Target: America By Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/target-america/
China is anxious for Trump to leave — so it can return to a global status quo tolerating its myriad abuses that harm the U.S.
C hina sounds giddy at the ending of the Trump presidency. Before COVID-19, it was locked in a likely lose/lose trade war with the U.S. The American corporate world was finally starting to complain that its once easy profits in joint-ventures were now being gobbled up by an increasingly voracious China.
The Left, for all its hatred of Trump, nonetheless after 2017 grew more vocal over the Chinese gulags, the Tibetization of Hong Kong, and Beijing’s Orwellian internal police state. Too many Chinese spies had popped up at the pinnacles of American power, whether erstwhile chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Dianne Feinstein’s chauffer, or, as we now learn, House Intelligence Committee member Representative Eric Swalwell’s something-or-other frequent associate, or among the Biden, Inc. clique.
With Trump the disrupter apparently gone for now, China is anxious to return to the prior global status quo — and its exemptions for systematic patent and copyright theft, dumping, currency manipulation, huge trade surpluses, and coerced technology appropriation.
Or as one prominent Chinese academic, Di Dongsheng, recently conveyed his post-election confidence in the Biden first family and the return of the American establishment to power:
I’m going to throw out something maybe a little bit explosive here. It’s just because we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.
Dongsheng elaborated, “During the U.S.-China trade war, [Wall Street] tried to help, and I know that my friends on the U.S. side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t do much. But now we’re seeing Biden was elected, the traditional elite, the political elite, the establishment, they’re very close to Wall Street, so you see that, right?”
Dongsheng summed up “right” with, “Trump has been saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that? Who helped [Hunter] build the foundations? Got it? There are a lot of deals inside all these.”
Substitute “Russia” for “China,” “Trump” for “Biden,” a Russian academic for Dongsheng, and November 2016 for November 2020, and a president-elect Trump would likely have been indicted by such admissions.
Currently China is suffering its worst global-popularity ratings in its modern history. Most countries in Europe, the U.S., and its immediate Asian neighbors poll anywhere from 70 to 90 percent disapproval of China. Such negativity is hardly surprising when over 75 million worldwide have been sickened with Wuhan COVID-19 — and perhaps another 500 million untested have had symptoms or at least developed antibodies to it — along with 1.6 million dead.
Many Western countries have vowed never again to outsource their medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries to China, given their ensuing exposure in times of a Chinese-spawned viral global pandemic. The chief rub for an awakening but recently somnolent Europe and a drowsy U.S. is not whether to reboot with China, but how — given that for decades America siphoned off its technology edge, as it trained tens of thousands of Chinese engineers and scientists, while greenlighting its own students to rack up $1.6 trillion in student loans to master the arts of green, race, class, and gender victimization.
Brilliant American engineers design battery-operated cars and sophisticated solar panels; elite-glut environmental studies majors fight over how best to bankrupt the American consumer and raise prohibitive power costs for businesses. China prefers to emulate the former, not the latter.
China tactically wages war against the U.S. all the time, from on-campus espionage to cyber assault to stealing technology and blueprints of institutions it can replicate. But more important, it counts on a sophisticated strategy to subordinate the United States, and thereby remake the entire international order to enhance its own agendas.
The Parasitic Way
China sends over a third of a million students each year to enroll in U.S. universities. Again, they are not here for the most part to focus on gender studies, pursue peace studies, or become psychology and sociology majors.
Perhaps one percent (e.g., roughly 3,000) are serious espionage operatives. Far more are the children of Communist Party elites. All know their way is paid for, on the expectation that they are to be debriefed at some point on their American careers.
Over the last two decades, through students, visiting-faculty exchanges, tourism, growing diplomatic billets, and formal espionage operatives, China has systematically replicated major American institutions. It copies wholesale American graduate-research programs, medical and scientific labs, foundations, and formal government entities, from the Pentagon to the military academies.
China is parasitic on Western institutions in the manner that imperial Japan was in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, when it sent tens of thousands of engineers, scientists, industrialists, and military attaches to the United Kingdom to master military shipbuilding and naval organization, and to Germany to copy imperial German ground forces and tactics — but without the perceived accompanying Western pollution of parliamentary government.
Nothing delights China more than hyping climate change, in hopes that the U.S. will emulate Europe in general and in particular Germany. That is, America should junk its nuclear plants, stop hydroelectric construction, shut down coal plants, phase out natural gas, and focus on “wind and solar” and other “green” technologies.
