Red Dragon Menacing III(3)

On CCP’s All-Out Aggression Against Humanity

Table Of Contents

No More China Tech: 57 Million Credit Card Machines Likely Compromised

The Other Epidemic: Chinese Spies and Academic Espionage

What Hath the CCP Wrought? Part 1

What Hath the CCP Wrought? Part 2

The CCP’s Infiltration and Threat

Beijing Exploits UN System

Chinese Military Improves Capabilities While America Sleeps

China’s Aggression Is Changing the Nature of Sovereignty

Peter Navarro’s J’Accuse Against the Chinese Regime

The Real China and the Downside of Arrogance

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago(Part 1)

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago(Part 2)

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago(Part 3)

Milley’s Sputnik Moment and China’s Nukes

The Moral Imperative to End China’s Regime

US Companies Are ‘Hostages’ to China

In Honor of Peng Shuai’s Disappearance...

No More China Tech: 57 Million Credit Card Machines Likely Compromised

Consumer credit cards are posed in North Andover, Mass., on March 5, 2012. (Elise Amendola/AP Photo)

No More China Tech: 57 Million Credit Card Machines Likely Compromised

Hundreds of millions of credit card users join Zoom and TikTok in likely data loss to China

Anders Corr

November 9, 2021 Updated: November 10, 2021

News Analysis

Americans and allies are too dependent on China   tech , as demonstrated by recent revelations that our Chinese-manufactured credit card machines are sending data  back to China for no good reason.

The U.S. Treasury Department says that millions of Chinese point-of-sale (POS) devices, the credit card machines found at check-out counters, could be sending customer data back to China for no good reason.

Treasury Department lab tests show that the data is encrypted and sent to unknown third parties in China. The transmissions are “superfluous to normal payment transaction processing,” according to a letter from the Treasury’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection (OCCIP), as quoted  in Bloomberg News. The China-bound data transmissions are larger and more frequent than the transmissions of normal payment transactions.

“Treasury’s preliminary assessment is that data transmission by these devices indicates the possibility of risks to customer data confidentiality,” a Treasury spokesperson emailed to Bloomberg.

A subsidiary of the Chinese company, PAX Global, claimed that the security concerns were just “rumors.” The company’s headquarters are split between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. PAX has manufactured 57 million terminals that operate in 120 countries around the world, according to its own claims.

Global Payments Inc., the credit card processing company that recently said it was subject to a massive security breach, announced on April 2 that around 1.5 million credit card numbers were exposed. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

On Oct. 26, the FBI raided  PAX offices in Jacksonville, Florida. And two days later, the company’s senior vice president of security and services quit her job.

A British security agency is also investigating the Chinese POS device manufacturer.

Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reported  that the FBI raid was not only linked to the discovery of “unusual network packets” from the company’s terminals, but to reports that the PAX systems could be linked to cyberattacks, hacks, and illicit data collection on U.S. and European Union organizations.

Financial company FIS Worldpay, a Florida-based payment processing company, has for security reasons been forced to replace its PAX terminals with machines from American and French manufacturers. A FIS spokesman explained  that the reason FIS is replacing PAX terminals is because FIS “did not receive satisfactory answers from PAX regarding its POS devices connecting to websites not listed in their supplied documentation.”

The likely compromise of American and allied financial data by Chinese-manufactured POS credit card machines is the tip of the iceberg of vulnerability to China tech. Other China-linked companies, like Zoom, TikTok, and computer and cell phone manufacturers, have hundreds of millions of global users who are vulnerable to data loss to China.

Zoom was downloaded 485 million  times in 2020, and continues to have serious security issues. In 2020, the FBI issued  a security warning about Zoom, and the Department of Defense forbade its affiliates to use the video-conferencing application. Zoom’s encryption keys were available  to the Chinese regime, and its international meeting traffic routed through Chinese servers.

Small toy figures are displayed in front of a Zoom logo in this illustration taken on March 19, 2020. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)

Yet in 2020, 90,000  schools in 20 countries made the wrong decision and utilized Zoom. Skype and Google provide better video calls, but the Zoom craze has gone dangerously viral.

The high rate of usage among naive Zoom users, many of whom are children, is not due to lack of warning.

“Zoom was found to be sending unauthorised data to Facebook,” according to a recent article  in the Business of Apps. Its past hoarding of data and sub-standard encryption, identified by academic researchers, is well known. “Zoom saw itself banned by governments for official business (Canada and Taiwan), numerous organisations (SpaceX and Nasa) and school boards (New York and Taiwan),” according to the article.

As late as September 2021, Zoom software allowed  remote code execution, that is, hacking of user machines over the internet. Zoom supposedly found and fixed the vulnerability, which is why we know about it. But with a lagging track record on security over the years, which is often only fixed when Zoom is caught with its hand in the digital cookie jar, who knows what remains. Prudence should be the order of the day. Stop using Zoom.

TikTok is even closer to China, and was downloaded 850 million  times in 2020, and over three billion times overall. Twenty-eight percent of TikTok users are under the age of 18, and 59 percent are female. North America had 105 million users in 2020.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing.

Due to national security concerns, India banned the app in June 2020. Two months later, President Donald Trump signed  an executive order requiring either the divestment of Bytedance from TikTok, or an American purchase of the app. However, the Biden administration unwisely revoked the order.

In April, the Beijing regime doubled down by taking a 1 percent stake in a key Bytedance management company, and one of its three board seats, according to The Information .

In response , Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) rightly blasted the Biden administration, which he said “can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. Even before today, it was clear that TikTok represented a serious threat to personal privacy  and U.S. national security. Beijing’s aggressiveness makes clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the U.S. needs to treat it that way. President Biden must take immediate action to remove ByteDance and TikTok from the equation.”

Rubio rightly went beyond just a whack-a-mole approach. “We must also establish a framework of standards that must be met before a high-risk, foreign-based app is allowed to operate on American telecommunications networks and devices,” he said.

The problem is not only China-linked software, however, but also the American and allied dependence  on China’s manufacture of computers, tablets, and phones. Ninety percent of computers, and 70 percent of cell phones, are manufactured in China. All of this hardware, therefore, includes a higher level of security risk.

TikTok logos are seen on smartphones in front of a displayed ByteDance logo in a file illustration picture. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

The world’s electronic device manufacturing processes are largely controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which has proven to be unscrupulous in its pursuit of power. We tend to ignore the attendant perils for reasons of convenience and budget, but we do so at our own grave risk.

The U.S. Treasury Department has hinted that technology from China should be rejected because of the higher risk it entails.

“OCCIP encourages stakeholders in the U.S. financial system to adopt a risk-based approach to protecting the confidentiality of their customers’ data, the integrity of their networks, and the availability of their services,” the Treasury Department said in this month’s letter about the PAX investigation. “Banks and financial service providers should apply this risk-based approach to their supply chains.”

While such warnings are welcome, they are entirely insufficient. We need laws and executive orders that mandate and provide for a fully secure technological environment for America and our allies. Our information security depends upon U.S. and allied control and protection of all information technology, from seed investment, to ownership, hardware manufacture, and the writing and operation of software that gives life to our networks. Nothing else will do.

It is unconscionable that U.S. and allied governments continue in their failure to protect our democratic communities from unscrupulous China-linked technology manufactures, including software like TikTok and hardware like computers, phones, and credit card machines, at the expense of American and allied privacy, workers, and the diversity of our industrial ecosystems, and those of our allies.

Our democratic governments must get smart fast, or the loss to China will be irreversible, and ultimately entail the loss of democracy itself.

Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. He authored “The Concentration of Power” (forthcoming in 2021) and “No Trespassing,” and edited “Great Powers, Grand Strategies.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/no-more-china-tech-57-million-credit-card-machines-likely-compromised_4090346.html

The Other Epidemic: Chinese Spies and Academic Espionage

Students walk through Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, on March 14, 2018. (Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

The Other Epidemic: Chinese Spies and Academic Espionage

John Mac Ghlionn

November 11, 2021; Updated November 12, 2021

Commentary

There is a genuine fear that Chinese spies  are monitoring a number of British universities’ online seminars.

These spies are monitoring lectures and debates, according to Mark McLaughlin, a contributor to The Times UK . Any individuals who dare to discuss “censored political content” find themselves the target of Beijing-approved operatives.

Many Chinese students, unable to travel to Britain because of pandemic-related travel restrictions, are left with little option but to log into lectures “using virtual private networks (VPNs) run by Alibaba,” wrote McLaughlin. Alibaba has close ties  to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Considering China  is engaged in a new cold war with the United States, Beijing’s desire to monitor conversations, especially those of highly sensitive, geopolitical nature, makes sense. With a genocidal campaign occurring in Xinjiang and citizens of Tibet being terrorized , one cannot discuss politics and human rights without discussing China.

But such discussions, especially for Chinese citizens, come with significant costs. The CCP monitors every one of its citizens  very closely, whether they happen to be at home or abroad . Worryingly, Britain appears to be particularly vulnerable to Chinese interference. British universities, including Cambridge, one of the most prestigious educational institutes in the world, appear to be particularly vulnerable.

As Spectator UK’s Ian Williams recently warned , Huawei, yet another company with close ties to the CCP , exerts a nefarious influence over the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management. Three out of four directors of the center, we’re told, “have ties to the telecoms giant,” which means they have ties  to the CCP. The center’s chief representative, as Williams noted, “is a former vice-president of the company who has been paid by the Chinese government.” Furthermore, an honorary fellow of the center is the author of a book that praises “Huawei’s ability to transform the intellectual elite into a band of soldiers with the same set of values and resolve.” To call Cambridge compromised is to utter an understatement of epic proportions.

The logo of Chinese company Huawei is seen at its main UK offices in London on Jan. 28, 2020. (Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2018, Cambridge University signed a £200 million (about $267 million) joint venture  to develop a science park with TusPark, or Tsinghua University Science Park. Again, the CCP and Tsinghua are intimately linked —when officials at Cambridge agreed to the deal, they effectively signed a deal with the CCP.

The science park, according to its website , has transformed Cambridge “from a market town with a world-class university to one of the leading technology hotspots in the world.” The 152-acre site is home to more than 130 different businesses, including “spin-outs from the University of Cambridge to multinational companies seeking access to the brightest graduates and entrepreneurs from Cambridge’s diverse talent pool.” Many of the diversely talented “are working on potentially life changing technologies from personalised medicines and non-invasive cancer diagnostics to artificial intelligence, IoT, defense and connectivity—to name just a few.”

In other words, they are working on vital technology that will serve the CCP.

Of course, British universities aren’t the only ones at risk. In the United States, fears of academic espionage  are very much warranted.

In the first week of September, more than 170 professors at Stanford University from 40 different departments signed an open letter  to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the widely-circulated letter, the academics requested Garland to terminate the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, initially introduced by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The objective of the initiative, launched in 2018, was simple: to combat academic espionage, intellectual property theft, and other serious threats associated with Beijing. Although the professors’ calls are somewhat understandable (after all, if someone is indeed innocent and finds themselves accused of spying on behalf of Beijing, their career is effectively over, even if their name is eventually cleared), the China Initiative is still necessary.

According to The Cipher Brief , Beijing still relies on scholars and researchers to act as spies. When it comes to espionage, universities—so consumed by the idea of equity, inclusion, and race awareness—are easy prey. The authors at The Cipher Brief warned that the CCP still identifies “universities and institutions of higher learning as vulnerable entry points to gaining access to sensitive data.”

In the aforementioned letter, the professors argued “that the China Initiative has deviated significantly from its claimed mission: it is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.” So concerned by the idea of “xenophobia,” they believe that the China Initiative should be scrapped. “Replace it with an appropriate response that avoids the flaws of this initiative,” they suggested.

Again, although the professors’ concerns are understandable, the China Initiative needn’t be scrapped. Investigations should still be carried out, but with far more care. CCP-backed espionage and intellectual property theft are still occurring . This is what the CCP does; it lies  and steals, doing whatever is needed to gain an advantage . As Cambridge so clearly demonstrates, if you give Beijing an inch, it will take a mile.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. His work has been published by the likes of the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, The Spectator US, and other respectable outlets. He is also a psychosocial specialist, with a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-other-epidemic-chinese-spies-and-academic-espionage_4095082.html

What Hath the CCP Wrought? Part 1

Then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping toast during a state luncheon for China in Washington on Sept. 25, 2015. (Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images)

CCP Appeasement Is a Fool’s Errand

Part 1 of the 2-part series: What Hath the CCP Wrought?

Stu Cvrk

November 8, 2021;  Updated November 15, 2021

Commentary

America’s China policy objectives have been flawed for decades, resulting in the ascendancy of a hyper-aggressive Chinese regime.

Have the objectives of U.S. policymakers over the years with respect to China been achieved? Is the Chinese regime more democratic and less belligerent, as so-called “China hands” have argued would be “inevitable” as they pushed free trade, massive Western investments in China, and appeasement policies since the 1970s? Is there less intimidation of China’s neighbors now than there was during the Mao Zedong era? Is China more democratic—by Western definition?

Appeasement  of the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) has had disastrous results. Let us examine some of the consequences.

Background

The U.S. relationship with China has flipped several times over the last hundred years:

- Pro-China before and during World War 2.

- Adversarial after the CCP took control of the Chinese government in 1949.

- Wartime enemies during the Korean War.

- Back to adversarial and a virtual quarantine of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after 1952.

- The surprise “opening” of the PRC to the international system by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1971-1972; and subsequent U.S. and Western appeasement of the PRC in the misguided belief that aggressive CCP behavior could be curtailed or at least lessened over time.

- The Trump administration’s efforts to return to a more adversarial posture with the realization that the appeasement efforts pushed by the U.S. political elite and multinational corporations had failed to curtail rogue CCP behavior. More on that last part later in this article.

When was the CCP’s real animus against the United States truly ignited? It could be argued that the ideological chasm between the communist Chinese and freedom-loving Americans virtually guaranteed an adversarial relationship, but the Korean War certainly fanned the flames. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fought the U.S.-led United Nations coalition to a standstill until the Armistice was signed at Panmunjom in 1953. According to estimates , about 180,000 Chinese were killed (these are PRC numbers; other estimates were as high as 500,000 killed in action), as opposed to 36,000 Americans killed in action, 227,000 South Koreans, and about 3,700 from other U.N. countries. Total Chinese and North Korean casualties  (killed in action, wounded, missing, prisoners) were estimated at 1.5 million, with two-thirds of those being Chinese.

A column of troops and armor of the U.S. 1st Marine Division move through communist Chinese lines during their successful breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea during the Korean War. (Cpl. Peter McDonald, U.S. Marine Corps)

While the CCP leadership has never been shy about sacrificing its people to achieve the “glorious goals of communism” over the years, nevertheless, suffering 900,000 casualties in a stalemated war on their periphery had to have left a lasting effect on Mao Zedong and the CCP leadership’s psyche. It could be argued that the Chinese plan for world domination began in earnest after the Korean War.

