CCP Mission Creep

An update for 2025

The CCP has been innovative and effective in penetrating integral elements of societies for cumulative access and control. They have accomplished this over decades in the USA, implementing their own concepts of shaping operations in what they consider the important “zones of influence”.

The zones the CCP has already permeated in America include:

• Education Systems

• Entertainment/Media

• Finance

• Health

• Surveillance/Security

• Agriculture/Farmland Acquisition

Cognitive domain(s) are no longer confined to influence operations, social engineering and ‘winning hearts and minds’ approaches, but expanded to encompass all areas where ideological attacks and possibly physical attacks are possible. Chinese subnational influence in the United States as of 2025, outweighs any other nation or external power.

As has been the Chinese modus operandi-they play the long game and they can be patient.

Education Systems

Placing their government operated Confucius Institutes in higher education and sponsoring Confucius Institute culture clubs in American high schools, China is using and has utilized these programs to infiltrate American colleges in a bid to both recruit spies and to indoctrinate students to advocate for positions favorable to China. The Chinese government generously funds thousands of students to study in the USA and other western nations. Yu Minhong, founder and chief executive of the New Oriental Education and Technology Group and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’s National Committee estimates that the number of Chinese studying abroad each year will peak at between 700,000 and 800,000.

China’s ‘Squirrel AI’ program is a formidable competitor and innovator in online education. In recent years, China has rushed to develop and implement what they label as ‘intelligent education’. China now has a billion dollar ed tech industry which includes companies (all companies owned by the Chinese government) like Alo 7 and Squirrel, which are exporting their ‘vision’ and products overseas including to the United States. These online education platforms; gather data from their clients/students and tailor lessons and elements of lessons to improve performance for each of their clients/students.

We need to ask ourselves and the education community-“Do we want the Chinese government and their artificial intelligence programs (AI) to be collecting and serving data and meta data to American children in their formative years?” There are initiatives to curb incursion into the US public education system and the Confucius institutes (CI). However, it may be a situation of “too little, too late”.

“Lawmakers are demanding action from the Department of Education after a report revealed that over 143 U.S. schools received more than $17 million in funds from China through cultural and language programs. “Many once-defunct Confucius Institutes have since reappeared in other forms,” and found that “28 institutions have replaced (and 12 have sought to replace) their closed Confucius Institute with a similar program.” Additionally, “58 have maintained (and 5 may have maintained) close relationships with their former CI partner,” and “5 have (and 3 may have) transferred their Confucius Institute to a new host, thereby keeping the CI alive.”

The 2022 report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) details how “the Chinese Community Party (CCP) used financial institutions to fund Confucius Institutes (CI) and similar programs in U.S. classrooms. The report found an alarming 20 Confucius Classrooms were found around U.S. military bases, stating that the CCP “appear[s] to target”schools with that location.

The CCP initiative has, in total, reached 143 US public school classrooms in 34 states and in Washington D.C. as of the end of 2023.

Parents Defending Education found that there are currently seven active contracts at a minimum between CIs and American public school classrooms, located in Texas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington. Not only is the CCP trying to promote their propaganda through education programs, but are using Chinese shell companies to outright buy American private schools around the country.”

Most people will not know about the courageous act of Chinese journalist, Gao Yu who in 2015 (as a 70-year-old woman) was sentenced to seven years in China for publishing the leaked internal Chinese government’s ‘Document Nine’.

“Document Nine can be read as a map of the ruling Communist Party’s anxieties as it pursues its global ambitions; it reads as an early signal of what is fast becoming a global battle of ideas.”

The document urged vigilance against the ‘infiltration’ of those dangerous, foreign ideas; today, as China’s global ambitions grow, it is increasingly taking the battle to the source, deploying its formidable economic resources and political muscle to challenge ideas and shape perceptions in the campuses, the communities and the media of the west, and using its weight to bring states and corporations into line with state propaganda.

