The Epoch Times is serializing an adaptation from the Chinese of a new book, How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World, by the editorial team of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
Listen to the audiobook:
Table of Contents (cont’d)
3. Unrestricted Warfare With Chinese Communist Characteristics
a. The CCP’s Global Propaganda Operations
b. The Aim of United-Front Work: Disintegrating the Free World From Within
c. Economic Warfare: The CCP’s Heavy Weaponry
d. Using the Masses for Espionage
e. The Many Forms of Unrestricted Warfare
4. The Communist ‘China Model’
5. Lessons Learned and the Way Out
a. The Policy of Appeasement: A Grave Mistake
b. Why the West Got China Wrong
c. The Way Out
3. Unrestricted Warfare With Chinese Communist Characteristics
In the process of realizing its global ambitions, the CCP recognizes no moral limitations and obeys no laws. As discussed in Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, the history of the CCP’s founding and rise to power was a process of gradually perfecting the evilness found through history, both in China and around the world, including the Party’s nine inherited traits: “evil, deceit, incitement, unleashing the scum of society, espionage, robbery, fighting, elimination, and control.” [112] These traits are seen everywhere through the CCP’s global expansion, and the Party has continually enhanced and strengthened its techniques and their malignancy. The CCP’s unrestricted warfare is the concentrated expression of these evil traits and an important part of its success.
The idea of unrestricted warfare has always run through the CCP’s military practices, but the term was first used officially in the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two Chinese colonels. As the name implies, unrestricted warfare has these characteristics: “[It is] a war beyond all boundaries and limits, … forcing the enemy to accept one’s own interests by all means, including methods of force and non-force, military and non-military, killing and non-killing. … The means are all-inclusive, information is omnipresent, the battlefield is everywhere … beyond all political, historical, cultural, and moral restraints.”
Unrestricted warfare means that “all weapons and technologies can be used at will; it means that all boundaries between the worlds of war and non-war, military and non-military, are broken.” It utilizes methods that span nations and spheres of activity. Finance, trade, the media, international law, outer space, and more are all potential battlefields. Weapons include hacking, terrorism, biochemical warfare, ecological warfare, atomic warfare, electronic warfare, drug trafficking, intelligence, smuggling, psychological warfare, ideological warfare, sanctions, and so on. [113]
The authors of Unrestricted Warfare believe that “the generalization of war” is the inevitable future direction and that every field must be militarized. They believe that utilizing a large number of nonmilitary personnel is the key to unrestricted warfare, and that the government must quickly prepare for combat in all invisible fields of war. [114]
Many people refer to various professional or social environments as “battlefields” by way of metaphor, but the CCP takes this literally. All fields are battlefields because the CCP is in a state of war at all times, and everyone is a combatant. All conflicts are regarded as struggles of life and death. Slight problems are magnified to be questions of principle or ideology, and the whole country is mobilized, as if in a state of active war, to meet the CCP’s goals.
In the 1940s, during the Chinese Civil War, the CCP used economic warfare to harm the economy of the Nationalist government (Kuomintang, or KMT) of the Republic of China and cause it to collapse. The Party used espionage to obtain the Kuomintang’s military plans even before the KMT’s own troops received them. The CCP continues to use unrestricted means of warfare today, on a yet larger and broader scale. Unrestricted warfare, which breaks all conventional rules and moral restraints, leaves most Westerners, Western governments, and Western companies unable to understand the CCP, much less contend with it.
The CCP implements many seemingly mundane means, in numerous fields, to achieve its goals:
- Exporting Party culture and lies to the world through foreign propagandaControlling global media and carrying out ideological warfare
- Using fame, honey traps (sexual entrapment), interpersonal relationships, bribery, and despotic power to gain leverage over the leaders of global organizations, important political figures, experts in think tanks and academic circles, business tycoons, and influentials from all walks of life
- Supporting, inciting, and allying with rogue regimes to distract the United States and Western governments
- Using trade diplomacy to make free countries compete against one another, using the market of more than one billion Chinese consumers as bait
- Deepening economic integration and interdependency to tie up other countries
- Violating World Trade Organization trade rules
- Making false reform commitments to accumulate trade surplus and foreign exchange reserves
- Using the market, foreign exchange, and financial resources as weapons to suppress human rights through economic unrestricted warfare and to force other countries to abandon moral responsibility and universal values
- Forcing Chinese working in private enterprises abroad to steal information from them
- Making hostages of China’s citizens and those of other countries
a. The CCP’s Global Propaganda Operations
In 2018, when the PRC’s state-run broadcaster established a branch in London, the outlet encountered an enviable problem: receiving too many job applications. Nearly six thousand people applied for the ninety positions available. [115] People’s eagerness to work for the CCP’s mouthpiece — the jobs required reporting news from the PRC’s perspective — reflects the decline of the Western media industry and the threat that the CCP’s foreign propaganda poses to the world.
The World’s Largest Propaganda Machine
Mao Zedong once demanded that the Xinhua News Agency “take charge of the earth and let the whole world hear our voice.” [116]
After the 2008 financial crisis, Western media outlets faced their own financial and business crises. The CCP seized the opportunity to deploy its “external propaganda” campaign. The People’s Daily, China Daily, Xinhua, China Central Television (CCTV), China Radio International, and other Communist Party mouthpieces set up newspaper distribution, radio stations, and television stations around the world.
