You may have noticed them already: slick adverts promising you can “learn Tai Chi in three weeks.” They show impossibly muscular Chinese men moving serenely in temple courtyards, promising health, strength and inner calm. They are everywhere online. They are also not real.
The “masters” are AI-generated avatars, their physiques and movements conjured by software. And while at first glance the campaign looks like yet another internet scam – the kind of digital detritus that clogs social feeds – its scale and sophistication suggest something more troubling.
This has all the hallmarks of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) psychological operation.
Culture as a Weapon
The CCP has long used culture as a tool of soft power. Confucius Institutes embedded in Western universities offered sanitised versions of Chinese history. State-backed Kung Fu shows toured abroad. Panda diplomacy softened Beijing’s image. In each case, heritage was not celebrated but instrumentalised.
Today, that same playbook is being updated for the digital age. Instead of pandas, we get AI avatars. Instead of martial arts exhibitions, we get adverts promising miraculous self-transformation. The goal is unchanged: shape how Western audiences think about China.
The message behind the Tai Chi campaign is clear. China is the source of ancient wisdom and modern vitality. Chinese methods are quicker, better, more efficient than anything the West can offer. Strength and serenity come not from liberal democracy but from Chinese tradition – mediated, of course, by the Party.
From Spamouflage to Soft-focus Serenity
This is hardly Beijing’s first foray into digital manipulation. Western security agencies have already exposed the “Spamouflage” network – a sprawling operation of fake accounts pumping out pro-Beijing content across multiple platforms. The CCP’s cyber units have pushed disinformation about Covid-19, smeared critics abroad, and spread propaganda about Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Against that backdrop, it would be dangerously naïve to see the Tai Chi adverts as harmless. They are better understood as a live-fire test of the next generation of influence campaigns: lifestyle branding, wellness promises, and AI-generated propaganda slipped invisibly into the churn of social media.
Unlike Spamouflage, which was clumsy and overt, this new approach is subtler. It does not preach or attack. It seduces, appealing to Western vanity and impatience. It exploits our obsession with shortcuts – mastery without effort, wisdom without years of practice.
Psy-ops in Silk Robes
The choice of Tai Chi is not accidental. In the West, it carries an image of calm and harmlessness – pensioners in parks, gentle breathing exercises. By rebranding it as a path to sculpted muscles in three weeks, Beijing wraps its influence in silk robes. It looks like harmless wellness content. In reality, it is narrative warfare.
And the saturation matters. No private marketing firm would burn money at this rate on something so implausible. Only a state-backed campaign, with propaganda rather than profit as its aim, would pursue such ubiquity.
Why Now?
Beijing has reasons to double down on soft power. Its reputation in the West is toxic: sanctions, human rights abuses, surveillance, aggression in the South China Sea. Its economy is slowing, its alignment with Moscow is under scrutiny, its global image battered.
So the CCP falls back on culture. Push a vision of China as timeless, serene and strong. Blur the lines between fitness advert and propaganda. Condition audiences, drip by drip, to view China as a civilisation to admire rather than a regime to resist.
The Casualty: Tai Chi Itself
The tragedy is that Tai Chi, a profound discipline requiring patience and humility, is reduced to a cheap prop in Beijing’s propaganda theatre. Genuine practitioners know it takes years, not weeks, to internalise its principles. By packaging it as a quick fix, the CCP insults its own heritage.
But this is what communist regimes do. They hollow out culture, strip it of meaning, and redeploy it as a weapon.
A Wake-up Call
Western publics cannot afford to dismiss these adverts as laughable spam. They are part of a continuum: from Spamouflage to disinformation on Hong Kong, from cyber-attacks on Western institutions to wellness psy-ops on our phones. Each is a front in the same campaign – to shape our perceptions, weaken our confidence, and normalise China’s rise.
The battlefield has shifted. Influence no longer arrives in the form of crude slogans or hackneyed Marxist screeds. It arrives in the shape of a smiling AI “master” offering serenity in three weeks.
The next time such an avatar appears on your screen, do not see him as a harmless curiosity. See him for what he is: a soldier in the CCP’s war of perception, a product of Beijing’s propaganda laboratories, and a warning that even your social media scroll has become contested ground.