“The cognitive war is a mostly hidden war, because it rarely involves direct confrontation or kinetic action. It involves a war of ideologies. If we fail to not only counter punch in this domain but build a sustained and proactive foundation to advance in the cognitive domain, we will have no other option then an eventual kinetic conflict. Kinetic capabilities can dictate an outcome but sustained long-term outcomes will remain solely dependent upon the ability to influence, affect, change, or impact the cognitive domain.” (Haugland, Edward L, “Future Intelligence CONOPS and S&T Investment Roadmap 2035-2050 The Cognitive War” Report 02/20, 2019)

China has been buying shares in major film and production studios in the USA and UK for over a decade. The Chinese government purchased the AMC movie theatres while creating English media channels including 24/7 news worldwide.

Like the USA, China is using sexual subliminal and shock programming to distract, distort, divide and disable the American population while inserting Chinese figures, icons and “values” into scripts and screens.

Chinese owned studios and cinemas have already exerted censorship influence on major motion pictures including removing any Taiwanese, Japanese or Hong Kong symbols (new ‘Top Gun’ movie) and changing the nationality of the “enemy” figures (Red Dawn 2012) stirring up division using Hollywood to mix cultural icons erasing the “white man as hero” and encouraging confusion and polarization within ‘western’ societies. This is a textbook communist tactic.

Concurrently the Chinese government highlights seven major threats to their communist based control of society. All of these ‘threats’ being fundamental rights and foundations for western republics and democratic rules of law. The Chinese government aims directly at steering the cognitive domain in their direction utilizing all forms of media already in their targeted countries.

Finance-Financial Sectors

These sectors, as components of the cognitive domain/cognitive war are crucial but often overlooked in political and military decision-making, or are not integrated into essential strategies for achieving dominance. .

This is the most recent data for top banks as of October 19th 2024.
(Millions) Balance Sheet Assets and Capital US dollars

1. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Limited $6,329,106 (Assets) $69,529 (Capital US $)

2. Agricultural Bank of China Limited $5,646,015 (Assets) $49,558 (Capital US $)

3. China Construction Bank Corporation $5,426,795 (Assets) $43,894 (Capital US $)

4. Bank of China Limited $4,592,395 (Assets) $41,685 (Capital US $)

5. JPMorgan Chase & Co $3,875,393 (Assets) $31,509 (Capital US $)

(#1) The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (#2) The Agricultural Bank of China (#3) The China Construction Bank (#4) Bank of China Limited. The CCP (China) occupies four of the top five positions of banking global dominance as of the last quarter of 2024.

U.S. capital markets have been increasing their holdings of Chinese companies, giving Beijing massive leverage inside the United States and posing huge risks to U.S. investors and the U.S. economy. “This practice transfers billions of dollars out of the United States and into China, while also placing U.S. investors in the position of gambling their economic futures on Chinese companies that are beyond the reach of U.S. government oversight and accountability.”

This transfer of US dollars should be a national security concern.

‘Trade Wars’ are part of the non-kinetic battles which have in the past, ignited kinetic wars, which is why negotiations to prevent escalation are so important. The considered use of sanctions, tariffs, and/or the ‘most favored nation’ status can mitigate economic aggression while de-escalating the possibility of military aggression. Trade deals are part of the cognitive domain games, as are sanctions.

China currently, is continuing its “non-compliance” game in terms of sanctions against Iran.

“In what appears to be a gesture of contempt for Washington, Chinese companies have continued to import Iranian crude, but instead of reporting the crude imports, which would violate US sanctions, they're storing the oil in bonded storage tanks situated at Chinese ports.”

Health

By studying the health patterns, medical conditions, medical equipment and medications needed in a population; China can accurately assess vulnerabilities, deliberately market to these companies and citizens or manufacture “shortages” of essential drugs, especially prescription drugs for psychiatric and chronic conditions. This is a whole other realm of the cognitive domain.