Chang Ping, former news director of the major Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend, said that between 2009 and 2015, the Chinese regime allocated 45 billion yuan ($6.52 billion) to the “national strategy for external propaganda in public relations and publicity.” According to Chinese media sources, the 45 billion yuan was only a small part of the total expenditure. [117] The CCP spends between an estimated $7 billion and $10 billion per year on media targeted at non-Chinese foreigners, according to a 2015 report published by The Wilson Center. [118]
In March 2018, the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China led the integration of CCTV, China Radio International, and China National Radio to establish the China Media Group, also called Voice of China. It has become the largest propaganda machine in the world.
The CCP’s foreign propaganda apparatus attempts to blend in by recruiting mainly local reporters and presenters. A video call between Xi Jinping and the Washington, DC, bureau of CCTV America in February 2016 showed that the majority of the journalists employed there were not Chinese. [119] But the CCP’s propaganda department drives the content they report. China’s state-run media thus produces local packaging in the target country, using local faces and voices to spout the Communist Party’s thinking and conflate the regime with the Chinese people. It uses locals abroad to spread the CCP’s stories and the CCP’s voice — not China’s true stories and not the voices of the Chinese people.
The Party also provides scholarships to young foreign journalists, including in the areas of food and education, so that they can study or be trained in mainland China and, at the same time, be instilled with the CCP’s views on journalism.
In many situations, the CCP’s propaganda appears unsuccessful due to its crude narratives, which damage its credibility. However, it uses a raft of tactics, including using foreign media as its mouthpiece, ruthlessly attacking any media and individuals that criticize the CCP, and forcing support for the CCP.
Aligning the World’s Media With the CCP
In 2015, the foreign ministers of ten countries condemned the CCP for building artificial islands in the contested waters of the South China Sea. At the same time, a radio station in Washington, DC, claimed that external forces had attempted to fabricate the facts and aggravate tensions in the South China Sea. It failed to mention the CCP’s takeover efforts. The station, WCRW, repeats a great deal of content favoring the position of the CCP — and curiously, it runs no advertising. Its only customer is a Los Angeles company, G&E Studio Inc., itself 60 percent controlled by China Radio International (CRI) in Beijing. G&E broadcasts its programs in Chinese and English on at least fifteen US stations, covering Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, Houston, Honolulu, and Portland, among others. [120] The biggest benefit of this operation is to conceal the role of the CCP and listeners are made to feel that Americans themselves are expressing their support for the CCP.
Globally, CRI operated thirty-three such stations in at least fourteen countries in 2015. By 2018, it had fifty-eight stations in thirty-five countries. [121] The control and operations are carried out via local Chinese companies, making it legal, although many people are unhappy about the Party hiding its propaganda. Under the banner of democracy, the CCP advocates for communism and attempts to manipulate its audience into adopting its views by exploiting loopholes in the laws of free societies. It uses democracy to destroy democracy.
The China Daily‘s inserts are another important part of the CCP’s external propaganda campaign. China Daily publishes pro-CCP news inserts in The Washington Post using a layout style that can give readers the impression that it’s The Washington Post’s content, as the text indicating the insert is an advertisement is placed in an inconspicuous location. [122] The CCP struck similar deals with more than thirty other newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph, and Le Figaro.
On September 23, 2018, China Daily also inserted a four-page supplement that looked like ordinary news and commentary in the local Iowa newspaper Des Moines Register. The material attacked the US president and the pending trade deal, in what some called an attempt to influence the upcoming midterm elections. [123]
When it comes to information warfare, the CCP’s totalitarian regime has several advantages over other countries. The Party blocks media from all democratic countries, but is able to insert its state-run media in democratic societies. The CCP prevents media inserts from free countries being added to its own media, but the CCP can insert its content into the media from free societies. CCP media serve the Party first and foremost, and Western journalists will never hold executive roles in their Party mouthpieces. The CCP can, however, send its own undercover people into Western media or train foreigners into being mouthpiece reporters for the Party’s media.
As long as the West still regards the CCP media as legitimate, the West will continue to lose in the information war. In 2018, the US Department of Justice ordered Xinhua and China Global Television Network to register as foreign agents in the United States. It was a step in the right direction but far from sufficient, the problem being the lack of reciprocity in the first place.
More recently, the US government has taken stronger action to counteract the CCP’s propaganda narratives. Starting in March 2020, the US State Department began placing restrictions on PRC-controlled media outlets operating in the United States, such as naming them foreign missions and limiting the number of staff they can hire. Trump administration officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been especially vocal in their criticism of the Communist Party’s attempts to win the propaganda war.
The Communist Party also excels in controlling overseas Chinese-language media. Through coercion and enticement, the CCP has recruited a large number of Chinese-language media, including some Taiwanese-founded media that previously had a strong tradition of anti-communism. The CCP-sponsored World Chinese Media Forum is used as a platform to communicate the Party’s instructions to Chinese media around the world. More than four hundred and sixty overseas Chinese media executives from more than sixty countries and regions attended the 9th World Chinese Media Forum held in Fuzhou on September 10, 2017.
An example of the impact of this media-control work can be found in the reporting of The China Press (called Qiao Bao in Mandarin), a California-based Chinese-language media outlet that carries CCP propaganda in the United States. The China Press’s lengthy reports during the CCP’s 19th National Congress in 2017 were almost identical to those published by official Party media. [124]
The CCP-controlled Overseas Chinese Media Association, with more than one hundred and sixty media members, swung into action during the 2014 Umbrella Movement’s pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The group urgently rallied one hundred and forty-two pro-PRC media outlets in Asia, Europe, Africa, the United States, and Australia to publish its “Safeguarding Hong Kong” declaration supporting the CCP’s perspective. [125]
Alongside the PRC’s economic “colonization” of Africa, CCP media has also reached all corners of the continent. The China-based television and media group StarTimes is now operating in thirty African countries and claims to be “the fastest growing and most influential digital TV operator in Africa.” [126] The regime has been relentless in its penetration of overseas media.