The CCP, if nothing else, retains grudges and long-term animosity for its perceived enemies. It plays the long game , especially against its adversaries.

A major milestone in that long game occurred when Mao allowed Nixon and Kissinger to “open China” through secret negotiations in 1971 and ultimately granted a state visit to Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War in 1972. This began the Chinese manipulation of the U.S. political class, which continues to this very day. The U.S. political class was convinced that China could be peacefully brought into the global system through open trade policies and access to world markets and Western technology.

In 1979, China was granted temporary Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) status, which has been extended continuously to the present day. This was a boon to the Chinese economy, giving China a favored trade status and direct access to the U.S. economy. China was eventually brought into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, as a crowning achievement by the “China hands”—acolytes of Kissinger who facilitated China’s rise, while feathering their own nests through CCP sinecures, awards, and bribes.

Observers might wonder when China will have transitioned from a “developing country” to a “developed nation.” After all, China is now “the world’s largest producer of over 220 types of industrial products, including vehicles and computers,” as touted by Beijing’s mouthpiece People’s Daily . But those are certainly not the only “unexpected effects” of the United States’ China policy from 1972 through the present.

The Results

Economic:  Through Western investment and CCP theft of technology and intellectual property, China has become a manufacturing powerhouse and the number two economy in the world. Modernizing China included the implementation of “free trade” policies and the off-shoring of U.S. manufacturing facilities to the mainland. These policies helped create the “Rust Belt” in the Upper Midwest of the United States.

One dire consequence was the offshoring of virtually the entire U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain to China—a fact made abundantly clear during the spread of COVID-19 over the past 20 months. The Biden administration has come to realize the threat posed by Chinese control of critical supply chains, as noted in Executive Order 19017, America’s Supply Chains .

The U.S. Congress and various think tanks are also examining ways to decouple from China in order to protect U.S. technology and intellectual property, and also address Chinese mercantilist practices by state-owned enterprises that are heavily subsidized by Beijing. The continuing Chinese economic espionage and theft of intellectual property and technology was previously discussed here . None of these CCP practices will be stopped without concrete actions taken by the United States and other nations.

Military:  The Chinese regime is pursuing a policy of massive military militarization. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has achieved several important milestones in recent months, several of which have shocked Western observers:

- The PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) is on the brink of a breakout in nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles with the discovery of 350 new missile silos under construction in Inner Mongolia . A harbinger: China is not bound by strategic arms limitation treaties as are Russia and the United States.

- Two tests of what could lead to the world’s first Hypersonic Glide Vehicle/Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (HGV/FOBS)  were recently completed this fall. Note: The DF-17 Dongfeng medium-range ballistic missile system entered PLARF service in September 2019.

- The first launch of a carrier-based variant of the Chinese FC-31 stealth fighter was conducted last month , which looks remarkably similar to the U.S. F-35 stealth fighter.

- The recent launch of a Chinese satellite with potential dual-use capabilities : space debris mitigation (for public consumption) and anti-satellite applications (for military use). It should be noted that China had virtually no satellite launch capabilities until the late 1990s after “tech transfer,” which was authorized by the Clinton administration . China is now launching prestige space missions to Mars and the Moon with great fanfare.

- The PLA Navy (PLAN) now possesses more ships  than the U.S. Navy, with the PLAN shipbuilding expected to continue at a rapid pace for years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Defense.

- Commercial SAR imagery indicates that the third PLAN aircraft carrier is now under construction near Shanghai, the Type-003, which is equivalent in size  to the U.S. Ford-class nuclear aircraft carrier.

A Long March-5 rocket, carrying an orbiter, lander, and rover as part of the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars, lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Center in southern China’s Hainan Province on July 23, 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

Geopolitical:  Chinese aggressiveness on the world scene has increased dramatically under Xi Jinping. Some examples include the following:

- The continued exploitation of debt trap diplomacy  through under the auspices of the Belt and Road Initiative.

- Genocide  through the use of concentration camps and slave labor in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) continues.

- Increased PLA Air Force intimidation of Taiwan  in recent months.

- Increased intimidation of India: PLA troops deployed to Anyi Airbase in Tajikistan ; new PCL-161 and PCL-181 self-propelled howitzer systems, and PHL-03 multiple launch rocket system deployed by the PLA to the India-China border.

- Implementation of a new national security law in Hong Kong, which violates CCP promises  of “autonomy for 50 years” in a “one country, two systems” arrangement.

- Corruption of United Nations agencies, particularly the World Health Organization.

- Xi’s non-attendance at the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties ( COP26 ) to avoid questions about Chinese coal production and pollution, while simultaneously and cynically (and hypocritically) pushing “technical solutions”  to achieve the conference’s climate goals.

Conclusion

U.S. policy with respect to China since 1972 has been a dismal failure–from the U.S. point of view. The objective of integrating China into the world economy has unleashed CCP mercantilism and debt trap diplomacy on the world, as opposed to the democratization and softening of the Chinese regime’s aggression. The CCP would almost certainly consider U.S. policy to have been an unexpected gift that propelled it to the precipice of overtaking the United States in economic, military, and geopolitical affairs. However, the most impactful result of that failed U.S. policy has been the corruption of the U.S. political class, which has made the Chinese regime’s ascendancy a reality. That disastrous result will be described in Part 2  of this two-part series.

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ccp-appeasement-is-a-fools-errand_4089181.html

What Hath the CCP Wrought? Part 2

Chinese leader Xi Jinping shakes hands with then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Dec. 4, 2013. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

CCP Successes Are American Failures: Beijing Infiltrates the US Political Class

Part 2 of the 2-part series: What Hath the CCP Wrought?

Stu Cvrk

November 15, 2021;  Updated November 16, 2021

Commentary

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attempted to reinforce the legitimacy of the People’s Republic of China  (PRC) during a speech on Oct. 25 to commemorate the PRC’s admission to the United Nations 50 years ago.

This is the second of two articles examining the deleterious effects of Western—and particularly U.S.—appeasement of the PRC since the Nixon-Kissinger trip to Shanghai that “opened China” in February 1972 . Part 1  focuses on economic, military, and geopolitical results. Part 2 examines Beijing’s infiltration and influence among the U.S. political class.

Background

Despite the increasing belligerence of the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) since Xi came to power in 2012, as well as increasing evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, accommodationists and appeasers in the United States and elsewhere are adamant about a return to “business as usual” with the Chinese communists (ChiComs).

Can the Biden administration keep its fingers in the dike and maintain Trump-era tariffs and other measures intended to protect the United States against predatory CCP practices? Or will it succumb to the pressures of U.S. business interests, globalists, and the CCP, and return to status quo ante  2017? Me thinks the CCP will get that for which it has paid, for the U.S. political class is in China’s sphere of influence.

It could easily be argued that a tougher and more clear-headed U.S. policy aimed at the Chinese regime—one that embraced the reality that the CCP cannot be changed by peaceful means or that communist China cannot be magically integrated with the world economy—would have precluded much, if not most, of those destructive results from happening. Certainly, the world’s collective response to CCP aggression over the past several decades would have been much stronger under decisive U.S. leadership.

But that was not to be, as the CCP began priming the pump with a few strategic investments in the U.S. political class for which the ChiComs have received massive benefits over the past 50 years.

The bribery costs to the CCP over time have been minuscule compared to the benefits gained, for the ChiComs are now using our  money (a trade surplus monthly record with the United States  in October and billions of dollars of foreign direct investments in China), our  intellectual property ( economic espionage ), and our  markets ( access without strings attached ) to achieve their world domination goals .

China’s Infiltration of the US Political Class Begins

The corrosive effect of the CCP’s corruption of the U.S. political class since 1972 is perhaps even more important than the economic, military, and geopolitical results summarized in Part 1  of this series, for that corruption enabled all  of those pernicious results.

Chinese political manipulation of U.S. politicians began with former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the case of these two, the leverage was giving them diplomatic prestige for spearheading the rapprochement with China—which was quite a shock to most Americans at the time, who were generally hostile to communists of any variety.

The Chinese were to learn in the coming years that much more effective leverage could be used to achieve their ends in the United States: bribery and the use of all manner of bought-and-paid-for influence agents within the U.S. political class. The ChiComs really understood this leverage.

President Richard Nixon toasts with Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing during Nixon’s official visit to China in 1972. (AFP/Getty Images)

‘Chinagate’

The year 1996 was a good example of CCP influence in the American political system.

Beijing allegedly invested nearly $100 million to pay for direct and indirect influence in the 1996 presidential and congressional elections, according to intelligence community estimates at the time.

From a 2015 report : “Chinagate aka Commercegate is the most serious scandal in U.S. history. It involves the transfer of America’s most sensitive technology, including but not limited to nuclear missile and satellite technology, possibly in exchange for millions of dollars in contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort and the Democratic National Committee.”

Besides money allegedly funneled to President Bill Clinton’s campaign by Chinese-American bundlers, some of the money also went via cut-outs to the campaigns of chairmen of key committees in Congress that affected U.S. policies with China.

One key result was that U.S. Commerce Department export rules were loosened to allow the exportation of key U.S. technologies that fueled the modernization of the Chinese military during the 1990s and beyond, as mentioned in Part I  of this series.

Beijing’s investments in U.S. politicians always come with strings attached. Here is a short list of what China received under the Clinton administration:

- A “ strategic partnership ” that set the tone for various technology transfers to China.

- The loss of American manufacturing jobs  that were transferred to China as a result of Executive Order 12850, which removed Most-Favored-Nation status reviews from Congress to the White House.

- Advanced missile technology transfers  that destroyed the U.S. strategic advantage.

- A satellite launch waiver  that allowed China to launch a Loral Space and Communications satellite, ultimately giving away missile and satellite technology to the ChiComs that led to near-parity with the United States in a single generation.

Lucrative Business Ties With China

Below are a few noteworthy examples of politicians (and their families) who have private business interests in China:

- Senator Dianne Feinstein  (D-Calif.): Second most powerful woman in Congress and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Her husband, Richard Blum, has lucrative business ties  with China. In August, details surfaced about Feinstein’s long-time driver/aide/office manager, who was suspected of being a Chinese spy.

- Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): The Democrat Speaker of the House. Her husband Paul has had long-time  multi-million dollar business dealings with the Chinese .

- Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): The Senate Minority Leader and married to Elaine Chao (former Transportation Secretary under the Trump administration). Both are soft on China . The Transportation Department Inspector General refused to investigate Secretary Chao for ethics concerns  about her favoritism to her relatives’ businesses in China.

- John Kerry: Biden’s “Climate Czar” and former Democrat presidential candidate. Kerry invested $1 million in a Chinese private equity firm, which has “invested in a tech company blacklisted for human rights abuses but is also a major shareholder in a solar panel company linked to labor abuses of the Uyghurs ,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.

- Hunter Biden (Biden’s son) and Chris Heinz (Kerry’s stepson): These sons of top Democrats inked a deal through the Bank of China  for a billion-dollar joint investment venture in 2013. Was the CCP buying influence from their fathers?

- Kamala Harris (D-Calif.): The Vice President of the United States. Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff, is a senior partner at DLA Piper , which has extensive dealings with China.

Biden Giveaways to China

An astonishing number of Biden’s political appointees have been compromised through past ties with the Chinese regime, as summarized here . Given his selection of pro-Beijing appointees, is Biden a “patsy” of the CCP, as suggested here ? Is Beijing receiving direct payback for its “investments”? The CCP is reaping an incredible reward for decades of infiltrating the U.S. political class, with the giveaways by the Biden administration perhaps being the icing on the cake.

The giveaways include some of the following:

- Kowtowing to CCP hostage diplomacy  in the release of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou.

- Cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline (playing into Chinese growing green industry).

- Facilitating the Chinese regime’s involvement in the U.S. power grid.

- Continuing public support for the failed ‘one-China’ policy.

- Appointment of a pro-China ambassador to the United Nations.

- Revocation of a ban on CCP propaganda in U.S. universities.

- Calling CCP genocide a “ cultural norm. ”

- Using a CCP sympathizer to oversee the review of Trump-era China policies.

- Dropping prosecutions of Chinese nationals accused of espionage.

- Giving the CCP a pass on the origins of COVID-19 through a politicized report from the U.S. intel community.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping virtually addresses the 76th Session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 21, 2021. (Spencer Platt/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Those modest investments by the CCP have been paid back in spades. No wonder the Chinese regime still enjoys “ a permanent most-favored-nation trade status ” with the United States. No wonder the U.S. Commerce Department’s Commerce Control List  has been watered down to enable the Chinese shopping spree of cutting-edge dual-use technologies. No wonder the Biden administration responses to Uyghur genocide, the absorption of Hong Kong, and the intimidation of Taiwan and other nations on China’s periphery have been so tepid. And all of this while the Chinese military is constructing silhouettes in the sand of U.S. Navy ships for target practice  in the Ruoqiang region in central China. Are the U.S. actions to date a repeat of Joseph Stalin’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler right up until the day that the German Army invaded Russia in June 1941?

Conclusion

This two-part series examined the economic, military, and geopolitical benefits that have accrued to the CCP in the decades since China was “opened” to the United States and the international system in 1972. While the original intent of that misguided policy was to have persuaded the Chinese regime to mitigate its belligerence and hostility, and to become more democratic and responsive to the Chinese people and others over time, the result has been virtually the opposite. The policy was naive from the beginning and nothing more than a green light that generated increasingly one-sided demands from the CCP, culminating in the bellicose pronouncements of Xi Jinping, wolf warrior Chinese diplomats, and state-run Chinese media over the last eight years.

Along the way, the appeasers among the U.S. political class gained careers, wealth, and fame; while the Chinese regime became the second-largest economy in the world, produced the world’s largest navy, continued the practice of genocide on domestic minority groups, intimidated its neighbors, exploited COVID-19 for economic gain, and developed a space exploration capability where none had previously existed—all through bribery, coerced tech transfer, mercantilism, and espionage. These are hardly the actions of a peaceful and democratic member of the world’s family of nations.

Read Part 1 here .

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ccp-successes-are-american-failures-beijing-infiltrates-the-us-political-class_4094737.html

The CCP’s Infiltration and Threat

Chinese soldiers march past Tiananmen Square before a military parade on September 3, 2015 in Beijing, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The CCP’s Infiltration and Threat

Anders Corr

November 18, 2021

Commentary

The American promise, which includes representative democracy, liberty, equality, and other rights found in the Constitution, is under threat—most seriously by the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ).

The CCP controls the world’s largest economy by gross domestic product (GDP) when considering the purchasing power that China’s GDP buys. The CCP controls a military  twice the size of the U.S. military by number of troops and is by certain measures, including supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and hypersonic missiles, more advanced than the United States in terms of military technology.