In the strategic sense, China will continue to use traditional cheaper carbon and nuclear fuels. It will stress that the West should not do the same and instead focus on “climate change.” China will then seek advantage with greater energy reliability and cheaper costs — while waiting to see when or whether Western investment and research in alternative energy should be cheaply harvested.
Divide and Impera
Europe has been apologizing for its 19th- and early-20th-century imperialism and neo-colonialism for 75 years. Yet China proudly boasts of its new brand of exploitation, the Belt and Road Initiative, to develop abroad infrastructure, harbors, ports, rails, industry, power grids, and highways.
The aims of such a vast $8 trillion project are multifarious. Beijing seeks to establish control over the world’s commercial choke points (from Suez to the Panama Canal) that will offer advantage in times of tensions and war.
It wants to interconnect a vast, Chinese-dominated predatory mercantile system, one, in naked ambition and racialist imperialism, analogous perhaps to the former Japanese “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
It lends promiscuously to cash-strapped aspiring countries and ossified developed nations, with the aim of leveraging them into “debt traps,” as uncollected loans can be paid back by ever longer and greater Chinese contractual control over infrastructure.
Divide and conquer is the subtext of the New Silk Road. Israel or Greece will bicker with its American ally over the degree to which billions of dollars in Chinese investment in their ports warps their strategic autonomy. Russia, as another beneficiary of Belt and Road, is no longer a triangular agent to check Chinese power. And it is hard for the EU cohesively to address Chinese asymmetrical trade when Beijing is increasingly controlling the harbor traffic of Antwerp, Genoa, Marseille, and Piraeus.
China’s once-grand talk of a “Polar Silk Road” to connect with Canada might help to explain why Justin Trudeau invited the Chinese military to conduct winter training in Ontario — apparently against the wishes of its NATO ally next door. The U.S. also includes non-nuclear and mostly disarmed Canada under its nuclear umbrella, which in nightmarish scenarios of nuclear deterrence, assumes Portland or San Diego are exposed to protect Montreal or Toronto.
The logic of the new Silk Road is that of the drug dealer: He accommodates his naïve user, who seeks ever more product, goes more deeply into debt and dependency to his smiling supplier, and is only dropped — or worse — for newer junkies when the strung-out’s debts reach unpayable proportions.
Identity and Race
China is essentially a monoracial nation, with a terrible record of exploiting those it deems racial inferiors, whether Tibetans or Muslim Uyghurs. Chinese in Africa make the old Cold War-stereotyped Russian brutes abroad seem like saints in comparison.
Nonetheless, the Chinese strategically piggyback on to the American race industry. And the result is that Western criticism of the Beijing’s racism and exploitation is itself deemed “racism.” China can recite chapter-and-verse canned leftist critiques of America, in the manner that Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Zawahiri once wrote that they were radicalized in part by their American enemies’ failure to embrace U.S. campaign-financing reform and climate-change remedies.
China encourages the United Nations, and international organizations such as the World Health Organization, to turn its megaphones toward the U.S. — and to indict America for its racial tensions, as if inveterately racist China too were a victim of historic white oppression.
China likes nothing better than to see our cities locked down amid riot, arson, and looting, and our country condemned in international fora. It eggs on authentically illiberal nations to blast America as illiberal.
The Naifs
When American corporations and capitalists see flat growth and fear inert future profits, they look for hope in Communist China. Disney’s post-COVID hopes of revival apparently rest with China. The NBA’s domestic audience is decreasing — as its lucrative franchising in China soars. Michael Bloomberg raised billions in Western capital for Chinese startups. Bill Gates’s Microsoft has had a 20-year relationship with the Chinese government’s spin-off concerns.
In that context, is it any surprise that Disney movies now “thank” their cooperative Chinese Communist officials when they undertake joint-venture movies in the backyard of Muslim-reeducation camps? Is it a shock that Bloomberg assures us that China is not an authoritarian country? On spec, the NBA’s Steve Kerr blasts American society and offers excuses about Chinese autocracy. Bill Gates unsurprisingly warns us not to underappreciate the valuable role China has played in dealing transparently with the virus and its spread.
China believes the current U.S. elite is unlike those who won World War II or sent a man into space. In their contempt, they believe instead that our best and brightest have grown naive, flabby, relativist, globalist, easily guilted, eager for repentance, decadent, and greedy — and can continue to be, and do, all that, while still becoming even richer with China.
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