{Editor’s Note: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily published an article examining an advanced form of modern warfare as rules warfare – the use of international rules as strategic weapons. The article asserts that “the ability to shape and dominate international rules has become a decisive factor in securing the strategic initiative in long-term competition among major powers.” The following is a transcription of the article as republished by People’s Daily. {1}}

(PLA Daily) Editor’s Note

The world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century. As the international order is reshaped and great-power competition intensifies, some countries and militaries increasingly view international rules not merely as constraints on warfare, but as strategic weapons in their own right. Rules warfare has emerged as an advanced form of conflict that transcends the traditional boundaries of military violence and cognitive confrontation, becoming an important force in shaping the global order.

At its core, rules warfare reflects the systemic restructuring of global interest distribution, governance frameworks, and the logic of great-power competition as the world transitions from the old international order to a new one. In this environment, the ability to shape and dominate international rules has become a decisive factor in securing the strategic initiative in long-term competition among major powers.

What Is Rules Warfare?

Rules warfare refers to a form of hybrid confrontation in which a country or group of countries uses international rules as strategic instruments. By creating, exploiting, reshaping, dismantling, circumventing, or introducing new rules, they seek to gain institutional dominance, legal legitimacy, and moral superiority. Their aim is to restrict an opponent’s freedom of action, amplify their own advantages, and reduce the costs of competition.

This form of confrontation spans multiple domains, including trade, technology, law, cyberspace, climate, military affairs, and the cognitive domain. It has emerged from the combined effects of shifts in the international order, changes in globalization, revolutions in technologies, evolution of great-power competition, and transformations in global governance.

A. Distinctive Characteristics of Rules Warfare

Rules warfare differs fundamentally from traditional warfare, which seeks territorial conquest, resource acquisition, or military destruction. Instead, it relies on rules, standards, and institutional systems to wage asymmetric, high-level competition, fundamentally reshaping the logic of strategic rivalry and the factors that determine victory.

Non-Kinetic Confrontation

Rules warfare breaks away from the traditional reliance on military force. Rather than kinetic operations, it employs sanctions, regulatory barriers, compliance reviews, exclusive technical standards, systemic decoupling, and control over the interpretation of international rules to exert strategic pressure.

Rules warfare is also inherently asymmetric. Established powers leverage their dominance over existing international rules to pressure competitors, while emerging powers seek to offset that advantage by creating new standards, introducing alternative rules, or building multilateral coalitions. This dynamic creates a new strategic paradigm in which institutional innovation challenges established dominance and new rules gradually reshape the existing order.

Competition Across All Domains

Rules warfare transcends traditional limitations of time, geography, and operational domains, becoming a continuous form of competition across virtually every sector.

It extends into nearly every area governed by international rules or industry standards, including trade, finance, technology, industrial development, cyberspace, arms control, and global governance. At the same time, it blurs the distinction between peacetime and wartime, embedding strategic competition in routine international cooperation, commercial exchanges, and technological collaboration. Under this model, peacetime itself becomes a form of competition, and every domain becomes a potential battlefield.

Legally Concealed Means of Competition

Rules warfare derives much of its strength from operating under the appearance of legality. Actions are carried out through international treaties, industry standards, regulatory frameworks, and multilateral mechanisms, allowing strategic containment to be presented as lawful governance and regulatory compliance.

States that dominate existing international rules often control their interpretation, application, and enforcement. As a result, unilateral sanctions, technology restrictions, systemic exclusion, and technical standards can be portrayed as legitimate market practices or accepted international norms. This process institutionalizes and legitimizes measures that might otherwise be regarded as coercive, placing targeted states in a dilemma: violating the rules invites punishment, while complying with them may reinforce structural disadvantages.

Long-Term, Incremental Competition

Rules warfare is a prolonged, low-intensity, and continuous form of strategic competition with no clearly defined beginning or end. Creating, revising, replacing, and reconstructing international rules can take years or even decades. Similarly, the adoption of standards, the evolution of governance systems, and shifts in the international balance of power unfold gradually.

Victory is therefore achieved not through a single decisive confrontation, but through sustained efforts to revise rules, update standards, establish new institutional frameworks, and gradually displace existing ones. By continuously narrowing an opponent’s strategic space while accumulating long-term institutional advantages, states seek to reshape the international order and ultimately alter the global distribution of power.

System-Level Competition

Rules warfare is a comprehensive contest between entire national systems rather than individual military forces or government agencies. Success depends on a country’s ability to develop institutions, formulate standards, integrate governance mechanisms, and mobilize international partners.