Suppressing opposing voices is another aspect of CCP overseas propaganda operations. The Party threatens journalists who expose it with visa denials and other forms of harassment, leading to self-censorship. The result is that there are few global media corporations that take a completely independent stance on the CCP without regard to consequences imposed by the regime.
There are several ways for a tyrannical regime like the CCP to improve its public image. The first and most direct way is to implement genuine reform and transition to a form of government that respects human rights, universal values, and the rule of law. The second way is for the regime to cover up its crimes through censorship. The third way is to actively convince the outside world to side with the regime. The third method offers the most effective form of cover for tyranny.
The CCP has used both the second and third methods simultaneously over decades. It employs a variety of large-scale propaganda activities to target foreigners, changing the minds of people to make them think positively about communist China, or at least not criticize its fundamental flaws. In some cases, CCP propaganda is even able to pull them into the mire, turning them into active allies. Through extensive investments and shrewd operations, the Party has established a worldwide system for creating alliances, isolating enemies, and turning neutral entities into sympathizers or scoundrels.
Manipulating Cultural Exchange to Indoctrinate the World in CCP Culture
Ideological and political indoctrination is an essential tool in the CCP’s destruction of traditional Chinese culture. But in recent years, the Party has advertised its commitment to restoring traditional culture, seeking to frame itself as the legitimate representative of the Chinese nation and its identity. As discussed in previous chapters of this book, this wave of supposed restoration has left out the soul of the traditions, replacing it with a fake version infused with deviant Communist Party culture. This has not only deceived the world, but also further undermined China’s ancient heritage. Typical examples of this effort are Confucius Institutes, which are set up on college and high school campuses around the world.
Confucius Institutes subvert important academic principles of autonomy and freedom of inquiry, aim to promote the CCP’s version of historical events, distort the history of China, and omit the CCP’s appalling human rights record. In some Confucius Institute classrooms, quotes from Mao are hung on the wall. On the surface, Confucius Institutes claim to teach Chinese culture, while, in fact, they promote communist doctrine and transmit Party culture.
According to incomplete statistics, as of the end of 2017, the PRC had established at least 525 Confucius Institutes (targeting colleges and universities) and opened 1,113 Confucius Classrooms (targeting elementary and secondary schools) in more than 145 countries. [127] Confucius Institute funding is provided by Hanban, an organization affiliated with the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD). The use of funds is supervised by personnel from the PRC embassies and consulates.
In addition to offering cultural and language courses, Confucius Institutes also distort history and even organize protests against activities the CCP believes threaten its dominance. For example, pro-Beijing speakers invited to Confucius Institute-sponsored events have repeated the CCP’s lies about Tibet, while others have claimed the United States drew China into the Korean War by bombing Chinese villages, according to a 2018 report by the congressional US–China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). [128]
The US National Defense Authorization Act for the 2019 fiscal year condemned the CCP’s attempts to influence US public opinion, especially “media, cultural institutions, businesses, and academic and political groups.” The act explicitly prohibits any national defense funds from being given to Chinese-language departments in US universities where a Confucius Institute exists. [129]
The CCP’s foreign propaganda campaign is a major project aimed at globally reshaping the public’s views on the regime. The CCP spreads its noxious ideology through this propaganda work, which has severely misled people about the regime, its mode of operations, its human rights abuses, and communism in general.
b. The Aim of United-Front Work: Disintegrating the Free World From Within
On December 18, 2018, the CCP celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its so-called reform and opening up. It awarded the China Reform Friendship Medal to ten influential foreigners to “thank the international community for supporting China’s reform.” [130] These ten foreigners included Juan Antonio Samaranch, former president of the International Olympic Committee, which had selected China to host the 2008 Olympics Games; and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an American businessman who lent his name as author of a fawning biography of former CCP head Jiang. Over the past few decades, countless politicians and celebrities have acted as accomplices to the CCP’s united-front tactics.
Mao labeled the united front as one of the CCP’s “three magic treasures.” Western governments have been deceived and suffered losses by these tactics, but some are beginning to wake up, and a number of investigative reports about the united front have been published.
The USCC’s 2018 report China’s Overseas United Front Work outlines the CCP’s overseas united-front work structure and operations, including how the CCP uses various types of governmental and non-governmental organizations for its united-front work and the implications for the United States and other Western countries. The report states, “This elevation of the importance of United Front work has resulted in an increased number of UFWD officials assigned to top CCP and government posts, adding roughly 40,000 new UFWD cadres.” [131]
The think tank Global Public Policy Institute published a report in 2018 detailing the activities of CCP’s united front in Europe. [132] The Hoover Institution at Stanford University released a detailed report on the same topic on Nov. 29, 2018. The report states: “China’s influence activities have moved beyond their traditional United Front focus on diaspora communities to target a far broader range of sectors in Western societies, ranging from think tanks, universities, and media to state, local, and national government institutions. China seeks to promote views sympathetic to the Chinese Government, policies, society, and culture; suppress alternative views; and co-opt key American players to support China’s foreign policy goals and economic interests.” [133]
The CCP’s united front primarily targets the following actors in the West: politicians and businesspeople; academicians and members of think tanks; overseas Chinese leaders, businessmen, and students; the movie and entertainment industries; and overseas dissidents.