Diplomatically, China can muster more votes in the United Nations General Assembly than can the United States and its allies, on issues such as human rights for the Uyghurs or development economics. Beijing achieves this kind of political and economic influence primarily through monetary incentives, including development financing for entire countries, or targeted infusions of contracts and cash to powerful companies and influential individuals. The CCP engages in these forms of corruption, some of which are legal and others not, in the United States as well. This essay focuses on how the CCP infiltrates the United States, the threat this poses, and potential solutions that citizens can advocate.

Infiltration

In the United States, the CCP infiltrates economic, political, academic, and media elites in much the same manner that it attempts to do so in other countries.

Beijing chooses America’s most powerful economic interests and offers them privileged and highly lucrative access to Chinese markets, which consist of 1.4 billion people and a nominal GDP of $14.72 trillion in 2020. These companies include America’s biggest corporate names, including Apple, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan.

Because these corporations make so much money in China, and because their China revenue could be cut off at any minute by the CCP, they are incentivized to comply with CCP wishes. They know that non-compliance could zero-out their China revenues, destroy their profitability, and tank their stock price. At times, the CCP seeks to use its influence in these big corporations to get board seats for CCP members. Sometimes they have no need for this, when existing board members, including U.S. citizens, know the rules of the game: Deliver for the CCP, or lose your company’s profitability and your leadership position in the process.

The CCP typically infiltrates political elites by delivering revenues through campaign donations, consulting agreements, or as direct bribes. These revenues are almost always delivered by middlemen, whether they be large corporations that manufacture in China, billionaires whose enterprises do extensive business in China, or nonprofit organizations with Chinese revenue streams.

U.S. billionaires linked to business in China, including Stephen Schwarzman, Larry Fink, and Michael Bloomberg, have been some of the most effective conduits of Chinese influence at elite political levels in both parties. But the CCP also attempts to access politicians through their family members, for example, business with both the Trump and Biden families.

Academia, the mainstream media, and think tanks, all of which are at elite levels of knowledge production, and which together are largely self-referential and exclusive of alternate viewpoints and sources, have one thing in common: corporate funding. Substantial amounts of this corporate funding come from businesses that are reliant on trade with China to maintain their profitability, and thus their stock valuations. Academia is particularly reliant on direct business from China, in the form of tuition from Chinese nationals, which for state schools is in the form of much-needed and highly lucrative out-of-state fees.

Threat

The threat of CCP infiltration in the United States is multiple and global. It is global because the United States is the only country in the world with a military capable of containing or defeating China’s People’s Liberation Army. Once the U.S. military is defeated or neutralized, including through infiltration, Beijing will very quickly become globally hegemonic.

The United States, along with Europe, is one of only two regions in the world capable of using economic tactics, such as sanctions, to force Beijing into becoming a responsible stakeholder in the international community. If the United States and Europe are neutralized through infiltration, they will be unable to stop China’s economic rise. With the CCP in control of China, China becomes the economic vehicle that the CCP rides to global hegemony.

Solutions

There are multiple overlapping solutions to Beijing’s infiltration of the United States. The most effective solution is to firewall off the economic means by which the CCP accomplishes such infiltration.

First, economic decoupling from China will weaken Beijing’s economic power through fewer trade and investment opportunities. It also cuts off the conduits upon which Beijing relies for political, economic, and ideological influence.

If Apple and Boeing aren’t manufacturing planes and iPhones in China, and not selling to China, then Beijing can’t use market access to compel these U.S. companies to influence U.S. politics in a manner that paralyzes our military and economic defenses against the CCP. Sure, these companies initially make less money selling to China, but they can divert their sales and manufacturing to U.S. communities and allies, strengthening the United States and its allies in the process. More manufacturing jobs in the United States means higher wages, more government revenues, a deeper and more diversified industrial ecosystem, and ultimately a militarily and economically stronger United States, relative to China, than previously.

Second, firewalling politics from the influence of money makes it impossible for Beijing to use the many corporate conduits of influence, including U.S. corporations, to paralyze U.S. defenses against the CCP. This would mean new laws, and strengthened laws, to end the revolving door between high government positions and the lobbying, think tank, and corporate job positions that provide outsized incomes in a quid pro quo for political influence when a candidate is in office. It would mean laws against China-linked corporations funding think tanks and universities that are then economically incentivized to support soft-on-China analysis and advocacy.

Third, firewalling the media from China-linked funding—especially, for example, direct Chinese state media advertising—would remove a means of influence over editorial and publisher decision making. The take-home profits of shareholders in a media company are directly linked to advertising, and if that advertising is from CCP organizations such as China’s state media, then a conduit is opened to influence publishers and editorial decisions, not to mention the advertising itself, which is often in the form of large inserts geared to appear as if they are legitimate news reporting when, in fact, they are CCP propaganda.

The key to ending CCP infiltration of the United States, and of any country, is to cut off the means that Beijing uses for such infiltration: money. America’s promise is in its ideas of liberty, freedom, equality, and property, all of which are interrelated—and which handily beat Beijing’s own communist ideology that is based on control of the many by the few.

To remain strong and robust, American values must be protected from the erosion of the CCP’s growing economic power, which can destroy our values where human willpower is weak. Where that weakness is found among American elites, and it often is, there America’s promise is most at risk.

Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. He authored “The Concentration of Power” (forthcoming in 2021) and “No Trespassing,” and edited “Great Powers, Grand Strategies.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-ccps-infiltration-and-threat_4088370.html

Beijing Exploits UN System

Flags outside the United Nations headquarters in New York on May 20, 2021. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

Beijing Exploits UN System

Increasing illiberal influence globally through small donations

Anders Corr

November 20, 2021

News Analysis

Beijing  expertly leverages international organizations to maximize the regime’s growing influence, according to a new study . The regime’s financial contributions to these organizations are small, segregated, and targeted for maximum advantage.

Yet the Beijing regime seeks to portray itself as a responsible member of the international community. Even as it commits multiple genocides, according to the U.N. definition, and threatens war against the United States and allies, Beijing exploits democratic voting structures in international organizations while denying those structures to its own citizens.

Analysis of a new report released by the Center for Global Development (CGD) reveals that China’s contributions are tightly controlled, segregated from dilution by the far larger and less strategic donations of global democracies, and leveraged for maximum advantage to itself, rather than to the broader goals of the international community.

While the U.N. system supposedly seeks to promote human rights and democracy, Beijing instead uses it to deny sovereignty to democratic Taiwan, along with other illiberal goals under cover of “peace and development.”

Peace for Beijing means continuing human rights abuse and the taking of territory from its neighbors without provoking self-defense by the world’s democracies. Development means increasing China’s own economic power, especially at the expense of its major geopolitical competitors, the United States, Europe, Japan, and India.

As noted by the CGD authors, China “has become a top donor to multilateral institutions and funds devoted to infrastructure and agriculture but its contributions to funds focused on public goods like climate and global health remain disproportionately low.”

China is the world’s second-largest economy, but typically ranks between 10th and 30th in funding of multilateral institutions. Beijing has an increasing voting share in these organizations, but it often earmarks contributions to allow the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) to use its “donations” and loans for global influence operations or export goals.

“Chinese firms, many of which are particularly competitive in high value infrastructure sectors, have been particularly successful in MDB [multilateral development bank] procurements,” according to Scott Morris, Rowan Rockafellow, and Sarah Rose, who co-authored the report.

CCP leader Xi Jinping’s 2015 creation of the $3 billion South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund engages with multilateral actors to implement the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal agenda. But between 2013 and 2018, 91 percent of its completed projects were in public and economic infrastructure, from which Beijing benefits because of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that exports China’s excess industrial production.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin attend a summit for the Belt and Road Initiative, at the International Conference Center in Yanqi Lake, north of Beijing, on May 15, 2017. (Lintao Zhang/AFP/Getty Images)

China’s polluting and subsidized iron, steel, and prefabricated building industries are overproducing, and the United Nations, in contradiction to its own Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is there to help the Beijing regime find more markets.

In 2017, China’s Ministry of Finance signed an agreement with five multilateral development banks to promote connectivity and infrastructure, which suits its attempts to control the rollout of the 5G infrastructure Beijing uses for espionage.

Instead of pledging donations of COVID-19 vaccines to the international COVAX access facility, as have many countries in addition to their financial contributions, Chinese pharmaceutical companies have benefited from COVAX agreements to buy 550 million vaccines from China through mid-2022. This, despite the CCP’s culpability in the initial spread of COVID-19 due to its initial cover-up of the Wuhan outbreak in 2019, and the lackluster effectiveness of Chinese-made vaccines compared to their Western counterparts.

On balance, China benefited disproportionately through multilateral engagement compared to its financial contributions, despite it being the world’s second-largest economy. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), for example, has committed $43.3 billion to developing China, but Beijing only co-financed ADB projects worth $6.1 billion (plus capital subscriptions of approximately $9.85  billion).

The U.N. Development Program (UNDP) assisted China in its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, which facilitated its economic explosion and military modernization. The UNDP in 2010 also supported Beijing’s South-South “cooperation,” which facilitates the CCP’s dominance of votes at the U.N. General Assembly. In 2016, the UNDP supported BRI, which promotes China’s exports and attempts at controlling ports that serve Beijing’s global naval expansion.

Given the regime’s ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong, as well as its increasing military belligerence against democracies, anyone who supports democracy and human rights should take a stand against Beijing’s leveraging of the world’s international organizations for its own benefit.

To put an end to the regime’s global malign influence, the leading entities in the international system, including the United States, European Union, Japan, and India, should end their complicity in allowing Beijing a seat at the international table.

What used to be a friendly gesture of inclusion and engagement of China is now an unacceptable complicity in allowing the Beijing regime to take advantage of democratic international institutions for malign purposes and against democratic values.

Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. He authored “The Concentration of Power” (forthcoming in 2021) and “No Trespassing,” and edited “Great Powers, Grand Strategies.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijing-exploits-un-system_4113902.html

Chinese Military Improves Capabilities While America Sleeps

Chinese J-20 stealth fighters perform at the Airshow China 2018 in Zhuhai, south China’s Guangdong Province on Nov. 6, 2018. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)

Chinese Military Improves Capabilities While America Sleeps

Stu Cvrk

November 25, 2021

News Analysis

China’s People’s Liberation Army ( PLA ) is undergoing a massive buildup in capabilities while the world is distracted.

The PLA has embarked on a massive buildup in recent years that has been cleverly camouflaged by the pandemic, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) charm offensive on the diplomatic front, and the supposed “benevolence” of the Belt and Road Initiative .

The goal is to become the world’s dominant military power in all facets of kinetic warfare by 2049, the centenary anniversary of the CCP’s takeover of China and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). A key element of their misdirection campaign, while this modernization effort has been underway, has been fomenting domestic political discord in the United States by supporting activist organizations such as Black Lives Matter  and exploiting the legacy and social media sympathetic to China.

While many Americans have been purposely distracted accordingly, major advances in capabilities have been made by the PLA on all fronts.

Here is a short list based on recent media reports:

Hypersonic Missiles:  The general officer in charge of the U.S. Space Force admitted on Nov. 20  that the United States was “behind” China and Russia in the deployment of hypersonic missiles .

In 2019, the PLA-Rocket Force (PLARF) was the first to deploy the Dongfeng-17 (DF-17) medium-range ballistic missile, which mounts the DF-ZF Hypersonic Glide Vehicle, after displaying it for the first time last fall in Beijing, marking the 70th anniversary of the Communist Party’s rule.

“The DF-17 is the first deployed hypersonic strike weapon for the PLA and can travel at speeds of more than 7,000 miles per hour—enough to outrun current U.S. anti-missile interceptors,” according to The Washington Times .

This new class of missiles greatly decreases defensive reaction times, and the ability to detect pre-launch actions is complicated, as the weapons do not require easily detected launch preparations, which complicates the tactical decision-making thought process of commanders.

The Chinese have also built silhouettes in the sand in the shape of an American aircraft carrier and Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers in the Taklamakan desert, as part of a new target range complex  for long-range missile practice—a very aggressive preparation for potential future hostilities.

A satellite picture shows a carrier target in Ruoqiang, Xinjiang, China, on Oct. 20, 2021. (Satellite Image ©2021 Maxar Technologies/Handout via Reuters)

Nuclear Weapons:  There has been a disciplined, decades-long campaign by the CCP to rapidly acquire, re-engineer, and integrate nuclear weapons  technologies into an array of sophisticated weapons, missiles, surveillance systems, communications, and command and control capabilities. This culminated in the breakout deployment in Inner Mongolia  of an estimated 300 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos.

As reported  by the Financial Times just last week, U.S. experts in the Pentagon are forecasting that the PLARF will quadruple its nuclear warhead arsenal to over 1,000 by 2030, which, combined with a massive buildup of conventional warfare capabilities, will change the strategic balance in East and South Asia. The deployment of road-mobile Dongfeng-26 (DF-26) intermediate-range ballistic missiles also continues apace.

The transformation of China’s strategic rocket force from an antiquated mixture of older Soviet technology, plus indigenous modifications into a modern capability that is nearing parity with the United States, is breathtaking both in its scope and also the rapidity in which it was accomplished.

Lastly, with the delivery of two new SSBNs over the past two years, the PLA-Navy (PLAN) now have six operational Jin -class Type 094 SSBNs, which gives the PRC a viable third leg of its nuclear triad.

Chinese military vehicles, carrying DF-26 ballistic missiles, drive past Tiananmen Square during a military parade in Beijing, China, on Sept. 3, 2015. (Andy Wong/Pool/Getty Images)

Ships:  In a single generation, the PLAN has developed capabilities that are direct challenges to the U.S. Navy, including overhead surveillance satellites, long-range hypersonic missiles, and modern ships and aircraft. The Chinese have recently eclipsed the U.S. Navy in the number of hulls available for naval missions.

According to a recently-released media summary  of a U.S. Department of Defense report on Chinese military capabilities, “The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has numerically the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 355 ships and submarines, including approximately more than 145 major surface combatants.”

A third PLAN aircraft carrier, the Type 003, is currently under construction near Shanghai; it is reportedly equivalent in size  to America’s new Ford-class nuclear aircraft carrier. A special-purpose ship  is also being built to support sea launch and recovery of rockets and space vehicles.

While most of the PLAN deployments are in areas close to the Chinese mainland, a growing number of operations are being conducted in distant waters, including the Western Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and Eastern Atlantic Ocean. The PLAN maintains an out-of-area naval base a in Djibouti and are also funding the construction of new sea ports at Gwadar, Pakistan, Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and— until recently —at Khalifa port in the United Arab Emirates.

Coast Guard and Maritime Militia:  China’s coast guard is the largest by far  of any country in East Asia and includes the 12,000-ton China Coast Guard (CCG) 3901 cutter No. 1123, which is the largest coast guard vessel in the world.

In February, in a sign of increasing Chinese belligerence on the high seas, Beijing “ released a draft law  that would empower the Chinese Coast Guard to use actual ‘military force’ against foreign vessels, and that could potentially be applied in disputes in the South China Sea,” according to The National Interest.

