Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Kieran Green, William Marcellino, Sale Lilly & Jackson Smith
Chapter 1. Introduction
In the spring of 2016, Li Bicheng, a computer science professor, left the technology-focused
Information Engineering University (IEU) in Zhengzhou, China, and moved to the language- and culture-focused Huaqiao University in Quanzhou, China. But Li is no ordinary academic, and this was no ordinary midcareer job change. Li Bicheng is a Chinese military researcher who, we argue, is likely the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) top expert on social media manipulation and at least partly responsible for overseeing its operationalization of this capability since the mid-2010s.
Additional details on Li’s move help explain this significance. IEU is a part of the PLA Cyberspace Force (PLACSF), which is responsible for the PLA’s cyber, electronic warfare, and core foreign influence operations.1 Huaqiao University is affiliated with China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), which is responsible for much of China’s interpersonal influence operations for both domestic and foreign target audiences.2 This also means that Li officially appears to have retired from his military service in the PLA and become a nominally civilian academic at Huaqiao, although plenty of evidence suggests Li has maintained his PLA ties. For the purposes of this report, we consider him to still be a PLA -affiliated researcher.
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