Recently, Chinese cyber criminals were caught - but only after hacking into medical records, pharmaceutical company research and development documents, and technical data from Anthem company. Anthem is considered a health care “giant” in North America.

It should also be noted that the Chinese are using the same social engineering and mind control techniques which were created and refined by the UK and the USA since World War I in specialized institutes -Tavistock Institute Network, Stanford Institute, the Frankfurt School, Macy Foundation, Psi-Tech-to name a few of these privately run but government funded organizations.

TikTok is one of the most effective soft power strategies for indoctrination of entire societies. It can reach any age of human being who has access to internet connections. The short bursts of images, music, AI tools, saturate the minds of the vulnerable. This is another type of cyber “warfare” which is being waged with unlimited entry-crossing all borders inserting insidious ideas, model of behavior and action to seize the minds of its targets. TikTok is proving more effective and seductive than any other psyop. It continues unchecked in the west. It is adversely affecting the emotional and spiritual health of societies. Yet, under the cover of “freedom of expression” (not permitted in many countries including China) TikTok seizes the ether of cognitive domains.

The Chinese government does not place the same restrictions or requirements on human subject testing and informed consent. They are advancing in CRISPR and now LEADER gene editing techniques, monitoring technology and copying the most advanced neuroprosthetics/enhancements. China and India are among the leading countries that are contributing major shares in the neuroprosthetics market in the Asia Pacific.

Enhancing human capabilities neurologically and otherwise potentially raises a nation’s population’s capabilities. The military capabilities (think super soldiers-enhanced human beings) if employed on a mass scale, have the potential to alter the entire ‘battlefield’ of the cognitive and physical domains.

Surveillance/Security

Have you heard or read about the Chinese Gaofen and Yoagun programs? The Chinese are continuing to increase their surveillance capabilities which will soon produce an Indo-Pacific region (and other regions of the Earth) where there is no place to hide.

“Gaofen, which means high resolution, is part of the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), an ostensibly civilian initiative to assist in agriculture, disaster response, and environment monitoring activities. In addition to satellites, CHEOS operates near-space, airborne, and ground-based data collection and processing systems”.

Yaogan-41 significantly improves China’s ability to “detect and track not just naval vessels, but also aircraft. Paired with AI algorithms and sufficient computational resources, capabilities afforded by Yaogan-41 will make it more difficult for the United States and its allies to hide vessels larger than an automobile in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, other than submarines”.

In July 2017, The National Sentinel reported that a Chinese dissident revealed Beijing had as many as 25,000 spies in the U.S. Guo Wengui, a billionaire businessman who broke with the Communist government several months prior, said China had infiltrated America’s most critical military and defense infrastructure and is threatening our country. The number as of December 2024, is estimated to be much higher.

“The Biden-Harris administration has overseen the largest influx of Chinese nationals illegally crossing the Southwest border than any previous administration. While the motivating factors driving Chinese nationals to cross the border are multifaceted, a thorough review is warranted due to the glaring security vulnerabilities at the border. In FY24 alone, Border Patrol agents have recorded more than 36,000 apprehensions of Chinese nationals—more than all those recorded from FY07-20 combined”.

The increase in AI (artificial intelligence capabilities) by Chinese companies extends the radius of the CCP’s influence operations (IO). Deep fakes, Voice Clones, and biometric surveillance systems created by American companies but utilized by the Chinese government, are two edged swords.

The CCP has already successfully integrated their created “Social Credit system“ which reaches further than just financial credit assessments on companies and individuals.

“Chinese state capitalism may be transitioning towards a technology-assisted variant that we call “surveillance state capitalism.” The mechanism driving this development is China's corporate social credit system (CSCS) – a data-driven project to evaluate the “trustworthiness” of all business entities [and individuals] in the country”.

Deep fakes and “fake news” will become an increasing challenge. We should be concerned about the type of mimicry and “answers” that today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is producing. Researchers have already developed deep learning AI that can superimpose one person’s face on another person’s body. The Chinese search giant Baidu constructed an AI they claim can learn to accurately mimic your voice with ‘DeepVoice 2’ — based on less than a minute’s worth of listening to the original voices.