China also operates a sizable maritime militia that includes a large number of research and fishing vessels for the purposes of asserting and defending PRC maritime and territorial claims in the South China Sea and other near-seas regions.

According to a recent report  from the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “The militia as currently constituted in the South China Sea operates from a string of 10 ports in China’s Guangdong and Hainan Provinces. Remote sensing data indicates that roughly 300 militia vessels are operating in the Spratly Islands on any given day.”

Chinese coast guard and maritime militia units are also being deployed to “protect” Chinese fishing fleets in such locations as the Galapagos Islands  and Second Thomas Shoals  (the Philippines).

Aircraft:  The PLAAF is the third largest in the world , with over 2,800 total aircraft of which approximately 2,250 are combat aircraft and a continuing stream of regular capability upgrades.

The fifth-generation stealth J-20 fighter jet  has been deployed for years in significant numbers, with a “ maiden flight of the twin-seat variation ” conducted recently, according to state-run Global Times. Many experts consider the J-20 to be a copy  of the United State’s J-35 stealth fighter in terms of both stealth and conventional capabilities—with blueprints and other technology probably obtained illegally  from U.S. firms such as Honeywell.

A recent Pentagon annual report to Congress  discussed the extended range nuclear-capable H-6N bomber and stated, “The PLAAF publicly revealed the H-6N as its first nuclear-capable air-to-air refuelable bomber.”

Meanwhile, development continues on the new H-20 stealth bomber, which some consider to be a “B-2 copycat .” Conventional aircraft production and deployment continue as well. For example, the latest variant of the JH-7 fighter bomber, designated the JH-7A2, was demonstrated at a Chinese airshow  earlier this year. The upgrades include improvements to “its surface attack capability by becoming capable of carrying extra surface attack weapons including stand-off air-to-surface missiles, laser-guided bombs and munitions dispenser,” according to state-run Global Times.

If aircraft production and deployment continue at the current rate, the PLAAF could very well have the largest air force in the world by 2049—and certainly achieve China’s goal of deploying more stealth fighters than the United States by 2025 .

A Taiwanese Air Force F-16 in foreground flies on the flank of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) H-6 bomber as it passes near Taiwan on Feb. 10, 2020. (Republic of China Ministry of National Defense via AP)

Space:  From almost no space capability in the 1980s, the Chinese regime has borrowed and stolen  missile, satellite, command and control, telemetry, and surveillance technologies. These have been fused into a robust multi-purpose space capability consisting of navigation satellites (Beidou), a network of signals intelligence and imagery systems, a variety of redundant communications satellites, a newly-tested potential first-strike strategic suborbital-launched hypersonic glide vehicle capability , and an emerging anti-satellite capability that is approaching parity with U.S. capabilities.

Regarding the latter, China recently launched what it claims to be a “ classified space debris mitigation technology satellite .” While advertised as a capability for “peaceful use of space,” the reality is that the technology is dual-use and could be deployed as an anti-satellite capability. This is entirely consistent with China’s civil-military fusion strategy in which its defense industrial base and civilian technology development and industrial base are merged (and difficult to separate) in support of CCP strategic goals and objectives—with Chinese dominance of space being one such goal.

As further proof of that “ fusion ,” Defense One reported: “The infrastructure of China’s space program is also heavily militarized. The launch sites, control centers, and many of the satellites are directly run by the PLA .”

Lastly, the Chinese have also demonstrated a satellite precision tracking and maneuvering capability aimed at detecting a nearby U.S. satellite and maneuvering a Chinese satellite away.

Conclusion

While the rest of the world has been distracted, including by the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years, the Chinese PLA has been engaged in a massive modernization program aimed at eclipsing the United States as the world’s top military power by the PRC’s centenary celebration in 2049.

New aircraft, ships, missiles, satellites, weapons systems, command and control systems, and surveillance capabilities are being developed, produced, and deployed in great numbers at an astonishing rate. All of this modernization and development has been fueled by a misguided U.S. policy that amounts to appeasement of the Chinese regime.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment—with the able assistance of Henry Kissinger’s “China Hands” since communist China was “opened” in 1972—has facilitated the economic and military growth of the Chinese regime through misguided efforts that are theoretically aimed at “bringing a rogue nation into the international family of nations.” In other words, China had unfettered access to the international system, Western capital, technology, and markets. As if promoting Western values—for example, democracy, free enterprise, and the rule of law—has ever worked with a communist government! That policy has led to the dangerous emergence of a highly aggressive communist-led regime in Beijing that is increasingly asserting itself on the world scene—and is backed by the growing military might of the People’s Liberation Army.

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-military-improves-capabilities-while-america-sleeps_4119002.html

China’s Aggression Is Changing the Nature of Sovereignty

Warships and fighter jets of Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy take part in a military display in the South China Sea on April 12, 2018. (Reuters)

China’s Aggression Is Changing the Nature of Sovereignty

Kiribati in the Pacific Islands is an object lesson

Anders Corr

November 26, 2021

News Analysis

Kiribati  is dumping a 158,000-square-mile World Heritage marine reserve, the Pacific Islands Forum, and its friendship with Taiwan. Why? The archipelagic state is trading its sovereignty for Beijing’s fast cash.

The sovereignty of Kiribati, a nation of islands in the South Pacific between China  and the United States, is being submerged not principally by the waves of global warming, as many fear, but by Beijing’s illiberal influence. Unlike the storms on a rising sea that build islands by successive layers of sand, Beijing is capturing Kiribati with waves of cash.

The Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) will not willingly return what it takes through purchase. So the citizens of Kiribati, and the rest of the world, must get much tougher, much more quickly, if we are to defend Kiribati’s democracy and sovereignty. What applies to Kiribati, the canary in a coal mine, will eventually apply to the capitals of Europe and North America.

This article uses the case of Kiribati to argue for what to this author’s knowledge is a philosophical first: support for an autocracy that seeks hegemony should void a country’s sovereignty. A similar approach should be taken to physical persons and corporations: support for hegemonic autocracy should be illegal and have criminal consequences.

Anyone who sells out democracy should go to prison, and any country that does the same will, one way or another, lose its sovereignty. Kiribati is an object lesson in this sad trend of contemporary international relations.

As preparation for breaking this new philosophical ground, consider these facts in the case of Kiribati.

The Case of Kiribati

On Nov. 11, exclusive reporting  by 1News revealed documents that show the Kiribati government deregistering a World Heritage site that is a massive 158,000-square-mile marine reserve. The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) will now be exploited by not only illegal, but commercial, fishing.

China, which engages in massive amounts of illegal fishing globally, facilitated by fossil fuel subsidies of its fishing fleet, will likely benefit from not only the exploitation of the newly vulnerable and pristine fishing grounds, but from their military potential. China’s PLA Air Force (PLAAF) and Navy (PLAN) could in particular use Kiribati’s prime military basing because it is adjacent to U.S. waters, and strategically located midway between Australia and Hawaii.

According to documents obtained by 1News, Kiribati’s cabinet informed PIPA that it would be deregistered. That confidential communication came in late October, and was only revealed publicly when New Zealand’s 1News discovered it this month.

Alex Gray, former U.S. National Security Council chief of staff and an expert on the Pacific Islands, responded to the news by saying that “China is the world’s greatest ecological menace, from its devastating illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing around the world, to its consistent undermining of global norms that protect delicate ecosystems like Antarctica and the deep seabed. The U.S. and its partners must confront China’s attack on the ecology of the world’s most vulnerable places and not remain silent on this defining issue.”

As Gray previously noted in The Diplomat , Beijing’s influence in the Pacific Islands is not only ecological, but political. The regime is inclined “to exert leverage over these tiny islands,” he wrote.

According to the 1News report by Barbara Dreaver, “There’s deep concern that the move [to deregister the reserve] has been driven by China. PIPA is attractive to China not only for its fishing wealth but its strategically significant location near US military installations.”

Defense analyst Anna Powles at Massey University in New Zealand told 1News that “Kiribati has real strategic value to China if it could potentially develop some strategic infrastructure on Kanton Island which has commercial fishery usage but potential military usage as well.”

Kanton Island was previously a U.S. and British military base , just 1,600 miles southwest of Hawaii. The United States used the tiny island—then spelled Canton after an American whaling ship that wrecked on the atoll in 1854—as an emergency air base and anti-ballistic missile tracking station.

In Violating Kiribati’s Sovereignty, Beijing Breaks China’s Promise of 1948

The United States voluntarily relinquished its military base on Kiribati’s Kanton atoll due to American ideals of a world of independent sovereign democracies, found in part within the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights .

The writing of that declaration was led by the United States and involved close participation from participants of France, Canada, nationalist China, and Lebanon. The formal drafting eventually enlarged to include Australia, Chile, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. Nationalist China and the Soviet Union supported the declaration, which recognized democracy as a human right, arguably as part of the bargain that welcomed these autocracies into leadership positions of the international community.

Now Russia and communist China are going back on their word and rejecting this foundational United Nations document, on which other U.N. principles such as territorial integrity and non-interference that they sometimes support are predicated.

Beijing continues to grab the territory of its neighbors in Asia against international principles such as territorial integrity and exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and it flagrantly violates the 1948 declaration and international law against genocide.

Kiribati Would Make a Useful Chinese Military Base

On and around Kanton atoll and the other Pacific Islands, Beijing manifests its disregard for sovereignty through illegal fishing, the attempted bribing of entire democracies with millions of dollars in cash, and the use of Chinese funding for an upgraded airstrip that could be used by the PLAAF and PLAN as a convenient jumping-off spot for Hawaii.

The Chinese could use the Kiribati islands as it does its artificial islands in the South China Sea: as bases for missiles, bombers, jet fighters, submarines, and aircraft carriers. Kiribati extends China’s military reach uncomfortably close to Honolulu, which hosts the U.S. military headquarters for all of Asia.

A Navy sailors aboard the USS Halsey salute the USS Utah Memorial, in Honolulu on Dec. 7, 2016. (Marco Garcia/AP Photo)

For a few million dollars, Kiribati is thus cracking the status quo of superpower relations that kept the peace in the Pacific Islands since the last world war. The country is being penny wise and more than pound foolish, especially in its disrespect for democracy and turn toward China during Beijing’s practice of genocide, military aggression against neighbors Taiwan, India, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia, and Beijing’s growing hegemonic ambitions.

Notably, Kiribati spurned a 23-year friendship with Taiwan in 2019 in favor of Beijing. In exchange, it was promised a $66 million grant.

Does Kiribati really want to choose the wrong side of this new cold war that could well get hot?

Beijing’s Carrots and Sticks at Work in Kiribati

In a recent Diplomat article, Gray noted that “China succeeded in prompting Kiribati to switch its diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in a process that raised concerns about China’s undue interference in Kiribati’s political process.”

Countries that have supported Taiwan, like Palau, pay the price. Beijing uses its power over Chinese citizens to wield illegal fishing and tourism bans against countries that support Taiwan.

“Particularly vulnerable are Nauru, Tuvalu, and Kiribati, whose exceptionally small size and geographic isolation make them especially susceptible to outside coercion,” wrote Gray.

Nauru and Tuvalu still recognize Taiwan, but Gray wrote that “China is capable of marshaling enormous resources, in the form of both overt economic aid and covert influence, in order to secure its preferred outcomes in [these] small states with relatively opaque governing processes.”

Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. has called Beijing a “bully,” and rightly so. Palau’s population of 20,000 is less than two thousandths of a percent of China’s 1.4 billion. This gives China the economic power to offer bribes  to elected leaders, as it has in Africa and at the United Nations.

“Stealing and offering bribes, that’s just got to stop, illegal fishing has to stop,” said Whipps after the Palauan police and U.S. Coast Guard stopped a Chinese vessel from illegal fishing in Palauan waters.

According to 1News, the Kiribati government admits that it is deregistering its World Heritage site for just $200 million annually in tuna fishing licenses. But it is unclear whether Kiribati will even get this, as the lost value of the marine reserve could outweigh the new licenses.

If so, that could indicate the attempted bribery of Kiribati leaders by Beijing. Some careful accounting should be done to check.

“To add to international concern, Kiribati has signalled its intention to leave the Pacific Islands Forum where leaders work together for the good of the region,” wrote Dreaver.

She quoted another New Zealand academic, Steven Ratuva of Canterbury University, as saying that the decision to leave the Pacific Forum “means China will have more and more foothold and the more isolated Kiribati becomes the more they play straight into China’s hands.”

Gray explained: “When the PRC [People’s Republic of China] succeeds in forcing changes in diplomatic recognition in small developing states from Taipei to Beijing, as it did in Kiribati and Solomon Islands in 2019, it brings with it economic and political coercion. The Pacific Islands have not been an exception, and the PRC’s diplomatic presence in Kiribati continues the pattern of using that presence to assert increased economic and diplomatic leverage over vulnerable states, to the benefit of Beijing’s regional agenda.”

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang inspect honor guards during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Oct. 9, 2019. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)

The CCP Is Eroding the Sovereignty of States

Former Kiribati President Anote Tong told 1News that the cancellation of the marine reserve is “a huge blow for conservation but I think it’s a much bigger blow to our credibility as a nation.”

He’s right, and the implications are profound for not only Kiribati, but for the changing concept of sovereignty itself.

As Beijing seeks to achieve global hegemony, it seeks to break down the sovereignty of the world’s other 192 countries to the point of being a “sovereignty” in name only, according to Rush Doshi, author  of “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.” Beijing does this with carrots (grants or loans) or sticks (threats of invasion or denial of trade) to attempt coercion of countries into consistently following the CCP’s diktat.

The strategy worked to tame most Chinese citizens, and now the CCP is applying the strategy globally to the leaders of countries, elected or not.

When countries come under Beijing’s sway, they are therefore de facto surrendering their sovereignty to Beijing and thus become part of “Greater China,” despite few admitting as much. When they retain their sovereignty in name, but follow orders from Beijing, this is a fake form of sovereignty, but one that is increasingly accepted as real. The notion of sovereignty is being eroded with insufficient concern by the public.

Beijing’s Pressure on Sovereignty Is a Threat to Democracy and Forces Democratic Counterpressure

To avoid this future of fake sovereigns under the control of Beijing, the rest of the world will have to act fast against Beijing and those that Beijing controls. Soon, not only China, but Greater China, including satellite “countries” and “autonomous” territories such as Kiribati, Hong Kong, and surprisingly the Philippines, could be treated as the adversary by countries that want to protect the international system of sovereign states.

Visiting Chinese leader Xi Jinping with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte troop the line before their one-on-one meeting at the Malacanang presidential palace in Manila on Nov. 20, 2018. (Erik De Castro/Reuters)

As seen during the world wars, and the Cold War, choosing sides is the nature of superpower conflict over regional and global types of hegemony. Given China’s greater economic strength relative to the former Soviet Union, the pressures during this current second cold war will be too great for most countries that want to remain neutral. They will be forced to choose sides, as they increasingly are. Diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and defense treaties with the United States, are currently the key public proofs of having chosen the side of democracy against dictatorship.

