Not sure this is about war, although you could consider that it is, but then you'd be defining big business and manipulation as war. You'd have a point - businessmen are supposedly always reading Sunzi's The Art of War - but then the word would begin to lose its meaning.
Anyway, the first obvious example of manipulation of information as big business is obviously the advertising and PR industry, which is all about manipulation, feeding off the human ability to communicate - our most important defining quality as a species. We live in the midst of a swamp of such manipulation, all over the world.

Anybody know which hoops I have to jump through before I can sign up with academia.edu? Some storm of mindpatrolling currently seems to make it impossible. Perhaps they're trying to boost alcohol sales? I think I'm about ready to help them.
Bastards!

@Yankee: knowing something about the Chinese language is a plus for an English teacher, although it is not necessarily the most important thing. Would you rather have a Chinese teacher who knows nothing of any foreign language?
And why the great differential in pay for foreign/Chinese teachers - market justice or something?

@Liumingke: Kunming may not be an ideal place, but then different situations motivate different people, and these can make a lot of difference. I was a disaster in secondary school and university when having to learn a foreign language (Spanish, a relatively easy one, at least for native speakers of Indo-European languages). There were virtually no native Spanish speakers in my area, I really hated language study, especially those damned language laboratories where you're asked to converse with machines, and I very early on concluded that, although I was a good student of other subjects, I was unfortunately an idiot when it came to foreign languages. Then I got interested in China and realized, if I wanted to pursue this interest, I was going to have to learn this seemingly impossible language. I went to China to study, found that I really wanted to be able to communicate with people, took classes and was honestly surprised to find that I am perhaps a little better than average as a language learner.
Different methods for different people, but also a matter of attitude and motivation. Knew a guy who'd graduated from Oxford in classical Arabic, could handle the Quran, poetry etc. - went to an Arab country as an English teacher, found that daily spoken Arabic is quite different, never learned to speak it, remained living in a foreign bubble.

@HFCampo: not sure if I'd consider your rather high requirements for English proficiency as the most important things (no, you don't say this) - they're not negative, don't get me wrong, but good translation or explanation can sometimes be a poor substitute for the imperative for the student to do intellectual work within the language he/she is trying to learn for himself. The best teachers/tutors I've had were by no means those with the best English, any more than were the best English teachers I've known those who knew most about the language of the students (though, in itself, it's always a plus).
Matter of priorities. What I'm saying basically is that the most important task is that of the student rather than that of the teacher - which is, of course, no excuse for teacher laziness.