Implications of Chinese Influence Operations for South Korea and the US-ROK Alliance • Stimson Center

Attention to the threat of Chinese influence operations (IO) is growing in Seoul and the US-Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) alliance. This paper specifically addresses evidence of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) interest, planning, and general understanding of Chinese military strategies for influencing ROK public opinion, interfering in ROK elections, and seeking to weaken the US-ROK alliance, with a special focus on the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on PLA IO targeting South Korea.

The arrival of large language models (LLMs) and other constantly advancing AI capabilities portends a potential dramatic increase in the capacity of malign actors to manipulate social media and other online discourse, especially for target countries that may have been a second-tier priority that was under-resourced. For Beijing, Chinese military strategists and researchers have historically acknowledged their own shortcomings in key components of IO, such as cross-cultural communication and foreign language proficiency. LLMs now offer a high-quality solution to these problems at scale and at a low cost.

For South Korea, this means there is likely to be an increase in Chinese IO efforts, if merely because it is now easier to do so, regardless of the overall trajectory of the bilateral relationship. Available evidence suggests that so far, Chinese activity has been of limited scale and of limited actual impact on South Korea, though the intent is concerning. Looking to the future, however, the advent of automated IO campaigns that may be better and cheaper than previous human-orchestrated efforts means that Beijing likely now has the capacity to expand beyond first-tier targets, such as Taiwan and the United States, and improve against second-tier targets, such as South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. This suggests that South Korea and the United States should remain vigilant against Chinese online IO and increase their cooperation.

A Brief Review of PRC Influence Activity Targeting South Korea

The fact of China’s efforts to influence ROK policies is obvious, evidenced by the 2016 Theater High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile defense (BMD) episode, but the details are worth returning to as an example of the blunt but effective public efforts Beijing can undertake. After Washington and Seoul agreed in early 2016 to deploy the system to defend against North Korea’s increased missile threat, Beijing strongly opposed the deployment. This was likely both for its political opposition to the strengthened alliance and concerns over THAAD’s threat to its nuclear capabilities. Beijing leveraged economic coercion, diplomatic pressure, cyberattacks, public opinion campaigns, among many other tactics, to influence the ROK government. Eventually, Beijing and Seoul reached an informal agreement in 2017 to move past the issue, but it showed the extent of PRC pressure when Beijing commits to an issue.

For more subtle influence, some scholars have argued that the United Front also features in Korea. As Russell Hsiao summarized, “Contrary to the perception that the CCP’s United Front groups are singularly focused on Taiwan, the South Korean branches of these groups have engaged on a range of other issues.” Hsiao lists not only the 2016 anti-THAAD protests, which Beijing reportedly supported, but also other ROK domestic protest movements, such as the 2014 anti-Japan “comfort women” protests and the protests against the 2016 intelligence sharing agreement with Japan, among others, dating back to even before China-ROK ties were established in 1992. More recently, the United Front apparatus reportedly even helped “mobilize support [for] Beijing’s Winter Olympics games while there were mass global protests against the Chinese government’s commission of atrocities in Xinjiang.” This United Front activity is just one of the levers Beijing employs against Seoul but shows the breadth of issues in which Beijing perceives its stakes.

Chinese pressure on South Korea has continued in recent years and even increased by some accounts. In November 2023, Seoul, for the first time, directly accused two Chinese public relations companies of creating 38 fake Korean-language websites that masqueraded as ROK news media websites and spread pro-China and anti-U.S. news on a variety of high-priority topics for Beijing, such as favorable coverage of China’s handling of COVID-19 and negative reporting on the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy. This was followed by similar accusations again in 2024 and 2025. Taking a broader perspective, a 2025 ASPI report found a “visible escalation of China’s hybrid activities (23%), focusing primarily on economic coercion and narrative and information campaigns but contributing equally to cyber incidents.” The report argued that “China’s main objectives are to extract economic advantage, discourage alignment with Western powers, and shape the regional balance of power without creating an open conflict.” At least some portion of these Chinese online influence efforts are using AI, discussed in detail below.