Beijing’s satellites, whose elites were captured typically through bribes and threats of one form or another, allow themselves to be driven by Beijing’s priorities, becoming part of Greater China. They thus lose their sovereignty and become adversaries to democracies and all other countries that value their sovereignty and the rule of law to be found in the international system.

The erosion of democracy globally, and the growth of Beijing’s hegemonic potential, is difficult for many to see because the loss of sovereignty to Beijing is gradual. But the effects are potentially catastrophic for the future of democracy everywhere.

The 17th-Century Sources of Sovereignty That Must Now Evolve

The more a democratic government is swayed by Beijing’s illiberal influence, the less democratic credibility it has, and the less power democracies have as a whole to protect the international system that dates to the 17th century Peace of Westphalia upon which the modern concept of sovereignty is based.

Democratic credibility is the core of sovereignty according to 17th-century philosophers like John Locke, whose political theories underpin the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

But without support for democracy, nations cannot really be considered sovereign and responsible members of the international system. An example is Vichy France, which was controlled by Nazi Germany. It was not considered a truly sovereign country and, therefore, the military invasion of France by democratic allies—including the United States and Britain—was considered legitimate.

The sovereign right of territorial integrity is limited to those countries that support the leadership of democracies and the gradual evolution of autocracies toward democracy, as evidenced by the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Any entity that allies itself with Beijing, which is a totalitarian and genocidal state, excludes itself from the responsible nations of the world and thus puts itself at risk of not only exploitation by Beijing, but of becoming part of Beijing’s belligerence and, therefore, part of the problem of its hegemonic ambitions. A state that is part of a totalitarian threat of hegemony voids its own sovereignty and loses its right to territorial integrity, as did Vichy France.

Democracies and autocracies alike, that ally with a totalitarian belligerent on its way to becoming hegemonic, are in violation of the spirit of the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are no longer supporters of democracy, and lose their sovereignty through the violation of international law. Therefore, even “democratic” supporters of autocratic hegemony should no longer be considered democracies, but rather self-interested collections of individuals under illiberal influence.

A criminal gang that votes is still a criminal gang. A country’s illegal support of a belligerent autocracy makes that country itself a belligerent for an illegal cause and, therefore, excludes itself from the rights and privileges of sovereignty.

A Peaceful Preservation of Sovereignty for Kiribati and the World

Let us return to the example of Kiribati for clues about how to resolve the problem of autocratic hegemony peacefully.

If Kiribati returns to the democratic fold, it can be protected from totalitarianism and its hegemony, as can other countries that have allowed themselves to be overly influenced by Beijing. By adhering to the principle of democratic leadership of the international system, both autocracies and democracies can protect the international system of 1948 that guaranteed their sovereignty and territorial integrity, predicated on their following principles of human rights and a gradual evolution toward democracy.

As Gray’s article explained, for example, the United States can protect the democratic sovereignty of the Pacific Islands by extending protection to them. This protection is not American hegemony, but a temporary solution to Beijing’s attempts to extend its control in ever-larger circles on the map. Neither is the principle exclusive to the United States. It applies to French or German leadership of European countries, especially in Eastern Europe, that are resisting Russia’s regional hegemonic ambitions.

Pacific leaders pose for the 42nd Pacific Island Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, on September 2011. (Bradley Ambrose/AFP/Getty Images)

In the Pacific Islands, the United States achieves the protection of sovereignty in part through closer economic and political relations called Compacts of Free Association (COFAs) .

“As the leaders of countries with Compacts of Free Association (COFAs) with the United States, they can be confident in Washington’s legal guarantee of their sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as the many economic and social benefits that accrue from such agreements,” wrote Gray. “In an era of Chinese economic pressure and aggressive influence campaigns, the Freely Associated States (as the COFA signatories are known) have significant protections unavailable to their Pacific Islands peers.”

COFAs provide a pacific solution to the Pacific problem. According to Gray, the United States should extend “versions of the COFA to the smallest states in the region.”

This is absolutely correct.

And, I would add, COFAs should be non-negotiable if the country is already operating under Beijing’s illiberal influence. The sovereignty of these countries, having been crushed by Beijing, requires economic and military protection. For all the rest that have not yet lost their sovereignty, they will be a form of free association.

“The success of the existing COFAs with the Freely Associated States in providing a bulwark against Chinese aggression offers a model that is appealing to the most vulnerable regional states,” Gray wrote in support of their sovereignty and free association. “In a post-colonial region that prides itself on hard-won sovereignty, the balance the COFAs strike between sovereignty and security has innate appeal.”

A Tough Stand Against Beijing’s Allies Is Ultimately Democratic

After World War II, the founders of the United Nations hoped to create a world of free and sovereign democracies that needed no protection from the United States or any other country. Unfortunately, Beijing is ruining that vision through undermining sovereign democracies on a global scale.

The world, and especially America and the European Union as the only democratic entities strong enough to defeat Beijing, is thereby forced into a choice it does not want to make. Either allow the CCP to continue the erosion of democracy globally, and the reorientation of vulnerable capital cities toward Beijing, or draw a line and force democracies that are losing their sovereignty to Beijing to reverse course. It is an unfortunately illiberal solution to an illiberal choice made by weak democracies.

Wars to protect democracy involve illiberalities on both sides. As Beijing forces supporters of the international system of sovereign states and democracy closer to war, some solutions will necessarily, and unfortunately, involve economic and military force.

While that could be considered undemocratic, so is the loss of sovereignty to Beijing. And the loss of sovereignty to Beijing is more permanent, as the United States—and, I would argue, the European Union—have proven over the years that they respect and encourage the sovereignty of diverse states and nations, including those that are peaceful yet autocratic.

Rather than occupy and control Germany and Japan after World War II, for example, the United States provided development assistance for their economies and facilitated their democratic elections, sovereignty, and full membership in the international system.

Rather than oppose Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, both of which are autocratic, the United States since the 1980s has sought to guarantee their sovereignty in exchange for at the very least staying neutral in superpower conflicts with the Soviet Union (in the past) and China (today).

The United States and European Union cannot guarantee such sovereignty to countries, including democracies, that side with autocracies that seek global hegemony. The United States tries to achieve peace with these countries and, as a democracy, never seeks war; but when forced by a conflict that devolves into one between superpowers in which one or more are autocracies that seek global hegemony, the United States has and will be forced into defending itself and the concept of democracy more generally by treating the allies of totalitarian governments as was Vichy France.

To effectively confront China, countries that value their independence must also confront China’s allies globally. If Kiribati or any other country falls under Beijing’s sway, either the United States and allies will begin to see them as having lost their sovereignty to Beijing, or they will be forced to resist Beijing’s tyranny with one hand tied behind their backs.

Allies of Beijing can therefore no longer be considered sovereign states. To do so would be to allow the gradual and permanent erosion of democracy and sovereign independence globally, and to allow the current international rule of law to devolve into chaos.

Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. He authored “The Concentration of Power” (forthcoming in 2021) and “No Trespassing,” and edited “Great Powers, Grand Strategies.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-aggression-is-changing-the-nature-of-sovereignty_4118213.html

Peter Navarro’s J’Accuse Against the Chinese Regime

Peter Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council, at the CPAC convention in National Harbor, Md., on March 1, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Peter Navarro’s J’Accuse Against the Chinese Regime

Bradley A. Thayer

November 29, 2021

Commentary

Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro  has written a tour de force in his latest book “In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year.”

Navarro’s work largely centers on the COVID-19  pandemic and the Trump administration’s efforts to deal with the consequences of it in the 2019-2020 timeframe. The study also covers other important topics such as Navarro’s efforts to support former President Donald Trump’s “America First” manufacturing agenda, the causes of the critical delays in the COVID-19 vaccine, and the run up and aftermath of the 2020 election.

What is particularly valuable in the book is Navarro’s identification of the Chinese regime’s “Five Heinous Acts.” He provides a clear and succinct j’accuse  of the Chinese Community Party (CCP) and how it turned an outbreak into a pandemic—the consequences of which the world still faces.

The first heinous act was to hide the possibility of a pandemic from the world for more than 60 days. In this deception, Beijing enlisted and thus perverted the World Health Organization in conjunction with its director Tedros Adhanom. Navarro illuminates that the world lost time to prepare and to contain COVID-19.

The second was the Chinese regime’s refusal to release the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In turn, this delayed attempts to understand the virus, to develop the right therapies for treatment, and to create a vaccine.

The third was the Chinese regime’s cover-up. It destroyed evidence at the Wuhan wet market, which might have allowed the world to doubt that the virus originated there. The regime also eliminated physical and electronic evidence at the Wuhan lab, while some of the lab’s personnel and whistleblowers disappeared.

Fourth, the Chinese regime locked down Wuhan city and domestic travel within China, while permitting hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals to fly from China to the rest of the world, thus ensuring the COVID-19 rapid global spread.

Fifth, as the Chinese regime knew it had a nightmare on its hands, it hoarded personnel protective equipment (PPE) and then placed some of the hoarded PPE back on the world market at exorbitant prices.

One of Navarro’s conclusions from the regime’s sordid behavior is that its lies, deceptions, and malevolent actions unleashed a pandemic that led to the needless deaths of countless doctors, nurses, caregivers, and first-responders around the world. We cannot forget the loved ones who were infected by their friends and relatives as well.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

Navarro’s account compels the question of whether the Chinese regime will be held to account. He discusses his efforts to form a national presidential commission to investigate the origins, costs, and geopolitical implications of the pandemic, as well as the bill for compensatory damages and costs, which he estimates would likely run some $20 trillion—the equivalent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Regrettably, the Trump administration’s time ran out before these measures could move forward.

The nobility of the effort is clear, and it is just. In the wake of major wars, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, great powers came together to determine how such cataclysmic events happened and how they can be avoided. The wake of a catastrophic pandemic is similar to many of the effects of a great power war. Thus, a pandemic should be studied, and justice meted to avoid or reduce the spread of another.

But it will take a U.S. administration, backed by its allies and other supporters, to lead any effort to such a successful conclusion. If the Biden administration will not advance it, then perhaps other states will, or the turn of fortune in U.S. domestic politics might once again make it possible. But the Chinese regime will use every method to prevent this—from the typical Billingsgate directed at the leaders and supporters of this effort to more coercive techniques aimed at the states that will support it. If it can be started, there are many millions—who have been harmed by the pandemic—who will likely take up the challenge.

Navarro’s work recalls Émile Zola’s great essay, “J’accuse,” written in support of French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongfully accused by senior officers and was ultimately responsible for righting the injustice. Navarro’s j’accuse is equally meritorious. The CCP turned an outbreak into a pandemic, lied to and deceived the world, retarded medical authorities’ understanding of what was occurring, and thus killed and harmed many millions of people. To this day, we still do not know the full effects of the virus, and if additional outbreaks might be as lethal and destructive as the first, or have an even more sinister provenance than the original.

If there is to be justice, if the Chinese regime is held to account, then Navarro’s efforts were germinal. Equally, if the CCP aborts any attempt at a reckoning, then the world owes Navarro gratitude for providing the record of what the Chinese regime did, the global costs it inflicted, and the Trump administration’s effort to document it and hold Beijing to account.

Bradley A. Thayer is a founding member of the Committee on Present Danger China and is the co-author of “How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/peter-navarros-jaccuse-against-the-chinese-regime_4128842.html

The Real China and the Downside of Arrogance

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (C) attends the celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, on July 1, 2021. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

The Real China and the Downside of Arrogance

How an aggressive Beijing is losing friends and influence in the world, and what it means for the world

James Gorrie, Writer

November 30, 2021

Commentary

Much of the world is having an enlightening moment with China .

Recall that China began the last decade by positioning itself as a global benefactor. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was supposed to be a beneficial foreign aid and development program. Other economic and cultural outreach efforts supplied nations with financing and cultural exchanges that have served Beijing well.

The Shine Is Off

But foreign aid debt traps and spyware scandals  certainly took some of the shine off China’s global reputation. The world started to open its eyes.

Then the launch and spread of the CCP virus  pandemic, along with the hoarding  of medical supplies and finger-wagging from Beijing about the West’s response failures, shattered any remaining goodwill that Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) leaders worked so hard to sell the world in the past.

Killing millions  and laughing about it  was just too big to ignore.

Today, nations around the world are increasingly viewing the Chinese regime as a major threat . In fact, over the past several weeks, Britain, France, and almost two dozen African countries have officially criticized China  over its foot-dragging with regard to the pandemic.

What’s more, Japan has unequivocally shifted its foreign policy to directly challenge  China’s re-unification ambitions vis-à-vis Taiwan. (More on this in a forthcoming article.) Today, at the end of 2021, Beijing has revealed itself to be neither a benefactor nor a partner, but rather, a voracious predator.

CCP: A Human Rights Obscenity

Domestically, the CCP’s behavior toward its citizens  is a human rights obscenity every way you look at it. There’s no justifiable way to sugar-coat it. Xi Jinping has done everything possible to quell civil unrest and maintain his grip on  power within the Party. The CCP virus played a big role in those efforts, but it wasn’t the only factor.

China’s neo-Maoist leader has also been very busy rewriting history  for his own self-glorification, if not an outright elevation to god-like status. On a more basic level, all images or references to Winnie the Pooh—the animated bear to which Xi bears a passable resemblance—became a symbol of resistance or disrespect to the all-powerful leader and was outlawed in China a few years ago.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is applauded by delegates wearing protective masks as he arrives at the opening of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on May 22, 2020. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

There’s really no need to ban poor Pooh Bear. With millions in labor camps, his police surveillance state, political prisoners , social and economic oppression, and crushing Hong Kong, no one is confusing Xi with lovable make-believe, cartoon animal these days—that’s for certain.

A Transformative Leader’s Big Plans

The fact that unfavorable views of China  around the world are at all-time highs poses a big challenge for Beijing.

Or does it?

More to the point, will the CCP leaders think it worthwhile to go through all the time and effort to rebuild their shattered reputation with a new, more cooperative foreign policy?

On the one hand, recent political utterances from Xi make it seem so. Calls for mutual respect and cooperation  sound terribly wonderful. It’s certainly easy to say such things, which are exactly the kind of words that the world wants to hear.

On the other hand, Xi’s official, if not pseudo-religious, elevation to the great transformative leader  of China makes humble and conciliatory pronouncements seem rather awkward and unworthy of a great, transformative leader, don’t they?

Besides this one obvious fact, there is another that should be carefully weighed. That is, all great, transformative leaders are mortal, no matter what one’s official news service may say.

Admittedly, no new ground broken there. But given Xi’s ambitions and plans for China’s uncontestable dominance  in the world, spending the next decade or two rehabilitating the country’s diplomatic bona fides just isn’t in the cards. At 68 years old, and a former inveterate smoker, Xi is a man in a hurry to realize his ambitions.