Politicians and Businesspeople
The USCC report says the CCP regards its united-front work as an important tool to strengthen domestic and international support for the Party. This includes buying off Western politicians. Through persuasion, temptation, and relationship-building, the CCP maintains close ties with many high-level officials in Western governments. The Party treats these politicians as its “state treasures,” giving them lavish gifts and conferring upon them titles such as “old friends of China.” Among them are current and former United Nations secretaries general, heads of state, high-ranking government officials, senior government advisers, heads of international organizations, famous academics and think-tank scholars, and media consortium tycoons. All these people in the united-front network are expected to voice their support for the CCP at crucial moments.
Patrick Ho Chi-ping, a former Hong Kong secretary for home affairs, was convicted in the United States for bribery in December 2018. Ho had close ties to the CCP, and bribed high-ranking officials in two African nations on behalf of China Energy Co. Ltd., a CCP-linked energy corporation in order to obtain mining rights. [134]
US court papers also document the corruption and espionage carried out by Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE. Two high-ranking telecom officials in Liberia testified that between 2005 and 2007, ZTE bribed numerous officials — including the president, government officials, and judges — with paper bags full of thousands of dollars in cash. [135]
The CCP uses money and women to entrap political leaders and then use them as pawns for the regime’s ends. In a memorandum following the November 2014 midterm US elections, CEFC China Energy outlined a plan to establish relationships and friendships with politicians. Ye Jianming, the now-disgraced chairman of the company, has strong ties to European political leaders. He once asked a security adviser to a US president to persuade the US army not to bomb Syria because he wanted to buy up oil fields there. Ye also boasted connections to senior officials at the Federal Reserve and the United Nations, as well as family members of US government officials. [136]
When deemed necessary, the CCP can form various temporary united fronts to isolate its enemies. For instance, the CCP has used the votes of developing nations whose officials it previously suborned to pass or block motions at the United Nations. Via proxies, it has disrupted US efforts to stabilize the Middle East. In the meantime, it has been able to forge new economic alliances. In the US–China trade war, the CCP sought to sow conflict between the United States and Europe with the aim of using the latter as part of another united front against the United States.
Local politicians are also targets of the CCP’s united-front work. These include community leaders, city council members, mayors, state senators, and others. The usual approach is to donate to local politicians through Chinese organizations or merchants, who are invited to visit China, where they receive bribes. Their family businesses get special treatment in China. Cases of sexual entrapment, known as “honey traps,” often involve blackmail and the CCP often uses this tactic.
Chen Yonglin, a former officer at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, Australia, who defected in 2005, told The Epoch Times that the UFWD had infiltrated the Australian government and had corrupted officials. Chen said: “The amount of private bribery for the officials far surpassed political donations. Especially those higher-ranking officials; the bribes were huge. … Another aspect of bribery is the all-expenses-paid trips to China, where officials are treated as kings. This includes prostitution paid for by Chinese companies. Many officials changed their stances after returning from China.” [137]
With its strong financial backing, the CCP has paid communist and leftist politicians around the world to become its agents in those nations in order to further spread communist ideology.
The CCP uses the same tactics on those in the financial sector and a number of other industries. Business people and entrepreneurs are treated as kings and given business incentives. In return, they become the CCP’s voice for lobbying their governments and influencing their countries’ financial and economic policies. In the US–China trade war, the CCP had frequent contact with Wall Street tycoons. Many top financial companies and international corporations do business in China. To help expand their business there, these companies hire numerous children of high-ranking Chinese officials, called “princelings.” In turn, these princelings act as the Party’s eyes, ears, and voice in those companies.
Academic Circles and Think Tanks
Many think tanks in the West directly shape their country’s policies and strategy toward China; therefore, the CCP pays them special attention. The CCP exerts control over think tanks via financial sponsorship. It has bribed, controlled, or influenced almost all think tanks related to China. [138] The Chinese tech giant Huawei has provided financial support to think tanks in Washington, who then write positive reports about Huawei, according to a 2018 Washington Post report. [139]
Huawei sponsors more than twenty universities in the UK, including Cambridge and Oxford universities. Historian Anthony Glees, a British expert in national security, said: “This is about the electronic agenda being driven by the injection of Chinese money into British universities. That is a national security issue.” [140] Huawei, through its Seeds for the Future program, attracted a large number of young talented engineers — a classic communist subversion tactic.
The CCP buys off overseas scholars, especially China observers, with money, status, and fame. Some such scholars then closely follow the CCP’s rhetorical line, publishing books and articles to explain the CCP’s “peaceful rise,” the concepts of the “China dream” or the “China model.” The viewpoints of these scholars then influence the China policies of Western governments to accommodate the CCP as it goes about hijacking the international order.
To make things worse, over the past several decades, Western humanities scholars and sociologists have been heavily influenced by strains of communist ideology. With a small amount of CCP influence, they can go from merely supporting leftist ideology to embracing the Party’s rule.
Overseas Chinese Leaders, Businessmen, and Students
The CCP has successfully exploited the patriotism of overseas Chinese students to create sympathy for CCP policies and ideology. To gain the support of overseas Chinese, the CCP provides them with financial support. It frequently uses the phrase “the love for one’s homeland, the friendship of kin” as part of its deliberate conflation of China and the CCP in order to deceive overseas Chinese. The Party also uses an extensive overseas network of organizations, supporters, and spies to marginalize and attack its opponents.
The CCP uses various pretexts to invite overseas Chinese to do business with and invest in mainland China. It gives overseas Chinese leaders special treatment when visiting the country, arranging for them to meet with high-ranking officials and invites them to attend PRC national-day celebrations.