Understanding Chinese Military Thinking on Influence Operations

Taking the Chinese military as one influence actor within the PRC system as an example, the PLA’s thinking on IO has evolved over the years. While the early concept was the now-familiar “Three Warfares,” the most popular concept is now “cognitive domain operations” (CDO). As a 2023 RAND report summarized, the core objectives of Chinese military IO are to “degrade adversary leadership decision-making, weaken adversary troop will to fight, undermine adversary public support for war, undermine adversary government from within, and support deterrence.” While the PLA expects to play a leading role, it also considers the role of non-military tools such as diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, and public opinion pressure, reflecting a whole-of-government approach.

Potential Threats for South Korea

Beijing may pursue both covert propaganda to influence general ROK public opinion toward South Korea as well as election interference to influence the outcome of future ROK elections. There is evidence of Chinese interest in both categories, and this paper focuses on the Chinese military as one PRC influence actor. It is worth noting that the topic of election interference is now politicized in South Korea as well, as former president Yoon Suk-yeol justified his December 2024 martial law declaration, in part, on claims of Chinese election interference in the earlier April 2024 election. China and the United States have both refuted these claims.

Insights into Chinese motivation and thinking for influencing ROK public opinion come in a 2023 article by a PLA researcher China’s Public Diplomacy Quarterly. Two facts are important about this article: The PLA researcher appears to focus on foreign language and translation research, likely supporting PLA IO, and the journal is published by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’s Foreign Affairs Committee, a United Front Work Department body. Taken together, it is likely this research was intended to support Chinese public diplomacy generally and Chinese efforts to influence South Korea more broadly.

This PLA interest in improving Chinese efforts targeting South Korea is likely motivated by the steep decline in ROK positive views of China, according to numerous polls over the last decade. The graphic below summarizes Asan Institute polling that was released in April 2025. The PLA article appears to understand this, as it says that “Faced with unfriendly public opinion and a social base in South Korea, people-to-people diplomacy should not remain limited to superficial exchanges.” Instead, China “should actively engage in concrete and practical work to improve public opinion in South Korea toward China, thereby contributing to our country’s [China’s] overall diplomacy and enhancing mutual understanding and trust between the Chinese and South Korean peoples.” The PLA researcher further argues, “The greater the discord between the two peoples’ sentiments, the more important it is to leverage the communication role of people-to-people diplomacy to change South Korean society’s perceptions and sentiments toward China. Exchanges through think tanks and scholars, through flexible and diverse methods and extensive engagement, can play an important role in communication.”\

ROK Public Opinion Toward China Relative to Other Countries

Source: “South Koreans and Their Neighbors 2025,” Asan Institute, April 2025.

This 2023 PLA article recommends three core actions for Beijing to improve its standing in Korea: innovating China’s public diplomacy efforts, deepening Chinese influence over ROK media, and diversifying the PRC actors engaging with South Korea. First, the article calls for cultivating “new forces” through “online channels,” such as “increas[ing] interaction with South Koreans through online education, video seminars, and ‘cloud visits,’ allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of China. Alternatively, direct online communication can provide opportunities for in-depth and detailed communication, fostering genuine understanding and recognition.”

Second, the article argues that China should “rationally compete for discourse power, tell China’s story well, and strengthen our mechanisms for people-to-people diplomacy.” The article blames South Korea’s conversative media for its “long-standing negative reporting on China, which has led to a continued surge of anti-China sentiment in South Korean society,” and instead says China “must expand cooperation with South Korean media, strengthen media integration, establish sister relationships with newspapers, and establish fraternal organizations for foreign correspondents.” This can include “recruit[ing] South Korean journalists who can impartially tell China’s story, thereby enhancing the discourse power of our mainstream media.” The article also mentions “strengthen[ing] cooperation with progressive South Korean media, Chinese-language media, and those friendly to China to enhance the objectivity and fairness of South Korean media reporting on China.”