A Hypersonic Window of Opportunity

What’s more, with its hypersonic  nuclear delivery system, the Chinese regime has a definite military advantage over the United States. At the same time, U.S. leadership is perceived to be its weakest in decades. Just as important is the fact that China’s economy is collapsing, and its population is rapidly aging.

From Beijing’s perspective, could there be a better time for “ Wolf Warrior ” foreign policy? This new turn in diplomacy doesn’t hesitate to defend China’s national interests in confrontational ways. It certainly seems to explain Beijing’s new aggression on the world stage.

The CCP’s continued militarization of the South China Sea, armed conflict with India, nuclear attack threats against Australia, and rising military actions aimed at Taiwan this past year alone all seem to point  to a more impatient China.

Furthermore, it appears that Beijing doesn’t really care  how or what the world thinks of China. The regular verbal insults  of other leaders  and threats  are not indicative of a global power that intends to build goodwill around the world.

In short, communist China prefers to be feared than loved, rather than both. The downside is likely to affect everyone rather negatively, including China, as the CCP reveals its true face to the world.

James R. Gorrie is the author of “The China Crisis” (Wiley, 2013) and writes on his blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-real-china-and-the-downside-of-arrogance_4129287.html

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago(Part 1)

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and other leaders applaud at the closing session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, China, on March 11, 2021. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago

Part 1 of the 3-part series: The CCP’s War on America

Stu Cvrk

November 29, 2021; Updated December 1, 2021

News Analysis

The age of the Chinese regime’s “benevolence” is long over; war  was declared years ago.

Communist China  has been at war with its main adversary—the United States of America—for years. Sadly, most Americans have not been paying attention. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) became quiescent, with a general policy promoted by Deng Xiaoping.

The Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) is partial to the number three for cultural and superstitious reasons . For example, the number three represents Buddha and stands for Heaven, Earth, and human being; and great respect and reverence are given to three historical Chinese kingdoms.

No slouches on superstition and luck, the CCP routinely capitalizes on the number three to pursue its goals and objectives.

A lot of “threes” have been orchestrated by the CCP since 1949.

- Mao’s Three Phase Theory of revolutionary war , which included establishing a secure base of operations, expansion of controlled areas through terror and attacks on isolated enemy units, and destruction of the enemy in large scale battle.

- Mao’s Three Main Rules  of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) discipline: 1) obey all orders; 2) take nothing so much as a needle or thread from the masses; and 3) turn in everything captured.

- Mao’s Three Anti-campaign , which “targeted communist cadres who had become too close to China’s capitalists.”

- Mao’s Three Worlds , defined as first world (United States and USSR at the time), second world (Japan, Canada, and Europe), and the third world (everybody else).

- The Three Warfares , which include public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare.

- The Three U.S.-China communiques , which established the flawed “one-China policy” that essentially conceded Taiwan to the PRC.

The CCP’s propensity to capitalize on “the luck of threes” starts right at the top with the appointment of the ruling Chinese leader as general secretary of the CCP, president of the PRC, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Lucky Xi Jinping! Three jobs filled by one man, which is the essence of the Chinese communist dictatorship, in theory and practice being checked only by the Central Committee of the CCP.

Upon assuming power, Xi launched his own campaign of threes. The first threesome involved grandiose economic initiatives: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also called the “One Belt, One Road”), Made in China 2025, and the 21 st  Century Maritime Silk Road. All three were aimed at consolidating China as the world’s leading economy for all time.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping gives a speech at a press conference after the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China, on April 27, 2019. (Wang Zhao/Getty Images)

Another example of Xi’s threes was announced last year at the 2020 China International Trade in Services Global Service Trade Summit : 1) jointly create an open and inclusive environment for cooperation; 2) jointly activate the cooperation momentum led by innovation; and 3) jointly create a mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation situation.

A third example is Xi’s “third historical resolution” at the Sixth Plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP earlier this month, as reported by state-run media . The “historical” reference relates to Xi’s resolution being the third of its kind, following in the footsteps of Mao and Deng. Xi also seeks to triple down by winning a rare third five-year term in office, which would elevate him as the third Chinese “paramount leader” along with Mao and Deng, completing in effect a trifecta or triple threes. This personal objective will likely be achieved during the CCP’s 20 th  National Party Congress in 2022.

But the most important “triple three” was Xi’s initiation and/or furtherance of three threes of warfare against the United States in a dramatic departure from the policies of Deng and his successors. Deng’s policies were not overtly belligerent and involved penetrating, coopting, and leveraging international institutions in order to gain access to resources, foreign direct investment, advanced technology, and Western methods in order to restore the Chinese economy and professional class that was destroyed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Xi’s three threes of warfare are directly aimed at elevating China to world leadership while destroying its primary adversary, the United States.

Those nine elements of CCP warfare against the United States and the West include the following:

Ideological (or Political) Warfare

The CCP is aggressively attempting to “ discredit the tenets of liberal capitalism  so that notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system,” according to Tablet Magazine. The goal in undermining democratic values and individual liberties of Western democracies is to both safeguard China’s own authoritarian regime and also to assert world leadership.

Euphemisms such as “whole process democracy,” “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics”—that are endlessly repeated by Chinese diplomats and Xi himself—mask the CCP’s true intention to fundamentally change the world order and replace Western liberal democracies with the ideological precepts that lead to CCP authoritarian rule over all nations in the future.

One important aspect of the CCP ideological warfare against the United States has been to foment discord  and division  among Americans, which has been ongoing for decades. Beijing’s greatest success in that regard to date has been the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which was founded by three self-proclaimed Marxist women and has been supported by the Chinese Progressive Association, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and other pro-Chinese communist organizations (as noted here , here , here , here , and here) . BLM-supported Critical Race Theory being taught in public schools continues to divide Americans and sow ideological turmoil in the United States.

Legal Warfare

This is an excellent definition of  legal warfare  as employed by the CCP: “Legal warfare, at its most basic, involves ‘arguing that one’s own side is obeying the law, criticizing the other side for violating the law [ weifa ], and making arguments for one’s own side in cases where there are also violations of the law,’” according to The Heritage Foundation.

The CCP’s goal in employing legal warfare is to undermine the international system and especially the Western tradition of the “rule of law” by propagating a Chinese legal framework that supersedes international law.

For example, one CCP objective is to extend the new National Security Law to all Chinese regardless of where they live around the world. With that assumed control comes the ability to influence events and policies in countries that have a significant minority population of Chinese, with the eventual goal being to extend the law in order prosecute anyone who violates its provisions, whether Chinese or not.

According to Article 38 of the law, it can apply even to offenses committed “outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region.” That means an American penning an editorial for a U.S. newspaper that argues for, say, sanctions against China, could technically fall afoul of the law for “inciting hatred” against Beijing. If its jurisdiction is ever accepted, this will mean the end of national sovereignty of other nations while turning the United Nations into nothing more than a CCP enforcement agency.

Attendees from various forces march next to a banner supporting the new National Security Law at the end of a flag-raising ceremony to mark the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

Psychological Warfare

While the PLA “ Political Work Regulations ”—published in 2003 and 2010 that address the employment of psychological warfare—are focused on pre-war activities to “soften up the enemy” for kinetic warfare, the CCP continuously employs the basic concepts to achieve other objectives. For example, to undermine any international coalitions oriented toward stopping PRC aggression and intimidation of its neighbors and others, including forced PLA intrusions into disputed areas, predatory Chinese mercantilist trade practices, rampant continuing economic espionage, and CCP efforts to unilaterally exert Chinese leadership in all spheres of human endeavors.

CCP psychological warfare involves the coordinated use of Chinese leadership, diplomats, and state-run media, as well as CCP-friendly foreign leaders, diplomats, academics, and media to sap the will of Americans and others who publicly impede CCP goals, objectives, and aggressive actions. CCP psychological warfare “includes diplomatic pressure, rumors, false narratives, and harassment to express displeasure, assert hegemony, and convey threats,” according to Marine Corps University.

These actions are all aimed at conveying a perception of lack of public support for anti-China public policies in the United States and other countries while marginalizing voices that speak out about Chinese authoritarian practices.

The ongoing coordinated effort directed against international support for the defense of Taiwan against a PLA attack is a good example of CCP psychological warfare aimed at a particular target.

Conclusion

The above are the first three of the three threes warfare being conducted by the CCP against the United States and the rest of the world. Part II  of this series will continue the discussion.

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/communist-china-declared-war-on-the-us-long-ago_4124451.html

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago(Part 2)

A security guard (right) and a police officer (left) secure the area at the entrance to Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound of the Chinese Communist Party, in Beijing on May 18, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago: Part 2

Part 2 of the 3-part series: The CCP’s War on America

Stu Cvrk

December 1, 2021

News Analysis

The Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) is partial to the number three for cultural and superstitious reasons . As it turns out, that would appear to apply to Xi Jinping, too, as noted in part one  of this three-part series.

A few of his “campaign of threes” have included:

- Three major economic initiatives.

- The historic third resolution at the sixth plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP.

- A campaign for a rare third five-year term as communist leader.

- An effort to be elevated to the personal status of “third paramount leader” with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

But Xi’s most grandiose leveraging of the number three has been the initiation and/or furtherance of the three threes of warfare against the United States (and, by extension, the rest of the world) in a dramatic departure from the relatively peaceful policies of Deng and his successors. Xi’s three threes of warfare are directly aimed at elevating China  to world leadership while destroying its primary adversary, the United States.

Part one  of this series summarized the first three warfares; below are the next three.

Information Warfare

Data and information are the lifeblood that control modern society. All sorts of industries, government organizations, and militaries are dependent on timely and accurate information to support decision-making processes, including societal infrastructures such as electric power production, money flow, air traffic, oil and gas, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and many other industries.

To control data and information—and to be able to corrupt it and gain economic and geopolitical advantages—is a primary objective of the CCP’s information warfare  campaign that is being waged against the United States and other countries.

The result of such control is “information dominance.” Information dominance in a military context means to achieve a superiority over an adversary in knowledge and understanding of the battlefield at the strategic, operational, and/or tactical levels of war . Extended to other spheres of human endeavor—for example, economic, political, and geopolitical—the concept can be used in virtually any context to gain advantage over a competitor, as all decision-making is founded on knowledge and understanding of relevant data, including that related to competitors and adversaries.

The Chinese communists (Chicoms) recognize this full well and have invested enormous resources to gain total information dominance in the international arena in order to improve decision-making related to the achievement of all of their geopolitical and economic goals and objectives.

Another key objective of CCP information warfare is to simply control all data and information everywhere, which amounts to limiting the exchange of data and information among citizens and entities to that which is approved by the Chinese state—and only the state.

Domestically, the free exchange of ideas is antithetical to the CCP and cannot be tolerated because free information exchange undermines CCP control and authority. For example, domestic Chinese tech companies are being forced to comply with a harsh new data security law  that will also create problems for U.S. and multinational companies doing business in China. As with other aspects of Chinese legal warfare discussed in the first part  of this series, the CCP seeks to extend that data security law to the rest of the world.

A logo of Tencent, a Chinese multinational technology conglomerate holding company, is seen during the World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China, on Nov. 23, 2020. (Aly Song/Reuters)

Opinion Warfare

The CCP uses all means to influence and shape public opinion to accomplish communist geopolitical and domestic objectives, including state-run media, movies, documentaries, podcasts, books, pamphlets, leveraging of “purchased” foreign media, etc.

A good example of an integrated campaign is the ongoing CCP exploitation of COVID-19 to shape world opinion. The CCP early on decided to exploit the pandemic for its own advantage: economic, geopolitical, and psychological.

The coordinated covid-related messages to the world have been relentlessly repeated to shape the regime’s desired pro-CCP narrative. There has been a constant deluge of agitprop from state-run media covering every facet of the coronavirus “pandemic” over the last 18 months: fear-mongering, social distancing advocacy, mask mania, feigned CCP altruism, condemnation and undermining of the United States on all topics, blame-shifting on the origins of the virus, exportation of “Chinese methods” in handling the virus, claiming leadership on pandemic response (regarding vaccines, personal protective equipment, testing, etc.), exploitation of international institutions like the World Health Organization, pushing multilateralism, and other messaging aimed at showcasing CCP leadership to Chinese citizens and the rest of the world.

Tedros Adhanom, director general of the World Health Organization, shakes hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Jan. 28, 2020. (Naohiko Hatta/Pool/Getty Images)

Economic Warfare

Xi’s premier strategic initiatives are in the economic arena, with a principal goal being China’s ascendancy as the dominant producer of industrial goods in the world. Xi envisions communist China as the world’s economic superpower, with his personal prestige tightly intertwined with the success of the nearly $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that, so far, involves debt-trap investment in 138 countries around the world.

The BRI goal is to develop a global infrastructure controlled by the Chinese regime. The infrastructure elements are largely focused on the development of transportation assets that can later be exploited by Beijing to transport the resources and raw materials needed to fuel Chinese manufacturing concerns, as well as support the exportation of finished Chinese goods to overseas markets around the world, including roads, ports, railroads, bridges, etc.

BRI investments also include renewable energy projects, communications infrastructures, and cultural exchanges. BRI-related infrastructure investments—in reality, these are loans from CCP-controlled state banks and not  grants—come with strings attached. Those loans must be paid back. Frequently, the provisions of those loans allow China to gain control of a country’s BRI-funded infrastructure and/or natural resources if/when loans are defaulted, generally through long-term leases of those assets. And that  is CCP economic warfare!

There are other facets of Chinese economic warfare, including a continuing push to control and manipulate the world’s strategic commodities. A strategic commodity is a raw material or agricultural product that is considered critical to a nation’s economy, such that the economy would suffer significantly if that commodity’s trade and supply is interrupted in any way. Strategic commodities are the natural resources that fuel a nation’s economy. Examples include rare earth elements , oil, natural gas, gold, silver, copper, livestock, rice, wheat, and corn.

The Chicoms have been successfully acquiring control of strategic commodities for years, while building up strategic reserves as both an inflation hedge  and also as a means of market manipulation  to influence targeted countries like the United States. Gaining control of Afghanistan’s lithium reserves positions China to control and manipulate battery production for decades. Furthermore, China is implementing a Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN). A blockchain is a type of database that stores information in “blocks” that are securely “chained together.” The implementation of a global BSN capability would enable the CCP to monitor and control all economic/trade transactions of users around the world—on CCP terms.

Build the infrastructure, build the manufacturing capacity, control the natural resources and strategic commodities, and ascend to economic superpower status—this economic warfare strategy is working, as China is already the number two largest economy in the world.

Conclusion

The preceding are the second three of the three threes of warfare being conducted by the CCP against the United States and the rest of the world. Part three will conclude the series with a discussion of the final three CCP warfares.

Read part 1 here.

