Communist China’s attacks – with intent and indifference – on human rights, humanity at large, and America are eye-popping and legion. They have become so numerous, regular, and stealthy, denied with such brash disregard for truth, that we risk growing numb to China’s strangulation of Western values. Worse, Joe Biden appears captured by the Chinese dragon – and that is a worry.
Wisdom starts with understanding the breadth and depth of China’s threat – to humanity and free peoples everywhere. Their assault has been unremitting – and appears to be accelerating.
Starting with mass murder under Mao, Communist China steadily grew more daring, disrespectful, clever, ambitious, and effective – in trampling international law, devaluing and disregarding life and liberty, seeking what, in Chinese tradition, would be called global conquest. Mao alone killed at least 45 million Chinese citizens, more than the population of California. See, e.g., https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder; https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html.
Over the past 30 years, accelerating in the early 2000s, China began pushing the envelope – seeing how far they could push the West. China modernized military forces at breakneck speed, militarized space with directed energy, built artificial islands astride international sea lanes, then militarized them for military power projection. See, e.g., https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11977083/space-weapons-kill-90-of-people-us-mainland/; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-china-islands-idUSKBN19L02J; https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26824/china-arming-fake-islands/.
Compounding these violations of international law, China abused economic rights tied to membership in the World Trade Organization and other multi-laterals, coerced, cajoled, extorted and bribed small nations from the Far East to Middle East, Africa to South and Central America, to gain a foothold for asserting wider communist authority. The list of nations beholden to Communist China – by debt, threat and forced economic dependence is long. See, e.g., https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/us-news/chinas-entry-into-wto-worst-of-all-deals-they-violated-rules-trump.html; see also, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/14/china-soft-power-united-nations-hong-kong-crackdown/.
Using state-controlled corporate entities, China has infiltrated every free economy and stock market in the world, using the sleight-of-hand that communist-controlled corporate operators are no different than heavily-regulated Western companies, accountable to Western laws – only they are no such thing. See, e.g., https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/trump-eyes-crackdown-of-nyse-listed-chinese-companies.
China’s companies and clandestine operators, given a pass by complicit American and European politicians and company leaders, methodically institutionalized the expectation of graft, theft, and penetration of the Western political process – in effect, corrupting Western nations from within. See, e.g., https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-indicts-chinese-hackers-for-stealing-us-and-international-company-data-183259081.html; https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/1-in-5-companies-say-china-stole-their-ip-within-the-last-year-cnbc.html.
China’s one-two-three-four punch has been effective. Lawless military advances expanded exponentially. Without Western responses, sanctions, or consequences to illegal actions in space, in the South China Sea or elsewhere, they returned to caustic rhetoric, threatening Taiwan, overran Hong Kong, have sought military bases from Africa and the Middle East to South America. See, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/13/hong-kong-china-targeting-any-dissent-national-security-law-column/3354776001/; https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/20/chad-sbragia-warns-xi-jinping-china-military-build/; https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-chinese-military-threat-is-real/;.
Lawless economic activity, tolerated in the name of “open trade” and political reform (which never followed), began with Clinton, continued under Bush 43, and accelerated under Obama-Biden. China’s appetite from dominance, from theft of intellectual property and coerced disgorgement of private information to 5G primacy and global surveillance power through Huawei, has been unremitting. See, https://www.foxnews.com/tech/chinese-cyber-hackers-have-built-a-backdoor-in-us-china-trade-war-says-report; https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-pentagon-analyst-china-has-backdoors-to-80-of-telecoms/.
Two other punches were thrown – to great effect. One was buying access to – and then influence over – American universities, and even primary and secondary school-age American children, with grants, abuse of cultural exchanges, and planting of young and older government agents (or those who would report back to the Chinese Government) to change curriculums and to steal research. The cases are so numerous that, today, they run into the hundreds. See, e.g., https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-infiltrating-u-s-education-system-in-propaganda-coup/; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/american-universities-are-soft-target-china-s-spies-say-u-n1104291; https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2020/01/30/harvard-china-spy/.
The last punch was to use human greed and political perfidy against the West. That is how, beginning in at least 1996, the Chinese began seeking to buy influence in congressional and presidential campaigns, and more recently the bold act of trying to buy into a vice presidency – into a White House – by contracting directly with the son of a vice president. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy; https://nypost.com/2019/10/10/6-facts-about-hunter-bidens-business-dealings-in-china/.
Unthinkable in most times, somehow – and the Chinese calculated right – such an overture to a sitting Democratic vice president’s son under Obama-Biden might work. It did. What it bought remains unclear, but that the effort was intended to buy something – can be no doubt. Similar allegations attached to those close to then-Secretary of State John Kerry. See, https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/obama-biden-cronies-made-billions-off-china-trade-deals-and-regulatory-policies-report.
Perhaps the most recent and pungent punch – created by the foregoing indulgences and lulling of Western public and corporate leaders into trust of this communist state – has been COVID-19. The pandemic incontrovertibly started in China, which lied about origins, timing, virulence, containment, and nature of the disease. The global impact of China’s lies has grown to 20 million, with 737,000 deaths. See, e.g., https://nypost.com/2020/08/11/global-coronavirus-cases-surge-past-20-million-with-over-737k-deaths/.
Only with the arrival of President Donald Trump – who refused to stay quiet about China’s military ambitions and adventurism, lawless economic and political behavior, penetration of US public and private institutions, mass theft of information and intellectual property, infection of America’s educational system, attempts at global surveillance through 5-G’s “backdoor,” misuse of our stock exchange, horrific violations of human rights in China and Hong Kong, reckless dispersion of COVID-19, and bold attempts to buy influence with the Obama-Biden White House – did China start to step back.
Only called out by Trump-Pence did the Communist Chinese behemoth slow. That brings us to now. At this moment, China – and Iran – appear intent on trying to dislodge Trump-Pence. No thinking person should doubt why. Trump has called a spade a spade, called communist China what it is – untruthful, unlawful, and illegitimate. He has refused to back down.
By contrast, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, joined by an inexperienced, young socialist, would be China’s dream leader for the US – bought and sold, daft and old, easy to bamboozle, already in the bag. And if he faded or folded soon after election, Kamila Harris would be perfect, an opportunist with no more appetite for taking on China than the last Democrat vice president. She would captive on day one, and on China would roll. China’s ambitions are only one in 2020 – but a big one. We cannot grow numb to it – China’s ambitions begin with Biden-Harris.