Turning to the role of social media, the article continues that for “self-media,” China “must also fully utilize the new media software commonly used by the South Korean public, adopt flexible and diverse promotional methods tailored to local conditions, and appropriately adjust the direction and target audience of new media development to vividly tell China’s story from an international perspective, thereby continuously increasing the South Korean public’s correct understanding of China.” However, the author appears perhaps to include a subtle criticism of Beijing’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy around that time, as they wrote, “This is in contrast to engaging in online verbal abuse and attacks that undermine the ties between the peoples of both countries.”

This PLA discussion of social media dovetails with documentation of Chinese covert influence efforts using AI against South Korea on social media by Microsoft in early 2024 to “[stoke] discord in South Korea.” Microsoft wrote that, “Since our last report in September 2023, these campaigns have evolved in several important ways including incorporating AI-generated photos to mislead audiences, stoking conspiratorial content — particularly against the U.S. government — and targeting new populations, such as South Korea, with localized content.” Specifically, Microsoft documented that Storm-1376, which is the company’s name for the PRC influence actor better known as Spamouflage and actually identified as the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), “made a concerted effort to target South Korea with localized content amplifying protests occurring in the country against… [Japan’s] Fukushima wastewater dumping… as well as content critical of the Japanese government.” The PRC campaign was coordinated, including “hundreds of posts in Korean across multiple platforms and websites, including South Korean social media sites such as Kakao Story, Tistory, and Velog.io.” Microsoft added that, “As part of this targeted campaign, Storm-1376 actively amplified comments and actions from Minjoo [Democratic Party] leader and unsuccessful 2022 presidential candidate, Lee Jaemyung,” who was critical of Japan’s handling of the Fukushima wastewater. ROK researchers have also identified suspected Chinese IO on YouTube and the Korean platform Naver.

Third and finally, the article argues that China “must change traditional mindsets and effectively strengthen the unique characteristics of people-to-people diplomacy.” This is ultimately an internal criticism of China’s approach, as the author explains that “In our country, people-to-people diplomacy is a supplementary tool to official diplomacy and is integrated into overall diplomacy and public diplomacy under government leadership. However, for South Korea and European and American countries, China’s people-to-people diplomacy still carries a strong official coloration.” Specifically, the problem is that “when communicating with the international public, semi-official Chinese academic institutions and economic groups tend to present China’s best and most positive side, avoiding negative information or topics that may conflict with relevant countries.” The result is that “this often creates the impression of strong value propaganda and indoctrination, and can easily give foreign audiences the impression of a lack of candor […] This can backfire, weakening the credibility of people-to-people diplomacy and creating a loss-making environment.”

Turning to the topic of potential Chinese election interference, there is less concrete evidence by PLA researchers than for PLA efforts targeted at Taiwanese and U.S. elections. However, in following with the broader PLA effort to develop capabilities to influence foreign populations via social media among many other channels, there is solid evidence of PLA interest in ROK social media and ROK elections. Broadly speaking, almost 10% of PLA IEU translation MA theses are focused on South Korea, the third highest percentage after the United States and Russia, ahead of Japan and Vietnam. This means the PLA invests significant relative effort to developing foreign language capabilities for South Korea, which is also relevant to PLA efforts to break the US-ROK alliance, discussed below. This also aligns with concerns by Microsoft, which wrote in early 2024, “As populations in India, South Korea, and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections.”

There is little PLA research specifically on KakaoTalk, as one example of a ROK-specific social media platform, but plenty of efforts to generally develop a machine translation capability for Chinese-Korean translation, which would support tailored messaging for Chinese influence efforts. For example, Zhao Tianrui, a PLA researcher on foreign languages now at the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), published a series of research articles over 2021-2025 all about improving machine translation for Korean. This continues earlier work by their colleague Bi Yude.

Beyond machine translation, additional PLA research indicates an interest in better understanding ROK politics. For example, a 2021 article by a PLA researcher in a journal published by a Chinese intelligence organization explored the recent ROK elections and projected future ROK political trends. Another 2021 article reviewed an Asan report to better understand ROK public opinion. Furthermore, a 2022 article focused on translating Chinese into Korean for political messaging, which could support election interference. Taken together, this type of research would indeed begin to help the PLA and broader PRC influence ecosystem target ROK elections.