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/communist-china-declared-war-on-the-us-long-ago-part-2_4129395.html

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago(Part 3)

Paramilitary police walk outside the Museum of the Chinese Communist Party near the Bird’s Nest national stadium in Beijing on June 25, 2021. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

Communist China Declared War on the US Long Ago: Part 3

Part 3 of the 3-part series: The CCP’s War on America

Stu Cvrk

December 2, 2021

News Analysis

Incredibly, many Americans and others still believe Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s propaganda about “shared futures,” “whole democracy,” and “Chinese benevolence.”

So far—and thanks to relentless coordinated propaganda by Chinese diplomats and state-run Chinese media—the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) has not completely lost control of the COVID-19 narrative, including success in delinking the virus itself from its human-engineered origins in Hubei Province.

Co-opted Westerners and others still champion the theory of a “natural” jumping of the virus from bat ( not pangolin ) to human, but scientific and other evidence has been shooting a lot of holes in that theory lately. Americans are also finally waking up just a little bit to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) intimidation of Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Japan, and others.

But the dots of Chinese belligerence need to be fully connected, as communist China  has been engaged in the three threes of warfare  against the United States and the rest of the world for years.

Parts one  and two  of this series have covered the first six of those warfares. This part concludes the series with a discussion of the remaining three warfares being conducted by the CCP.

Financial Warfare

Financial warfare being conducted by the CCP against the West is closely related to economic warfare. Despite the best intentions of Westerners who were hoping for more when China was “opened” in 1972, China remains mercantilist to the core, having manipulated its currency since the country was “opened” by former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1971.

China’s economy is opaque, Byzantine, and authoritarian capitalist, and the Chinese yuan is the very definition of a fiat currency  that is manipulated through devaluation  when deemed necessary for economic advantage by the CCP. The Chinese communists (Chicoms) seek to challenge the U.S. dollar as the key international currency underlying the world trade system, and eventually supplant it with the Chinese yuan as the world’s primary reserve currency. The yuan has already achieved official reserve-currency status from the International Monetary Fund, but for now “the yuan’s share in global payments and central bank reserves remains low, at about 2%, ” according to Bloomberg.

The key to displacing the dollar is convertibility of the yuan. If/when the yuan achieves full convertibility, then Chinese overseas investments under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can be flexibly implemented, and China can nudge other countries away from the dollar and toward the yuan. Also, the convertibility of the yuan and an accompanying digital exchange and payment capability with the Chinese central bank would enable the Chicoms to extend their financial empire worldwide. The aim would be to decouple Western companies and banks from global capital markets and money flows, making it easier for the yuan to prevail as the top world reserve currency.

Another key financial warfare objective is to entice Western capital and financial institutions to China. Hong Kong—long a banking and financial capital of the world—has already been absorbed into communist China, and the CCP has a long-standing goal to make Shanghai the world’s top global financial center for both prestige and financial control purposes.

A woman walks past a yuan and a U.S. dollar currency sign in Hong Kong on Aug. 13, 2015. (Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images)

Cyber Warfare

The CCP has long been engaged in cyber warfare against the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) : “Malicious cyber activities attributed to the Chinese government targeted, and continue to target, a variety of industries and organizations in the United States, including healthcare, financial services, defense industrial base, energy, government facilities, chemical, critical manufacturing (including automotive and aerospace), communications, IT (including managed service providers), international trade, education, video gaming, faith-based organizations, and law firms.”

Most Chinese cyber operations, which consist of economic espionage against U.S. private industry that have been detected, are focused on cleared defense contractors or IT, and communications firms whose products and services support government and private sector networks worldwide.

Chinese cyber attacks have targeted U.S. trade secrets, science and technology data, and proprietary information, as well as classified military and intelligence community networks to access and/or corrupt tactical, operational, and technical databases.

In one example, members of “ Advanced Persistent Threat 10, or APT 10 , a hacking group associated with the Chinese government,” were indicted in 2018 for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft,” according to the FBI.

In another example, links have been found between Chinese cyber actors and a back door in the popular CCleaner application that allowed the actors to target U.S. companies, including Google, Microsoft, Intel, and VMware. And Chinese cyber attacks continue, as a recent report  by the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks stated, “In the U.S. alone, hundreds of organizations were targeted by hackers as part of an espionage effort that took place between late September and early October.”

Finally, a Nov. 22 report  from the Congressional Research Service listed a number of Chinese cyber attacks against U.S. entities over the past decade.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of ongoing CCP-directed cyber warfare against the United States.

A screenshot of an FBI wanted poster for Chinese members of the APT 10 hacker group. (FBI/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Biological Warfare

Is the COVID-19 pandemic actually CCP biowarfare in practice?

The PLA has been conducting biological warfare research for decades. Since the Chinese were themselves victimized by Japanese biological warfare in World War II , it is no surprise that they began research into the development of bioweapons, as well. It is alleged that the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is just a cover for the research and development of Chinese bioweapons being conducted under the direction of the PLA . There have been open-source signs of the results of that research—as well as its purpose—for several years.

The PLA has long-held plans to use bioweapons in a future conflict, according to a May 2021 news report : “Chinese scientists have been preparing for a Third World War fought with biological and genetic weapons including coronavirus  for the last six years.”

A novel coronavirus research report from 2015  declared: “Researchers inserted a protein from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat into a SARS virus from 2002–resulting in a new pathogen which could infect human cells.”

The Smithsonian Magazine published an article about the bird flu in 2017  that is almost a precursor of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The article was titled, “Is China the Ground Zero for a Future Pandemic?” And this is the money quote (emphasis added): “Western experts say Chinese officials have come a long way since their wobbly handling of the 2002 outbreak of SARS, the severe respiratory disease caused by a previously unknown coronavirus; Chinese apparatchiks initially tried to cover up the epidemic, creating a worldwide scandal.”

In 2018, the Chemical and Biological Intelligence Unit of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD) disclosed in an unclassified report  that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro Airport stopped a Chinese biologist who was carrying vials containing “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials.”

Since its appearance in China’s Hubei Province in late 2019, there has been much speculation in open sources about the specific origin of the SAR-CoV-2 virus, with the two main theories being a zoonotic  event (animal-to-human) or a bio-engineered virus deliberately created in a laboratory.

In June 2021, The Wall Street Journal  reported that the CGG-CGG amino acid sequence found in the virus is manmade and can only have been inserted through gain-of-function research, as the CGG-CGG sequence is not found in nature.

Whether purposely or inadvertently released, the CCP has exploited the virus by sowing fear that draconian lockdown measures are “justified,” it withheld details on the virus genome that could have facilitated a much better medical response, and exploited the lockdowns around the world for crass economic advantage.

Capability, intentions, a past cover-up, illegal smuggling of bio-agents into the United States, scientific evidence pointing to a human-engineered virus in a laboratory run by the PLA, and purposeful exploitation—all of this points directly to biowarfare being conducted by the CCP against the United States and the world.

Conclusion

Xi Jinping is leading the CCP in the three threes of warfare against the United States and the world with a goal of achieving global supremacy and world leadership by the Party’s centenary celebration in 2049. Nine avenues of ongoing CCP warfare were summarized in this three-part series. The evidence is overwhelming that the CCP is at war with the United States on multiple fronts. Will the luck of the threes  prevail for Xi and the CCP, or will the United States finally awaken to the total threat posed by the Chinese regime?

Read Part 1  and Part 2

Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/communist-china-declared-war-on-the-us-long-ago-part-3_4131201.html

Milley’s Sputnik Moment and China’s Nukes

Military vehicles carrying hypersonic DF-17 missiles travel past Tiananmen Square during a military parade in Beijing, China, on Oct. 1, 2019. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

Milley’s Sputnik Moment and China’s Nukes

Stephen Bryen

December 2, 2021

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley called it a “Sputnik” moment , recalling the time when the Russians were the first to put a satellite in orbit.

Milley was talking about China ’s test of a space launched nuclear hypersonic glide vehicle, a fractional orbiting hypersonic bombardment system.  But, in fact, it was not a Sputnik moment.  Russia’s satellite did not pose any strategic or existential threat.  What Milley should have said is that the Chinese test of a space launched hypersonic glider was a “Cuban Missile Crisis” moment.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was an attempt by the Soviet Union to put on Cuba a nuclear strike capability made up of missiles and nuclear bombers. On Sept. 4, 1962, President John F. Kennedy warned the Russians about putting “offensive” weapons on Cuba.

But the deployment continued with additional missiles and warheads en route to Cuba and launching sites on the island were made ready (some of them already operational). That led to the confrontation in October when the United States demanded the withdrawal of the missiles and warheads and put in place a quarantine of the island. Finally the Russians agreed and pulled them back (the United States was secretly obliged to pull 100 Jupiter missiles and warheads from Turkey as part of the deal).

At the time Russia had around 300 to 500 nuclear weapons on missiles (mainly in Russia and on submarines) while the US had 3,500. A key advantage to the Soviets was to balance out their deficiency with a near-the-US Cuban nuclear capability.  In September/October 1962 around 20 nuclear warheads had been delivered to Cuba and another 20 were on their way.  At the end of the day, looked at only from the perspective of numbers, the Soviets got the better of the final deal given that the US pulled 100 Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

Fast forward to China today.  China is in the midst of a major increase in its nuclear strike missile capability.  China is aiming to have a stockpile of 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030 which is still far below the United States (5,550 nuclear weapons) and Russia (6,255 weapons).

Even with its rapid nuclear expansion, China remains well enough behind that Chinese strategists no doubt realize that if a major conflict came about, China would be at a severe disadvantage and could suffer from a first strike from the United States or, for that matter, from Russia (which in future may not be so friendly with China).

China cannot depend on Russia, where the two countries are strengthening their defense relationships, in the case of a nuclear attack.  That helps explain why China has been looking for fast ways to neutralize the U.S. nuclear threat by acquiring a novel kind of first strike capability.

When Nikita Khrushchev planned to move  R-14 intermediate  and R-12 short range  missiles and Ilyushin Il-28 bombers to Cuba the objective was to create a credible first strike Soviet capability on that island.  The R-12’s got there (range 1,292 miles capable of hitting New York or Dallas) but the R-14’s were en route (range 2,500 miles covering most of the United States).

The United States in 1962 had numerous air defenses  mainly based on the Nike, Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules  systems.  Nike Hercules had a range of around 90 miles and its solid-fueled rocket could reach 150,000 feet.  It carried a nuclear warhead (the smallest was the  W-31 , which was a  boosted fission  nuclear explosive which could be set with a yield of 2, 20 or 40 kilotons—Hiroshima was around 16 kilotons).

Unfortunately, the Nike system was not capable either of reliably detecting or destroying a ballistic missile warhead.  The Nike missile defense series was designed against Russian bombers, not missiles (which is one of the important reasons why in the 1970s most of the Nikes were decommisioned).

Had the United States not responded to the Soviet challenge, the nuclear balance would have changed decisively because the missiles in Cuba would give the United States very little warning time to respond to any attack by the USSR.

It isn’t clear whether the Cuban missiles alone would constitute a first strike capability, but it would have certainly enhanced that possibility.  In any case it obliged the United States, as part of a Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement, to pull its nuclear missiles out of Turkey, a major victory for the Soviets.

China’s Hypersonic Missile

A fractional orbiting hypersonic nuclear weapon offers China similar advantages for a number of cogent reasons.  First off it shortens U.S. response times, perhaps dramatically, unless the United States can field new space-based sensors and orbiting satellite killers that can find and remove China’s space-based threats.

The likelihood of space-based missile defenses being deployed anytime soon is unlikely, although China’s demonstration of a fractional orbiting hypersonic bombardment system (FOHBS) and its demonstration of new killer satellites suggests the United States is going to have to move forward with countermeasures sooner, rather than later.

Existing U.S. missile defenses (which are few and far between) probably cannot intercept hypersonic glide vehicles, possibly not even detect them.

A second advantage for China is for them to have credible leverage over the United States, making it easier for China to pursue non-nuclear aggressive operations primarily in the Pacific.  This means the First Island Chain and its crown jewel Taiwan, but beyond that with China making an effort to push the United States forward-deployed forces back from Japan, Okinawa, and possibly even Guam.

China is looking to dominate Asia economically, politically, and militarily.  A hypersonic weapons capability like FOHBS demonstrates Chinese technological and military superiority, at least in the eyes of those nations bordering China, but also increasingly in U.S. defense circles, including the Defense Department.

The United States has been very slow in responding to the rise of China’s military power.  U.S. force deployments have remained more or less the same and few improvements have been made in firepower for U.S. ground, air, and naval forces.

At home the United States is seriously behind both Russia and China in developing and fielding hypersonic weapons, and the United States is not known to be working on a space launched hypersonic glider.

While the United States retains a strong nuclear deterrent, it urgently needs to address how to support and help much weaker U.S. allies who do not have strong military capabilities. While the United States has helped Japan by F-35 sales and coproduction, it has not done very much for Taiwan which lacks stealth jets, submarines or even a first rate coastal defense capability.  It appears there is no urgent plan of any kind to build up pro-U.S. forces in the Pacific.

The Pentagon covered up China’s FOHBS.  China conducted two tests, one in July and the other in August.  It wasn’t until mid-October when the Financial Times  told the world about the Chinese tests and only on Oct. 28 when Milley told  Bloomberg Television about the “Sputnik” moment.

Certainly the Pentagon knew about the tests because all space events are carefully tracked and analyzed.  And even with the confirmation of the revelations, the administration is silent about what to do about the new threat.

Now there is increasing evidence that “experts” are claiming the Chinese FOHBS is nothing to worry about and “don’t have to be a Sputnik moment .”  Washington’s response so far is to maybe “talk” to China and  even proposing setting up a “nuclear hotline” as if that would be of any use.  It appears the administration is not seriously thinking about any challenge from China.

The lack of any U.S. administration policy and the Pentagon cover up are reasons for profound concern, as is the lack of a coherent U.S.-China policy that can deter China.

Dr. Stephen Bryen is regarded as a thought leader on technology security policy, twice being awarded the Defense Department’s highest civilian honor, the Distinguished Public Service Medal. A senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, his most recent book is “Technology Security and National Power: Winners and Losers.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/milleys-sputnik-moment-and-chinas-nukes_4135904.html

The Moral Imperative to End China’s Regime

The Chinese flag behind razor wire at a housing compound in Yangisar, south of Kashgar, in China’s western Xinjiang region, on June 4, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

The Moral Imperative to End China’s Regime

Gordon G. Chang

December 2, 2021

Commentary

“We do business in 100 countries,” said  Jamie Dimon to Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo in early August. “And we do, we do it under the laws of those lands and under the law of America as they apply.”

“Foreign policy is set by the American government, not set by JPMorgan,” Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, argued.

Dimon is correct. The U.S. government does not prohibit banks or other companies from doing business in China .

Yet doing business in China strengthens a horrific regime, so the issue is not about legality, as Dimon suggests. It is about morality.