The implications of using this technology to gather information, generate strategies, deceive and infiltrate various levels of society, social media, government and military departments using ‘stealth’ retrieval, is concerning. Even frightening.

“Cyber and information operations harnessing everyday applications like Facebook and Twitter, and the news media, are used to influence the cognitive domain in countries around the world. These are the new weapons of war. Unfortunately, they’re not yet recognized as warfare because digital 1s and 0s can’t be seen, heard or feared like bombs or bullets. The U.S. and its allies must acknowledge the changing characteristics of warfare in the information age and move to defend against cognitive domain attacks.”

This is the view of Colonel Deric J. Holbrook, US Army and a visiting ASPI Fellow to the Army War College.

Agriculture/Farmland Acquisition

The maxim “Control the food, control the people” should be a warning to countries where the Chinese government and CCP controlled companies are buying up land, infrastructure and resources.

CCP does not have a right to own U.S. agricultural land, but it is taking advantage of our vulnerabilities in states legal codes. The states with the largest Chinese holdings are Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Utah and Virginia, which represent about 85% of all Chinese holdings in the U.S., according to USDA.

As of reports from February 2023, the CCP owns 352,140 acres of U.S. land valued at $1.9 billion. According to USDA reports, CCP holdings of U.S. agricultural land surged by more than 5,300% from 2010 to 2020. The 352,140 acres now controlled by the CCP could instead potentially be farmed by 800 American families.

• 11 states (AZ, KY, MD, MN, MO, NE, ND, OK, PA, SC, and WI) have passed laws effectively restricting the CCP from owning agricultural land, and another 3 have introduced legislation.

• U.S. citizens and companies may NOT own agricultural land in China.

• The U.S. government has difficulties tracking transactions from foreign entities because “the records for these transactions, such as land deeds, are usually kept at county tax and recorder offices across the country and are not maintained in a single database.”

• Congress should not just think about foreign transactions when it comes to farmland but to other infrastructure sites such as manufacturing.

  “If you have a company coming in to do a huge purchase of our infrastructure like hog slaughter, you should be putting that through that same intelligence community process to help us understand if that’s a strategic threat to us.”

Approximately 39% of the 911 million acres of farmland across the U.S. is rented out to farmers, and 80% of that rented farmland is owned by landlords who don’t farm themselves data from the Agriculture Department shows.

Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao is the second-biggest foreign owner of US land—though less than 1% of foreign-owned land in the US is owned by Chinese interests, per the USDA.

American citizen billionaires such as Bill Gates, Thomas Pettrffy, Ted Turner, Michael Burry, Ray Dalio and Jeff Bezos are buying up more and more of American farmland, American corporations such as Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street and Carlyle own over 50% of the single family homes in the USA.

“Corporations can secure financing for real estate at costs 30% less than the richest people in the country,” Robert Kennedy Jr. said. “This gives them a significant advantage over typical American homebuyers.

"So they can outbid you, and they can outbid your children. Our families are now competing against these companies, which are trying to buy every single-family home."

As a point of interest on this subject, Canadian investors own 31% of foreign-held US land, which comes out to just under 1% of total US agricultural land. They are the foreign government with the most land holdings in the USA at present.

On October 13th, 1970, Canada and China governments published a joint communiqué on the establishment of diplomatic relations, opening a new chapter between the two countries. Canada was governed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister of Canada. His son, Justin Trudeau has maintained that close relationship with China. Justin Trudeau has praised Xi Jinping’s governing of China on numerous occasions in public forums and on social media.

Perhaps that will change with Canada’s next prime minister. Canada is our geographically closest and largest border nation. It has been considered the USA’s steady ally and shares the longest border in the world of 8,891 km (5,525 miles).

The USA will need strong allies to stem the mission creep from all sides in the years to come.