Zach Dorfman, a senior fellow at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, published an investigative report in Politico revealing Chinese and Russian espionage activities in Silicon Valley, with a particular focus on Chinese actors. The report examined Rose Pak, the San Francisco Chinese powerbroker, as an example. It noted that the CCP used Pak to have the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco marginalize Falun Gong, Tibetan, pro-Taiwan, and Uyghur groups, preventing them from participating in the Chinese New Year parade. [141]
The USCC report also detailed how Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA) are controlled by the CCP. On their websites, some CSSA branches directly state that they were established by the local Chinese consulate or are its subsidiaries, while in other cases, the control is carried out clandestinely. These organizations receive orders from the PRC consulates, preventing any dissonant views from being aired. Consulate officials harass, intimidate, and monitor students who dissent from the Communist Party line.
CSSAs and those affiliated with them sometimes even conduct industrial and economic espionage. In 2005, France’s Le Monde reported that the CSSA at the University of Leuven in Belgium was the CCP’s front-line spy group in the country. Sometimes such spy networks consist of several hundred agents working in various companies in Europe. [142]
The Film and Entertainment Industries
In recent years, the CCP has increased efforts at infiltrating the US entertainment industry. In 2012, the mainland Chinese Wanda Group spent $2.6 billion to acquire AMC, the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States. Since then, it has acquired Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion, and Carmike Cinemas, the fourth-largest movie theater chain in the United States, for $1.1 billion. [143] In 2016, Ali Pictures acquired a stake in Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, and placed a representative on Amblin’s board of directors to participate in major decision-making. [144]
One of the CCP’s main goals in infiltrating the entertainment industry is to have the world follow the CCP’s script — painting a positive image of the CCP and China’s so-called peaceful rise — to conceal the regime’s tyrannical ambitions. At the same time, this image covers up how the exportation of Party culture has corrupted the world. From 1997 to 2013, China invested in only twelve out of the top one hundred highest-grossing Hollywood movies. But in the ensuing five years, China co-financed forty-one of Hollywood’s most popular movies. [145]
Hollywood covets China’s rapidly growing movie market, and executives are well-aware that they’ll be excluded from it if they fail to toe the Party line. Thus, they set about ensuring they are in compliance with Chinese censorship. [146] American movie stars who’ve taken a stand against CCP oppression are blocked from entering the country, or their films are excluded from the Chinese market. Hollywood star Richard Gere’s clear support for Tibet, for example, led to his being denied access to China, thus limiting his career in the United States as film producers sought to avoid offending or provoking the CCP. [147] Other movie stars have been blacklisted for such “transgressions” as well.
Marginalizing Overseas Experts and Dissidents
The CCP has used intimidation and incentives to influence Western China scholars and marginalize the experts who are critical of the regime. This has led many to willingly self-censor. Intimidation includes refusal to issue visas, which has the greatest impact on young scholars. For the sake of professional advancement, many voluntarily avoid discussing human rights, Tibet, and other sensitive topics that might attract the Party’s ire.
Perry Link, a professor of East Asian Studies, was blacklisted by the CCP for his scholarship on the Tiananmen Square massacre. His treatment by the regime became a “lesson” for young scholars as to what not to do. [148]
In October 2017, Benedict Rogers, deputy chairman of the British Conservative Party’s Human Rights Commission and supporter of the Hong Kong democracy movement, went to Hong Kong on a private visit to see friends, including democracy activists, but was refused entry and repatriated at the Hong Kong airport. [149]
The 2018 report by the USCC also said that PRC intelligence agents attempt to recruit people from ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs living abroad, to act as spies. Refusal may lead to persecution of their family members in China. Uyghurs who have been threatened state that the purpose of such threats is not only to collect information about the Uyghur diaspora, but also to create discord and prevent them from effectively opposing the CCP. [150]
c. Economic Warfare: The CCP’s Heavy Weaponry
If external foreign propaganda, perception-management, and united-front work are the CCP’s forms of soft power, then its high-tech industry must be the Party’s hard power. In the 1950s, the CCP’s slogan was to “surpass the United Kingdom and catch up with the United States.” Today, that strategy has become a legitimate threat.
Since the 1980s, the PRC has implemented a series of strategic plans in science and technology, including the 863 Program (also known as the State High Technology Research and Development Program), which helped facilitate the theft of technology from other countries; the Torch Program, which helped build high-tech commercial industries; the 973 Program, for scientific research; and the 211 Project, which helped “reform” universities. [151][152] The Made in China 2025 plan aims to transform China from a manufacturing country to a manufacturing power by 2025, taking the lead in big data, 5G, and the like. The strategy includes ambitious plans for artificial intelligence, in which China aims to be a world leader by 2030. The purpose is to upgrade the PRC’s status as the world factory to that of an advanced manufacturing giant, thereby attaining global supremacy. [153]
Under normal circumstances, it is normal for a country to mobilize state resources for the benefit of industrial development, or to invest in the research of key technologies. But the CCP’s high-tech development strategy poses a fundamental threat to the free world. The PRC is not a normal country, and does not respect the norms that govern international relations. The purpose of the CCP’s technological development is not so it can join the ranks of the world’s other high-tech countries or compete on equal footing with them, but to eliminate opponents and take down Western economies — especially that of the United States — and thus be one step closer to world domination.
Technological innovation is the fruit of individual liberty, which is in natural conflict with the totalitarian rule of communism. Researchers in mainland China are deprived of the freedom to use foreign search engines, let alone express their freedom in other ways. Thus it is indeed difficult to make real breakthroughs in scientific and technological innovation given the CCP’s restrictions on thought and access to information.