Competition extends across the entire policy cycle, from creating rules and exporting standards to building multilateral partnerships, integrating governance systems, and mitigating strategic risks. Stronger powers seek to establish closed, self-reinforcing rule systems capable of exerting comprehensive strategic pressure. Weaker states, meanwhile, must build alternative institutional frameworks, strengthen cooperation with like-minded partners, and develop new governance mechanisms to balance existing systems. This is a form of competition in which “systemic capability determines success and institutional order determines victory.”

Rule Dominance as the Key to Victory

Rules warfare fundamentally redefines the logic of strategic success. The ability to define international rules, establish industry standards, shape global narratives, and lead international governance becomes more important than military superiority alone. Military power serves as the ultimate guarantor of a country’s position in this competition.

The country that first establishes new rules, technical standards, and value frameworks—and successfully shapes their interpretation, revision, implementation, and international acceptance—gains control over the underlying logic of global competition. By controlling rule-making, it can determine market access, define the boundaries of acceptable behavior, influence the distribution of benefits, and shape future governance structures. It thus pursues the strategic goal of “constraining competitors by rules, preserving strategic advantages by standards, and sustaining leadership by institutional orders.” This is the defining characteristic that distinguishes rules warfare from traditional forms of warfare.

B. Diverse Forms of Rules Warfare

As international competition increasingly shifts toward institutional and regulatory rivalry, rules warfare has expanded into virtually every domain critical to national development. It has evolved into a comprehensive, systematic form of competition that integrates peacetime and wartime activities, operates through gradual and often concealed means, links multiple domains, and unfolds over the long term.

In the Economic and Trade Domain: The Frontline of Interest Distribution

Economic and trade competition is the most frequent, far-reaching, and immediately consequential form of rules warfare. Its central logic is to manipulate, revise, or exploit international trade, investment, and financial rules to undermine a target country’s economic ecosystem, disrupt the modernization of its industrial and supply chains, and impose sustained economic pressure.

Major powers may use the language of “rules compliance” to justify unilateral containment measures. In essence, this reflects competition for leadership in global economic governance and influence over international value chains. Such persistent, high-intensity competition poses growing challenges to the stability of the global economic order.

In the Science and Technology Domain: The Strategic Center of Technological Leadership

Competition in science and technology has become a contest for dominance over the rules governing innovation. Control over technical standards, industry specifications, patent portfolios, certification systems, and technology governance can create technological path dependencies that limit competitors’ ability to innovate independently or upgrade their industries.

Rules warfare in this domain extends throughout the entire innovation chain, from research and development to patent protection, product certification, industry standards, and export controls. By establishing high regulatory and technical barriers, states seek to secure long-term strategic advantages. This form of rules warfare is highly technical and among the most fundamental and enduring.

In the Legal and Judicial Domain: A Precise Instrument of the Rules Game

Rules warfare in the legal domain is characterized by precision, concealment, and technical sophistication. International law and domestic legal systems become strategic instruments through which judicial procedures, legal doctrines, and regulatory reviews are used to exert “soft damage” on foreign governments and enterprises.

Its essence lies in the weaponization of legal systems: through selective enforcement of laws, procedural manipulation, and expansive claims of extraterritorial jurisdiction, states seek to impose cross-border legal constraints beyond their own territories. Because these actions are carried out under the appearance of judicial legitimacy, their strategic objectives can remain obscured.

In Cyberspace and the Digital Domain: A New Frontier of Governance

As digital technologies become central to national competitiveness, cyberspace has emerged as a major arena of rules warfare. Key issues include data sovereignty, cybersecurity, platform regulation, algorithmic governance, and digital ethics, with the ultimate objective of shaping global digital governance.

Competition focuses on defining rules for digital sovereignty, cross-border data flows, acceptable state behavior in cyberspace, and emerging digital trade frameworks. The outcome can determine a nation’s digital sovereignty, room for development, and future position in the global economy.

In the Ideological Domain: The Hidden Battlefield of Values

Rules warfare also extends into the cognitive and ideological domains. It employs value-based narratives, public opinion campaigns, and strategic communications to influence international perceptions while seeking to weaken a target country’s confidence in its political system, development model, and international standing.

This form of competition uses human rights and other value-related issues as political instruments through double standards, narrative dominance, and efforts to shape international opinion. By controlling the definition of legitimacy and morality, countries seek to occupy the moral high ground in global competition while influencing public opinion, social consensus, and international soft power. Characterized by concealment, deception, and persistence, this struggle can erode a target country’s international discourse, domestic social consensus, and soft-power foundations.

In the Military and Security Domain: The Strategic Extension of Rules Warfare

Military and security affairs represent the extension of rules warfare into traditional security competition. This form of competition centers on arms control agreements, military operating procedures, alliance frameworks, and emerging security norms. Its objective is to shape the international rules governing military affairs while constraining competitors’ military development and strategic freedom.

