American And Chinese Interactions In The Period Of The Donald Trump Presidency: Information War Aspect

Information in the 21st century emerges as the object of tremendous and frequent manipulations, which occasionally leads to information wars. The information war between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China under the presidency of Donald Trump consisted primarily of a dissimilar understanding of cybersecurity and in conducting mutual cyber-attacks on politically and economically crucial national objects, while, at the same time, both countries are the most basic locations in the world, where cyber-attacks originate from. Along with that, at the end of December 2019, a new type of coronavirus infection, the official name of which is COVID-19, was detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Due to the absence of accurate scientific knowledge about the virus and due to its rapid spread around the world, the United States of America and the People's Republic of China have become the dominant information opponents. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of tweets and official press releases from the U.S. Department of State, Mike Pompeo, the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and Lijian Zhao, it was revealed that the COVID-19 topic was used by the United States and the People's Republic of China in the ongoing information war as one of its forms: disinformation. Thus, the information war between the United States and China with the occurrence of coronavirus infection has acquired the characteristic of not only cyber-attacks, but also disinformation simultaneously.