To make up for this, the Party has used various underhanded means to steal Western technology and win over cutting-edge talent, and has also used unfair and extraordinary measures to undermine Western industry. The PRC has adopted an all-of-state approach, including government bodies and firms, the military, private business, and individuals to steal technologies the West spent decades and vast sums of money to develop. After assimilating and improving upon the stolen intellectual property, mainland Chinese companies mass-produce high-tech goods at low costs and dump them in international markets, squeezing out foreign enterprises, which are privately owned and cannot flout regulations as is done in the PRC. This economic strategy forms an important component in the CCP’s use of “unrestricted warfare” against the West.
The Trap of Trading Technology for Market Access
In recent years, China’s high-speed rail network has become almost like an advertisement for the country’s high-end manufacturing prowess, and the concept of “high-speed rail diplomacy” has arisen. Chinese state media has called China’s work in this area “legendary,” given its rapid development in only ten years. But to Western companies, China’s high-speed rail buildup has been a nightmare of technological theft, entrapment, and what ultimately became huge losses in exchange for only small gains.
Work on the high-speed rail project began in the early 1990s. By the end of 2005, the CCP abandoned the idea of developing the technology independently and turned to Western technology. The CCP’s goal was clear from the beginning: It planned to first acquire the technology, then manufacture the same technology and sell it for cheaper prices on the global market.
The Chinese side requires that foreign manufacturers sign a technology-transfer contract with a Chinese domestic firm before bidding on construction contracts. The Chinese regime also established formal internal assessments called “technology-transfer-implementation evaluations,” which focus not on how well foreign businesses teach their systems, but rather on how well domestic companies learn them. If domestic enterprises don’t completely master the technology, China doesn’t pay. The authorities also require that by the last batch of orders, local companies must produce 70 percent of the orders. [154]
Because foreign companies felt that accessing China’s market was an opportunity not to be missed, such terms didn’t stop them from signing contracts. Japan’s Kawasaki, France’s Alstom, Germany’s Siemens, and Canada’s Bombardier all submitted bids. Still, no Western company was willing to transfer its core, most-valued technology. The CCP thus continued to play games with several of the companies in the hope that at least one would relent and give up something of real value for the benefit of short-term interests. Sure enough, when it appeared that one company would get a chunk of the Chinese market in exchange for technology, the others began to fear being left out. Thus, several of them fell into the CCP’s trap, with the result that China was able to extract key technology from the above four companies.
The PRC has invested huge sums in the rail project, acting regardless of cost, and Chinese firms built out the world’s most extensive high-speed rail system by mileage. In a few years, China rapidly assimilated Western technology, which was then turned into “independent intellectual property rights.” What really shocked Western companies was when the PRC then began applying for high-speed rail patents abroad, with Chinese firms becoming fierce competitors against their former teachers on the international market. Because Chinese companies have accumulated a great deal of practical experience in this realm, and are afforded all the industrial advantages brought by large-scale production capacity and massive state financial backing, China’s high-speed rail industry possesses a competitive advantage against peers. It has become a key element of the Party’s One Belt, One Road project.
While foreign companies once dreamed of getting their share of the huge market for high-speed rail in China, they found instead that not only were they squeezed out of that market, but they also had created a tough international competitor. Yoshiyuki Kasai, an honorary chairman of the Central Japan Railway Company, said: “The Shinkansen [Japanese bullet train] is the jewel of Japan. The technology transfer to China was a huge mistake.” [155]
The CCP itself acknowledges that China’s success in high-speed rail was achieved by standing on the shoulders of giants. Indeed, its purpose from the beginning was to become a giant so as to slay all the others. The CCP has an explicit dual purpose: Its short-term goal is to use economic achievements to prove the legitimacy of its regime and to make economic and technological progress to maintain and excite nationalist sentiment and propaganda. But its long-term purpose is to prove that its communist system is superior to the capitalist system, so it unscrupulously steals technology and uses the power of the entire country to compete with capitalist free enterprise.
The CCP’s tactics — promising market access in exchange for technology, coercing tech transfers, absorbing and improving foreign technology, having mainland Chinese firms practice in the domestic market before advancing to the world, and dumping products globally to undercut competitors — have led Western companies, and job markets, to suffer immensely.
In 2015, the CCP proposed the ten-year Made in China 2025 project, envisioning that by 2025, China would have transformed from a big manufacturing country to a manufacturing power, and that by 2035, the country’s manufacturing industry would surpass that of industrially advanced countries like Germany and Japan. The PRC hopes it will lead innovation in key manufacturing sectors by 2049. Using such lofty rhetoric, the CCP has raised the status of its manufacturing sector to “the foundation of the nation” and “the instrument for rejuvenating the country.”
A Manufacturing Superpower Built on Theft
How did the CCP boost Chinese manufacturing and innovative potential in such a short period of time? It used the same old tricks: It coerced companies to transfer their technologies, as in the case of high-speed rail and demanded that foreign companies form joint ventures with Chinese firms so they could acquire the foreign companies’ technologies. In addition, the regime encouraged domestic firms to make acquisitions of overseas high-tech companies, directly investing in startups with key technologies, and establishing overseas research-and-development centers. It induced leading foreign tech and scientific research institutes to set up R&D centers in China, and it used targeted policies to bring in foreign technology experts.