Through international military law, arms control treaties, the law of armed conflict, and alliance arrangements, states can create, revise, or selectively implement rules—or withdraw from them—to restrict an opponent’s force development, limit its operational freedom, and construct exclusive security architectures. In this way, “rule-based deterrence” increasingly complements and, in some circumstances, partially substitutes for traditional military deterrence. This is one of the most strategically significant forms of rules warfare because it directly affects national security, military sovereignty, global strategic stability, and the future international security order.

C. The Underlying Mechanisms of Rules Warfare

Compared with traditional warfare, which relies primarily on physical force, rules warfare operates at the institutional, systemic, and cognitive levels. Success depends on a state’s ability to shape rules at their source, establish standards, use institutions effectively, build integrated governance systems, influence international narratives, and ultimately restructure the international order.

Rule Lock-In: Achieving Strategic Dominance Through Standard Setting

The most fundamental mechanism of rules warfare is control over the definition of standards. By establishing technical, commercial, security, and regulatory standards, a dominant actor can restructure the competitive landscape before direct confrontation even begins.

Once a standard gains international acceptance, it can create rigid barriers to entry. Technical patents, digital algorithms, trade requirements, and security criteria all function as strategic benchmarks. The party that defines these standards effectively determines legitimate technological pathways, evaluation systems, and market access requirements. It can present its own model as the “only legitimate norm,” forcing competitors either to adapt on unfavorable terms or risk exclusion.

The advantage gained through standard-setting can be even more significant than that derived from conventional power.

Institutional Constraints: Building Systemic Advantages Through Multilateral Mechanisms

Rules warfare is fundamentally a contest between institutional systems rather than individual capabilities. Its objective is to transform unilateral advantages into multilateral institutional advantages by building alliances, regional agreements, and international organizations that reinforce a common set of rules.

A dominant actor seeks to incorporate its national interests into international institutions, multilateral treaties, and regional governance frameworks, thereby turning national preferences into internationally recognized norms. In doing so, it can draw other countries into its sphere of influence while isolating and constraining competitors through compliance mechanisms, regulatory reviews, and institutional sanctions. This process converts temporary advantages in national power into durable institutional advantages.

Narrative Shaping: Winning Through Cognitive and Moral Leadership

Rules warfare combines legal competition with cognitive competition. The effectiveness of international rules ultimately depends on whether the international community recognizes them as legitimate.

Control over public discourse, legal interpretation, and academic definitions forms the soft-power core of this struggle and directly affects the perceived legitimacy and enforceability of rules. Through these channels and international evaluation systems, dominant powers can define what is considered lawful or unlawful, legitimate or illegitimate, and acceptable or unacceptable. They can portray their own actions as consistent with international norms while characterizing a competitor’s development as a violation of those norms. Narrative dominance thus becomes a long-term source of international legitimacy and strategic influence.

Systemic Control: Integrating Rules Across Multiple Domains

Rules warfare operates through interconnected systems rather than isolated policy areas. Trade, finance, technology, security, and data governance increasingly reinforce one another, creating a comprehensive framework for strategic competition.

Technical standards influence trade rules, financial regulations can be used to sanction industrial entities, security frameworks shape technological cooperation, and data governance can restructure entire industries. By integrating these rules into a closed institutional system, a dominant actor can create cascading constraints in which a single regulatory violation triggers restrictions across multiple sectors. Compared with traditional military competition, this mechanism can turn a confrontation in one area into an all-out contest across multiple domains.

Winning Through Continuous Rule Innovation

The long-term success of rules warfare depends on continuously creating new rules and establishing leadership in emerging domains. Technological advances and changes in global governance are opening new areas—including outer space, artificial intelligence, quantum information, biotechnology, and digital trade—in which mature international rules have yet to be established.

Unlike established fields, where existing powers enjoy entrenched advantages, these emerging domains offer new actors opportunities to shape future governance by proposing standards, institutional arrangements, and regulatory frameworks. Countries that do not dominate the existing system should participate more actively in these new fields, seeking to become first movers in proposing solutions, rules, and standards. By establishing governance systems in which they have greater influence, they can gradually offset, replace, or transform existing international frameworks.

This mechanism illustrates how a less dominant state might seek to prevail in rules warfare: by competing strategically within established domains while taking the lead in shaping emerging ones. Through continuous innovation, systemic upgrading, and paradigm shifts, it can gain the upper hand in hybrid warfare.

Endnotes:
{1} People’s Daily, “Rules Warfare: The Advanced Form of Hybrid Warfare,” July 16, 2026.
http://military.people.com.cn/n1/2026/0716/c1011-40761828.html.