We must, therefore, ask: Is it moral to do business in the People’s Republic of China?

The Communist Party of China operates  one of the most immoral regimes in history. For instance, it kills  in great numbers.

We begin in the metropolis of Wuhan. The world still does not know how COVID-19 started, but it is 100 percent clear that Beijing deliberately spread the disease  beyond China’s borders. While lying about contagiousness for at least weeks—Chinese doctors knew it was highly transmissible human-to-human but officials said it was not—Beijing was busy locking down Chinese cities while pressuring other countries to not impose travel restrictions and quarantines on arrivals from China. Then, after finally admitting transmissibility, China’s officials said the disease would infect fewer than SARS, the disease at the turn of the century that sickened 8,400 people worldwide and killed 810.

Therefore, each of the more than 5.1 million COVID-19 deaths outside China should be considered a murder. The intentional spread of the disease is, so far, the crime of this century.

Also murdered are the tens of thousands of Americans who each year have overdosed on fentanyl compounds, which are formulated in China. The ingredients—and sometimes the final products—are made in that country. The Chinese fentanyl gangs are far-flung and international in scope. They have their money laundered  by other Chinese gangs through China’s state banks.

The Communist Party, in its near-total surveillance state, knows about the activities of these gangs and therefore approves of them. Chinese officials undoubtedly profit from the fentanyl trade. The intentional killing of others without just cause—the inevitable result of Beijing’s protection of the fentanyl gangs—is also murder. In one year alone, from May 2020 to April 2021, fentanyl killed about 64,000  Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

China, in addition to murdering foreigners, is “disappearing” and killing its own people, starting with critics and dissidents.

Most notably, it has, in the horribly misnamed Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, built a chain of concentration camps  that have held an estimated three million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic minorities. Minorities are dying in those camps in large numbers. We know this because officials built a crematorium and cemetery  between two of their internment camps, in Aksu City.

Inside those facilities, inmates are systematically tortured . Beijing has institutionalized slavery , offering the labor of tens of thousands of minorities to domestic and foreign companies. The Chinese state maintains a policy promoting the rape  of Uyghur and other Turkic women. Officials are organ-harvesting  minorities and imprisoning children  in “orphanages” resembling prisons. Policies imposed on Tibetans appear to be similar  in many respects to those forced on the Turkic peoples.

These crimes against humanity in Xinjiang constitute “genocide” as defined in Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948 . Both the Trump and Biden administrations have declared that China is committing this unspeakable crime.

The Genocide Convention, in Article I, requires signatories such as the United States, “to prevent and to punish” acts of genocide.

Preventing and punishing does not include strengthening the despicable ruling group by, for instance, buying Chinese products. “We are each responsible for our actions, whether they’re in our backyard or an ocean away,” Jonathan Bass, CEO of Los Angeles-based WhomHome.com, told Gatestone. “In 2010, I realized that the way Chinese factories treated workers was not in line with the values that America represented. Slave labor in any form is unacceptable.” Bass then moved high-value jobs to North America and assembly jobs to Mexico.

Is there a moral imperative to leave China, like Bass? There is such an imperative if the Chinese regime cannot be dissuaded from committing atrocities.

Those impossible-to-justify crimes have been the work of one of the most dangerous figures in history, Xi Jinping, the current Chinese ruler. Some have suggested that Xi is merely an aberration of China’s communism, implying that his crimes are his doing, not inherent in the communist system.

Xi’s era, marked by an attempt to return to totalitarianism, resembles that of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic. Mao turned what was supposed to be a regime run by a committee into a regime run by one man, and then he almost destroyed the Chinese state with ruinous campaigns such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, normalized politics. Deng started institutionalizing the Communist Party by developing norms, guidelines, understandings, and rules. Foreign observers gushed over the rise of what they called a “meritocratic” system.

Xi, in a Mao-like grab, has reversed the process, deinstitutionalizing the Party by seizing power from just about everyone else. Mao has also been called an aberration, but he was not. China has been ruled by strongmen both at the beginning of the Communist period and now. That system, which from its Maoist beginning has idealized struggle, demands a strongman. It is Deng and his two successors who are the aberration.

The Chinese communist system, by its very nature, demands uniformity, and to further its goals justifies the elimination of all refusing to conform. All China’s communist leaders, but especially Mao  and Xi , are blood-soaked.

If there is now no reasonable hope for a benign Chinese communism—almost all observers and political leaders once thought the system would evolve in a welcomed direction—then we must not tolerate the regime, which means we have, in the first instance, a moral imperative to cut ties with it.

Cutting ties would result in ending the reign of the Communist Party, which has always been dependent on continual infusions of foreign cash. Among other things, ending Chinese communism would make Jamie Dimon, who quipped  last month that his bank would outlast the Communist Party, look prophetic.

From the Gatestone Institute

Gordon G. Chang is a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a member of its Advisory Board, and the author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-moral-imperative-to-end-chinas-regime_4135204.html

US Companies Are ‘Hostages’ to China

Activists rally in front of the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles, California, calling for a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics due to concerns over China’s human rights record on Nov. 3, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

US Companies Are ‘Hostages’ to China

Emel Akan, reporter

December 4, 2021

Commentary

Foreign firms doing business in China  should be aware of the costs of transacting with a totalitarian regime that controls everything in society and can easily bend any company to its will.

Heads of U.S. corporations don’t dare to criticize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) even in private settings. They know Big Brother is always watching them.

JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon’s quick apology  over a joke he made recently about the country’s communist regime provides a good example of how business leaders fear retribution from Beijing.

Clyde Prestowitz, author and strategist on Asia and globalization, explains the true cost of doing business in China in his latest book “The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership.” He was a presidential advisor and a leader of the first American trade mission to China in 1982.

The U.S. companies that are highly coupled with China face all kinds of risks, from intellectual property theft to commercial cyber espionage. But the biggest, most fundamental risk is “the loss of free speech,” Prestowitz says in his book.

Dimon is not alone as there are many examples of free-world CEOs and presidents making apologies or backtracking when they anger the Chinese regime.

During Hong Kong protests in 2019, for example, Apple pulled  from its app store a map application widely used by pro-democracy protestors that showed the location of police patrols and tear gas deployments, citing security reasons. The move was made after Chinese state media piled pressure calling for the app’s removal. Google also sparked controversy when it removed a Hong Kong protest role-playing game from its app store.

These are by no means the only apparently self- censorship  incidents by U.S tech companies. Apple, for example, removed nearly 55,000 active apps from its app store in China since 2017, according to a New York Times  report. They include apps made by minorities oppressed by the regime, including Uyghurs and Tibetans.

Over the years, the list of entities that have caved to Beijing’s censorship demands has grown long. The Gap, Disney, Delta Airlines, Medtronic, Marriott, the NBA, and many others have all bowed to the Chinese regime over issues ranging from Taiwan to Uyghurs to Hong Kong.

Such actions by U.S. firms, though, have drawn criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who accuse companies of sacrificing American values for the allure of profits in the world’s second-largest economy.

For the CEO of Apple Tim Cook and other U.S. corporate executives navigating the Chinese market, they effectively become “hostages” to the whims of the Chinese regime.

“They may be perceived as the heads of American companies, but they fear Beijing far more than they fear Washington,” Prestowitz writes in his book.

Since there’s no rule of law in China, they become “captive,” he adds. In Washington, they have lawyers and lobbyists that give them the power to influence or sue the U.S. government. In Beijing, however, they can’t sue the Chinese regime because they know they would lose—the courts in China are controlled by the Communist Party—and would face retaliation from the regime for even trying.

Beijing is aware of this leverage and hence can freely use companies as a tool. As I wrote in a previous column , the Chinese Embassy in Washington is pressuring U.S. companies and trade groups that have business interests in China to lobby against a comprehensive China bill that aims to enhance U.S. competitiveness and hold Beijing accountable for its human rights abuses.

According to Prestowitz, entities that are under pressure could be giants like Walmart, Apple, General Electric, and FedEx as well as organizations like the U.S.-China Business Council.

None of this should come as a surprise. As The Epoch Times readers will know, China exerts significant influence in the United States. It spent more than $67 million on lobbyists last year, a sixfold increase since 2016, according to OpenSecrets .

And this is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers the overt influence operations that need to be disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The FARA, passed in 1938, requires a person who represents a foreign interest to register as a foreign agent. The law, however, falls short in addressing less overt political influence operations conducted through proxies, including corporations, trade associations, and think tanks. Many China hawks in Washington are urging Congress to close this loophole in foreign influence.

“It’s really something that must be addressed,” Prestowitz tells me.

If heads of corporations have substantial business operations in China, “they should not be allowed to make political donations in the United States,” he said.

“When they testify before Congress, they should be compelled to declare that they are testifying as the leaders of Chinese businesses. They should be made to tell the public and the Congress that they in fact, are subject to pressure and influence by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Emel Akan is White House economic policy reporter in Washington, D.C. Previously she worked in the financial sector as an investment banker at JPMorgan and as a consultant at PwC. She graduated with a master’s degree in business administration from Georgetown University.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-companies-are-hostages-to-china_4137114.html

In Honor of Peng Shuai’s Disappearance...

This combination of file photos shows tennis player Peng Shuai of China (L) during her women’s singles first round match at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne on Jan. 16, 2017; and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli (R) during a visit to Russia at the Saint Petersburg International Investment Forum in Saint Petersburg on June 18, 2015. (Paul Crock and Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP via Getty Images)

In Honor of Peng Shuai’s Disappearance, the Persecution of Falun Gong, Uyghurs and So Many Others, Boycott the Beijing Olympics

Roger L. Simon

December 4, 2021; Updated December 5, 2021

Commentary

As an avid lifetime player and fan, I was probably more aware of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai  than most Americans, even media types.

I was watching on television when she cramped up in the semi-finals of the 2014 U.S. Open—her greatest success thus far—and had to be wheeled off the court, throwing the match to Caroline Wozniacki.

Peng got my sympathy then, but not nearly as much as she’s had recently since she is, as of now, a member of what is known in Spanish, because it happened so often in Argentina during the days of their  military dictatorship, as the “ desaparicida ” (the disappeared).

Ms. Peng has vanished because, as Leta Hong Fischer  explained in the New York Times:

“On Nov. 2, Peng Shuai, a former Wimbledon doubles champion, accused China’s former vice premier , Zhang Gaoli , of sexual assault. ‘Like an egg hitting a rock, or a moth to the flame, courting self-destruction, I’ll tell the truth about you,’ she wrote in a lengthy post on Weibo , China’s popular social media platform. Then she disappeared.”

The truth she was telling (we could say “alleging,” but in communist China, you don’t make casual accusations) was that Zhang sexually assaulted her. This while his wife was present in the house, no less—talk about patriarchal societies!

Zhang and Peng had had an on again, off again relationship, about which the tennis player was guilty and self-critical. She clearly wanted it over and assumed it was. The former vice premier equally clearly (and more violently) disagreed.

This is the first known #MeToo-type accusation toward a high-ranking Chinese official. Zhang was, until quite recently, a member of the Politburo.

Public discussion of her assertions and her whereabouts have been removed from the highly-censored Chinese internet.

Mega-tennis stars Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic have registered their concern and support for Peng, as have many in the sport.

Moreover, unlike most American sports organizations, notably the National Basketball Association, the Woman’s Tennis Association under Steve Simon (no relation) has actually taken action against the totalitarian communists who rule China. The WTA is suspending play  in that country until Peng surfaces in safety.

They might also wait until the CCP stops suppressing and worse Falun Gong  and Uyghurs  and other minorities, meaning millions and millions of people in gigantic China.

Bari Weiss discusses the ramifications of these choices on her Substack : “Women’s Tennis Has Balls. Does Wall Street?”

Weiss’ target is hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, whom she accuses of looking the other way at the numerous well-known atrocities of the People’s Republic, including—but, as we say, “not limited to”—the genocide against the Uyghur Muslims and the mysterious disappearances of doctors and scientists “who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19.”

She writes of Dalio:

“Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.

“‘I can’t be an expert in those types of things,’ he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. ‘I really have no idea.’ He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called ‘Principles.’”

Disgusting, no?

Well, yes, but sadly quite normal in our society these days when many in the upper reaches would rather go along with China than deal with anything so old-fashioned as morality.

Which leads us to the Olympics. How is it even faintly moral—I know, such an old-fashioned term—to participate in a festival of sport in China when one of the leading sports figures in the country has been disappeared by that government?

It’s obviously not. In a way, with the Beijing winter games coming in February, we are back at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Only this time there’s no American hero like Jesse Owens likely to be confronting the minions of Xi Jinping.

Less likely still is that the United States will actually boycott the games. There’s a question our leaders even have leverage to do so, if they so wished (which they probably don’t).

The reason is right under our noses in a Dec. 2 New York Post editorial: “Sorry, but Hunter Biden’s profiteering matters—even if the rest of the press ignores it.”

“Most of the media”, their board writes, “continue to ignore Hunter Biden like toddlers with their fingers in their ears. His laptop is ‘unconfirmed.’ ‘Unsubstantiated.’ ‘It doesn’t matter.’”

After debunking “unconfirmed” and “unsubstantiated,” which are, indeed, ridiculous at the point—in fact were always ridiculous—the editorial boards adds:

“So that leaves ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Liberal media outlets are uniquely incurious about Hunter selling the influence of his father. In the case of the Chinese deal, outlined by [author Miranda] Devine, they say there’s ‘no indication’ that Joe Biden ever received the ‘10 percent for the big guy’ promised in one email.

“But consider these questions:

- We know from Hunter’s own correspondence  that the chairman of China’s government-connected energy firm CEFC promised him $10 million a year for three years to provide ‘’ What politicians did he introduce executives to? Which of those meetings did Joe Biden help facilitate? What promises were made at those meetings?”

I’ll leave it there. There’s obviously more at the Post link, including emails indicating Hunter actually paid Joe’s bills with credit cards the two shared and that one of those same cards was used to pay a prostitute, presumably in China.

Unlike the discredited Steele dossier, this comes from actual evidence, on a hard drive that belonged to Hunter.

So, will the United States under Joe Biden be boycotting the Beijing Olympics ? You’ve got to be kidding. I wouldn’t be surprised if the family had a piece of it.

Nevertheless, We the People can boycott the Beijing games ourselves. We can decide not to watch yet another slavish display of communist propaganda on our television screens and create our own ratings disaster for NBC. They deserve it and then some.

So find something else to do during the Olympics. Write your congressman—there’s plenty to write about—or brush up on your Shakespeare before he’s banned from the schools.

As for Peng Shuai—pray for her. And while you’re at it, pray for the Uyghurs, the Falun Gong, and just about everybody else in the People’s Republic of China who cares even slightly about human freedom.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on GETTR and Parler @rogerlsimon.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-honor-of-peng-shuais-disappearance-the-persecution-of-falun-gong-uyghurs-and-so-many-others-boycott-the-beijing-olympics_4139045.html