Many startups in Silicon Valley need capital. The CCP uses taxpayer money to invest in them in order to get its hands on new technologies, including rocket engines, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and 3D printers that manufacture flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Ken Wilcox, chairman emeritus of Silicon Valley Bank, said in 2017 that within a six-month period, he was approached by three different Chinese state-owned enterprises about buying technology on their behalf. He said: “In all three cases, they said they had a mandate from Beijing, and they had no idea what they wanted to buy. It was just any and all tech.” [156] A 2018 investigative report by the Office of the United States Trade Representative said that Digital Horizon Capital (formerly Danhua Capital) uses China’s venture capital to help the CCP gain top technologies and intellectual property in the United States. [157]
The PRC’s aptitude for industrial espionage far exceeds the scope of commercial spies in the past. In order to steal technology and secrets from the West, the regime mobilizes all available personnel and tactics — including espionage, hackers, international students, visiting scholars, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants working in Western companies, and Westerners lured by monetary interests.
The CCP has always coveted the US F-35 stealth fighter jet. In 2016, a Canadian permanent citizen from China, Su Bin, was sentenced to forty-six months in prison for helping steal plans for the F-35 and other US military aircraft. Su worked with two hackers from the Chinese military to penetrate the computer systems of the manufacturer Lockheed Martin and steal the trade secrets. Investigators found that Su’s group had also stolen information about Lockheed’s F-22 stealth fighter and Boeing’s C-17 strategic transport aircraft, as well as 630,000 files from Boeing’s system, totaling some 65 gigabytes of data. [158] The PLA’s own J-20 stealth fighter exhibited in recent years is now very similar to the American F-22, and the smaller Chinese FC-31 is an imitation of the F-35.
David Smith, an expert on metamaterials at Duke University, invented a kind of “invisibility cloak” with the potential to one day protect US forces. The US military invested millions in support of his research. In 2006, Chinese student Ruopeng Liu came to the United States with the express purpose of studying at Smith’s lab, becoming the scientist’s protégé. An FBI counterintelligence official believes Liu had a specific mission: to obtain Smith’s research. In 2007, Liu brought two former colleagues, traveling at the Chinese regime’s expense, to visit Smith’s lab, and they worked on the invisibility cloak for a period of time. Later, the equipment used to make the cloak was duplicated at Liu’s old lab in China. [159]
On December 20, 2018, the Department of Justice sued two Chinese citizens from the Chinese hacker organization APT 10, which has close ties with the CCP. According to the indictment, from 2006 to 2018, APT 10 carried out extensive hacking attacks, stealing massive amounts of information from more than forty-five organizations, including NASA and the Department of Energy. The documents stolen included information on medicines, biotechnology, finance, manufacturing, petroleum, and natural gas. FBI Director Christopher Wray said: “China’s goal, simply put, is to replace the US as the world’s leading superpower, and they’re using illegal methods to get there. They’re using an expanding set of non-traditional and illegal methods.” [160]
PRC theft of technology and patents is hard to combat and prevent. Kathleen Puckett, a former US counterintelligence officer in San Francisco, said that the CCP puts all its efforts into espionage and gets everything for free. [161]
The CCP has launched a “war against everyone” to loot advanced technology from the West, using patriotism, racial sentiments, money, and prestige to drive its unprecedented stealing spree.
Some have defended Chinese intellectual property theft by arguing that such activity can’t amount to much, because Chinese firms don’t get the full picture of how technology is deployed and scaled. But it’s very dangerous to look at the PRC’s industrial espionage this way. Espionage in the electronic age is completely different from that in decades past, in which spies might take some photos. CCP spies now steal entire databases of research, and in many cases, scoop up not only the technology, but also the experts. With the power of the world factory that the PRC has developed for decades and the R&D potential it has accumulated, the regime is truly willing and able to build a manufacturing superpower based on theft — and it is on course to do so.
The Thousand Talents Program: Espionage and Talent Attraction
From when mainland China opened up in the 1970s until today, millions of Chinese students have studied overseas, and many have become accomplished in various fields. The CCP seeks to recruit and use these talented individuals, invested in and trained by the West, to directly bring back to China the technology and economic information they’ve acquired so as to support the Party’s campaign for global dominance. Until its recent disappearance, multiple PRC government departments ran the Thousand Talents Program. Started in 2008, the Thousand Talents Program was ostensibly about recruiting top Chinese talent overseas to return to China for full-time or short-term positions. But the real goal was for state industry to get its hands on new technology and intellectual property from the West. In 2020, following mounting pressure from the West, information about the Program has been scrubbed from public view.
The FBI declassified a document about the talent programs in September 2015. It concludes that recruiting target individuals allows China to profit in three ways: gaining access to research and expertise in cutting-edge technology, benefiting from years of scientific research conducted in the United States and supported by US government grants and private funding, and severely impacting the US economy. [162]
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) noted in a 2018 report that foreign nationals had transferred US intellectual property to their native countries while on the US government payroll. Their actions have unfairly impacted all US academic institutions. [163] M. Roy Wilson, a report co-author and co-chair of the advisory committee to the NIH director, said that a key qualification of becoming part of the Thousand Talents Program is having access to valuable intellectual property. He said that the problem was significant, not random, and that the severity of the intellectual property losses was impossible to ignore. [164]
Peter Harrell, adjunct senior fellow in the energy, economics, and security program at the Center for a New American Security, said: “China is pursuing a whole-of-society approach to its technological capabilities. That includes purchasing innovative companies through overseas investments, requiring Western companies to transfer cutting-edge technologies to China as a condition of market access, providing vast state resources to finance domestic technological development, financing training for top Chinese students and researchers overseas, and paying a hefty premium to attract talent back to China.” [165]
The Thousand Talents Program included as its targets almost all Chinese students who have come to the United States since the 1980s and who find themselves with access to useful information for the regime’s industrial, technological, and economic development — potentially tens of thousands of individuals. The CCP is mobilizing the capacity of the entire country and population to conduct unrestricted warfare in its recruitment of talent and accumulation of intellectual property.
