate citizens, manufacture political enthusiasm and encourage opposing factions simultaneously? Why aren’t students taught that the angriest person in an online argument might not be an American — or even a person?

The Three Warfares should be a household term. Instead, most Americans have never heard of it.

The media have covered individual Chinese influence operations, but rarely explain the larger pattern. Some of that failure is probably mundane. A bot campaign that attracted almost no one does not look urgent to an editor. The subject crosses the boundaries between national security, technology, politics and business, meaning no newsroom desk entirely owns it.

But corporate interests cannot be ignored.

A surprisingly small group of corporations and wealthy proprietors controls much of America’s national media. Several have extensive interests involving the Chinese marketplace, Chinese manufacturing or partnerships with Chinese state-owned businesses.

Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, holds a major interest in Universal Beijing Resort alongside Chinese state-owned partners. Disney operates Shanghai Disney Resort with Chinese partners. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount have all depended to varying degrees on access to China’s government-controlled movie market. Beijing decides which American films may be shown and what content must be removed.

Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post separately from Amazon, but Amazon acknowledges that China-based sellers and suppliers contribute significantly to its marketplace, advertising and product supply.

None of this proves that media owners instructed journalists to suppress the Three Warfares. American outlets regularly publish strong reporting about Chinese espionage, censorship and military expansion. But these interests create possible conflicts, and it is fair to ask whether news organizations embedded within global corporations are sufficiently aggressive in explaining Beijing’s economic and political leverage.

China’s campaign extends well beyond data centers. Microsoft has identified CCP-affiliated accounts posing as Americans and posting about immigration, border security, drug use, racial tensions and climate change. Some asked polling-style questions, apparently testing which subjects generated the strongest reactions.

Other China-linked operations have entered debates over gun control, inequality, crime, homelessness, fentanyl, tariffs and the Israel-Hamas war. The accounts may attack Republicans one day and Democrats the next. The object is not always to elect a particular candidate. It is to intensify division, discredit American institutions and depict the United States as a failed society.

This presents a difficult problem for a free country. The government cannot determine which opinions Americans may express. Opposition to a data center is not proof of foreign influence. Neither is criticism of tariffs, immigration policy or a technology company.

The issue is not the opinion. It is the deception.

A responsible public-awareness campaign would not tell Americans what to believe. It would explain that foreign governments create false personas, disguise propaganda as grassroots activism and exploit real grievances to make compromise harder.

The message could be simple: Foreign governments are impersonating Americans online. They may promote both sides of an argument to divide us. Verify the source before sharing.

China’s present operations may be clumsy and ineffective. Artificial intelligence will make the next generation cheaper, faster and more convincing. Today’s empty bot account could become tomorrow’s trusted community activist, viral commentator or synthetic news outlet.

Beijing is studying America’s divisions and testing how they might be converted into weapons. Every American deserves to know that is happening.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)