“China is going to eat our lunch?” Joe Biden asked dismissively on the campaign trail in 2019. “Come on, man…. They’re not competition for us.” The Trump administration has taken a very different posture. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned that Beijing is undertaking the “fastest, most rapid, most expansive peacetime military buildup in history” and called it “the single greatest challenge this nation has ever faced.” And, of course, President Trump has targeted China with tariffs that have become a bone of contention domestically.
Of course, some good, intelligent people, such as economist Thomas Sowell, consider the tariff strategy misguided. But wherever we stand and whatever the truth on that, a striking reality is inescapable.
China is not just our main geopolitical adversary; rather, it’s the most fearsome and foreign of foreign threats.
It is, in fact, from the Western perspective, the closest thing there is to an aggressive, planet-imperiling, alien civilization on Earth.
They Do Not Come in Peace
That Biden and many of his co-ideologists minimize the Chinese threat is replete with irony. (Though many of them do make money off Beijing.) Just consider, for instance, Barack Obama’s comment to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a 2012 debate. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” he said. He was responding to Romney’s claim that Russia is our main geopolitical foe. Now, however, all Obama’s friends seem to love this ’80s foreign policy.
In reality, though, Russia’s economy is one-eighth the size of China’s. So with military power flowing from economic power, that Putin could somehow reconstitute the Soviet empire doesn’t seem very realistic. Moreover, Russia isn’t successfully censoring our movies and putting its propaganda in our schools. China is. (Really. Click here, here, and here.)
Then, the word “fascism” is bandied about much today; we hear that it’s a threat imperiling us. Children also learn that we fought WWII to keep the world safe from fascism. Yet what is the most powerful fascist country to ever exist?
China.
Oh, “It’s communist,” you say? That’s marketing by Beijing; it’s the regime’s claim to legitimacy. But China began instituting free-market reforms decades ago, and today its economy is mostly market-driven. The government has a hand in everything, though, making it align nicely with Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism. To wit: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
As to this, note that Beijing law dictates that every Chinese company and all China’s 1.4 billion citizens are required to, when the government demands it, engage in spying. It spies on its own people, too, as Beijing aims to become the world’s first all-seeing state. (I.e., there may be 700 million surveillance cameras countrywide. Shanghai alone has approximately 5,000 per square mile.)
Covid-19 was used, too, as a pretext to increase this surveillance further. This brings us to the next topic.
Covid Kingdom
One silver lining in the Covid cloud is that it tarnished China’s reputation, waking up many to the Beijing threat. Why, some observers even suspect that China released the virus purposely. For example, writing at American Thinker, James Zumwalt proposed this on Wednesday — then went further. Citing a 2003 speech allegedly delivered by then-Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian, he wrote that
Chi recognized his country’s need for more territory for its expanding population. Incredibly, he laid out a plan for meeting this need by “colonizing” America. But how could this possibly be achieved? The seed of his plan — planted 22 years ago — was to seek development of a genetically modified virus that was capable of being transmitted primarily to Caucasians only!
To be clear, this information’s provenance is questionable; the speech may be mythical, in fact. And the claim of intentional release — also made by Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan in 2020 — is unproven. More plausible is the theory that, once SARS-CoV-2 began rampaging through China, the government facilitated its spread beyond its borders. “Why should only China be damaged by it?” was the alleged thinking.
“Know Thy Enemy” — Sun Tzu
Whatever the truth, suspicion is warranted. China is the Earth’s most godless nation, literally, led by a cutthroat regime. Furthermore, it still reflects history’s default mentality: considering one’s own culture and race superior. In fact, Beijing apparently fancies world dominance its birthright.
The Telegraph addressed this attitude in the 2003 article “The giant who lives at 590 Yongia Road,” writing:
Nothing in human history compares with the spellbinding phenomenon of Chinese genius, Chinese vision and a uniquely Chinese scale being simultaneously harnessed towards the one goal: the restoration of Chinese hegemony over the known world. This is the position which all Chinese leaders, from the Emperor Ch’in to Mao, have felt to be rightfully theirs.
… One would never judge modern Rome’s potential by the precedents set by the Caesars, nor use the conduct of the Aztecs as a useful guide to Peru’s intentions. But China is different, because it has repeatedly been in the forefront of human endeavour; and its multi-millennia-long continuities are deeply embedded within the consciousness of those who govern it. Moreover, the Chinese are more than nationalistic; they are a people for whom the concept of Herrenvolk [“Master Race”] is not some passing and malign idiosyncrasy, but a defining condition of identity. To their eyes we are barbarians whose historical eminence is due entirely to our infuriating mastery of the savage arts of war.
… Racial superciliousness remains deep within the character of the Chinese people….
Now perhaps we understand why Napoleon Bonaparte warned, “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the world.”
As for the current trade conflict, Beijing may lose the battle. But while Adolf Hitler imagined a “Thousand-Year Reich,” China’s realm has lasted 4,000 years already. She’s not going anywhere, and should be taken very, very seriously.