Potential Threats for US-ROK Alliance

The biggest threat to the US-ROK alliance from Chinese IO is the potential for China to seek to undermine the political and societal cohesion of the alliance. As some U.S. analysts have noted,  “Beijing perceives Seoul as the weakest link in the U.S. alliance network, given its perception of South Korea’s deference and history of accommodating China’s rise relative to other regional players, such as Japan, which considers China a long-term security threat.”

Chinese military writings certainly acknowledge the advantages of alliances and clearly discuss targeting these alliances. The 2020 PLA National Defense University (NDU) version of the “Science of Military Strategy,” an authoritative teaching text for PLA officers, explains the PRC threat perception of U.S. alliances and calls for focusing on “trends of the world’s major powers in strengthening their military alliances and making strategic deployment adjustments in our surroundings and its impact; the basic policies, strategic guidance, military deployment, and possible use of military forces in disputes between neighboring countries and China on land territories.” This reflects continuity from the 2013 PLA Academy of Military Science (AMS) version of “Science of Military Strategy,” which was already concerned about the Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia and warned against “powerful hostile military alliances.” The 2013 AMS version called for Beijing to make up for “comparative weakness” by “striving to control the political, economic, and diplomatic contradictions and not extend into strategic conflicts, to prevent military expansion and development in military alliances against us as the object under the hegemony’s guidance.”

Authoritative PLA texts make clear that targeting adversary alliances, like the US-ROK alliance, is a priority for PLA IO. For example, a 2013 textbook published by PLA AMS discusses targeting adversaries, such as the United States, by “break[ing] its military alliances, its command systems, and its political and ethnic cohesion.” Similarly, a 2014 textbook by PLA NDU discusses “collaps[ing] the enemy’s alliance relationships.” In practice, Beijing could seek to target the US-ROK alliance in many ways, including through spreading disinformation about the alliance and U.S. actions in Korea, or fomenting ROK public opposition to the alliance.

PLA research has paid attention to the US-ROK alliance and U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), likely for their potential role to play in a Taiwan contingency and also for a North Korea scenario. This PLA concern over USFK’s “strategic flexibility” for potential involvement in a Taiwan contingency dates to at least 2006. This concern continues, for example, as one researcher at PLA IEU wrote a series of articles over 2020-2022 all about US-ROK relations and USFK. Lv Chunyan wrote or co-authored articles on “A Study on the Change of United States Forces Korea from the Perspective of Regional Security and Stability,” “Biden’s Efforts to Strengthen US-South Korea Alliance and Its Impact on China-South Korea Relations,” and “The ROK-U.S. Alliance in the Context of New Changes on the Korean Peninsula.” Others have continued to write on USFK and its “strategic flexibility,” and some even draw lessons from the Korean War.

Policy Options for South Korea and the US-ROK Alliance

Given these threats, Washington and Seoul have several options to improve their coordination and capacity to counter Chinese IO. First, the two countries should continue supporting their 2023 memorandum of understanding to counter disinformation, which appears to be mostly focused on China. This can include deepening information sharing privately, but both sides should consider what they can also say publicly. Seoul could follow Washington’s lead and publish public reports on foreign influence efforts, for example, documenting efforts by North Korea and China. The ROK government has made sporadic announcements of Chinese efforts but has not yet published an official comprehensive review. This report could be published yearly to improve transparency. The two countries could also invest in promising technologies to identify generative AI content.

Second, Washington and Seoul should increase cooperation against Chinese IO across multilateral fora, including with Taiwan. Taipei is the number one target of Chinese influence efforts and is generally a testing ground for new Chinese tactics, and the government and people have continued improving their ability to counter these efforts. Taipei has much to share with other countries, and Washington and Seoul should support Taipei’s efforts to do so. Seoul can also share its experience with North Korean IO. Washington and Seoul should also consider engaging with other regional countries, such as the Philippines, to counter Chinese IO.