The latest artificially manufactured information warfare narrative to wildly proliferate across social media concerns the false claims that President Xi was just overthrown by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which comes right after a similar fake news campaign alleging that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov defected to the US while in New York to attend the UN General Assembly. There’s no credence connected to either report, with both representing nothing more than psychological warfare designed to manipulate the perceptions of their targeted audience. In this case, the purpose is to make people think that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is divided ahead of next month’s National Congress.

President Xi is expected to soon receive the honor of serving for a third term in spite of the tradition that Chinese leaders only serve for two. Propagandists want to misportray this likely development as being contrary to the people’s will as well as that of the CPC, hence the latest campaign designed to make their targeted audience think that efforts are supposedly underway to stop him. This comes right after a former high-level security official just received a life sentence for corruption after also being accused by officials of leading a “political clique”, which adds false credence to the fake news implying that the faction connected to him might have just tried to overthrow the Chinese President.

It’s no secret that there are some in the People’s Republic who might have preferred for President Xi to react more muscularly to Pelosi’s Taiwan provocation, including presumably within the CPC itself, but the very fact that this didn’t happen shows that those with such contrarian views don’t have the influence within China’s power structure to carry out a coup. After all, if they truly wielded such sway, then they’d have obviously been able to override their leader’s will in getting the PLA to react differently last month. Those under the influence of the latest fake news, however, clearly haven’t thought this through. Others, meanwhile, know that it’s not true but are purposely playing their part in spreading it around social media to others as assets of those foreign powers that are behind this latest operation.

To wrap it up, observers can certainly expect more such fake news to proliferate across the internet ahead of next month’s National Congress and especially in the years afterwards since the orchestrators of this information warfare campaign want to mislead their targeted audience into thinking that President Xi’s likely third term isn’t popular among the CPC or the Chinese people. Manipulating others’ perceptions, however, will have absolutely no impact on shaping events. All that it’ll achieve is actually discrediting themselves and their cause once folks ultimately realize that they’ve been lied to, especially after it becomes undeniable that no coup was carried out against President Xi.