Ivan Zuenko: China unveils a surprising new weapon in its information war against the West

When summing up 2020 – a difficult year with the Covid-19 pandemic and an escalation in the confrontation between Beijing and Washington – prominent Chinese political scientist Yuan Peng wrote: “It no longer matters what is true or false – what matters is who controls the discourse.”

The expert was referring to media pressure to discredit China, but in fact he identified one of the main features of our time – which could be called the ‘post-truth era’, when public opinion is shaped not by facts but by emotions.

Those who can guide these feelings in the right direction are the ones who shape the information agenda. The emotions that are generated have become the ‘discourse’. This concept, born among French poststructuralist philosophers (primarily Michel Foucault) in the mid-twentieth century, has found itself at the core of global politics in the early twenty-first century.