Recursive cognitive warfare and domestic legitimation: official and platform discourse during Pelosi’s 2022 Taiwan visit

This study examines China's response to then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's August 2022 visit to Taiwan through a qualitative frame analysis. It advances a framework of recursive cognitive warfare, in which official narratives are operationalised through specific frames, amplified as public affect within a state-managed platform ecology, and selectively reabsorbed into official discourse as evidence of popular consensus. Across the complete verifiable official-statement corpus, framing recurs along three dimensions: subject, action, and solution. Official statements construct U.S. and Taiwan-related actors through sovereignty, legality, and non-interference claims; define the visit as a violation; and present countermeasures as justified, necessary, or historically warranted. Both registers perform a “double movement” that appropriates liberal-legal vocabulary while delegitimising liberal actors, sustaining a domestic legitimacy infrastructure for coercion. Convergence across registers is patterned, though its causal direction remains suggestive rather than conclusive.