A Sinister, ‘Whole-of-Government’ Effort
In addition to outright stealing, PRC state support and subsidies are also an important means for the CCP to fulfill its ambitions. State support means that the regime can use huge sums of money to support key industries. Effectively, this is about using China’s national power to exert pressure on private businesses in the West. This poses an enormous, unique challenge to countries where leaders are democratically elected and leave business decisions to businesses themselves. Chinese subsidies — ultimately taken out of the pocket of the unconsenting taxpayer — mean that Chinese manufacturers can ignore the real costs of doing business, making them unstoppable predators in international markets.
The solar cell industry is a classic example of the CCP regime’s subsidies. In the early 2000s, no Chinese companies existed among the top ten solar-panel manufacturers, but by 2017 there were six, including the top two. The green energy industry was heavily promoted during US President Barack Obama’s first term, but before long, dozens of solar-panel makers were filing for bankruptcy or had to cut back their businesses in the face of unrelenting competition from China, which ultimately undermined enthusiasm in the clean energy industry. [166] The damage was wrought by China’s dumping of products on the international market, enabled by the regime’s subsidies for its domestic solar industry.
In Western countries, states also fund key projects, including those on the cutting edge of technological development. The prototype of the internet, for instance, was first developed by the US Department of Defense. However, in the West, government participation at the national level is limited. Once a technology is commercialized, private companies are free to act as they will. For example, NASA disseminated its advanced research results to industry through its Technology Transfer Program. Many of its software projects simply put their source code on the Web as open source. In contrast, the CCP directly uses the power of the state to commercialize high-tech, which is equivalent to using a “China Inc.” to compete against individual Western firms.
The Made in China 2025 project is, of course, inseparable from state subsidies and state industrial planning. If the CCP continues on its current track, the story of the solar panel companies will play out in other industries, and Chinese products will become global job-killers. Through unrestricted economic and technological warfare, the CCP has successfully led many Western companies, including multinational corporations, into a trap. They handed over capital and advanced technology, but weren’t able to compete fairly in the Chinese market, and instead helped create their own state-backed competitors. The CCP used them as pawns to achieve its ambitions.
d. Using the Masses for Espionage
The CCP regards information as simply another weapon in its arsenal. Regardless of the field, whether pertaining to the state, private enterprise, or individual endeavors, all forms of information are seen as fair game for the fulfillment of the regime’s strategic ambitions.
The CCP also has used legislation to force all Chinese people to participate in its unrestricted warfare. The National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China, passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, states that “national intelligence agencies may require relevant agencies, organizations, and citizens to provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.” [167] This means that any Chinese citizen can be coerced by the CCP to collect intelligence and become a spy.
On December 12, 2018, the US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the CCP’s non-traditional espionage activities. Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI counterintelligence division, outlined the CCP’s approach: The Party plays by the rules when it’s advantageous, while at other times, it bends or breaks the rules to achieve its goals. When possible, the Party also tries to rewrite the rules and reshape the world according to its own requirements. [168]
John Demers, assistant attorney general of the National Security Division of the US Department of Justice, testified that the CCP’s Made in China 2025 plan is essentially a handbook for what to steal. He disclosed that from 2011 to 2018, more than 90 percent of the cases of economic espionage allegedly involving or benefiting a country, and more than two-thirds of the trade-secret theft cases were related to the PRC. [169]
The CCP’s espionage is far from limited to intellectual property. The CCP controls all major private companies in China and uses them for international intelligence gathering. US Senator Ted Cruz called Huawei a “Communist Party spy agency thinly veiled as a telecom company,” in a Twitter post in 2018. “Its surveillance networks span the globe and its clients are rogue regimes such as Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba. The arrest of Huawei’s CFO Wanzhou Meng in Canada is both an opportunity and a challenge,” Cruz wrote. [170]
An investigation published in January 2018 by the French newspaper Le Monde, revealed that confidential information from the African Union (AU) headquarters in Ethiopia had been sent to Shanghai every night for five years, starting in January 2012. The CCP was accused of being behind the hack. A report released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute six months later revealed that Huawei was the key provider of the information and communications technology infrastructure at the AU headquarters building. [171]
André Ken Jakobsson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Military Studies in Copenhagen, said: “What is worrying is that the CCP can get very critical and sensitive information. They can enter a system that controls our entire society. Everything will be connected to the 5G network in the future. We are worried that the country that provides such equipment — China — controls the switch.” [172]
For at least two decades, the CCP has used hackers on a large scale to obtain critical information from other countries. As early as 1999, CCP hackers disguised as a Falun Gong overseas website attacked the US Department of Transportation. The department contacted the website to investigate the attack and traced it back to a hacker from a Party-run intelligence agency. [173]
In June 2015, CCP hackers attacked the US Office of Personnel Management, stealing the data and security information of more than 21.5 million Americans. Those affected included 19.7 million government employees and 1.8 million of their family members.
In November 2018, Marriott International announced that private information, including passport details, of up to 500 million guests had been stolen by hackers, dating back to 2014. US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo confirmed on December 12 that the hacking was carried out by the CCP. Marriott is the largest hotel supplier to the US government and military.
e. The Many Forms of Unrestricted Warfare
The CCP utilizes other methods of unrestricted warfare. A few major areas are listed below.
Diplomatic Warfare
The CCP’s typical diplomatic method is to divide and conquer. When the world criticizes the CCP for its human rights abuses, regime officials invite each country to discuss human rights separately and in private; consequently, such criticism can have no restraining effect. Moreover, the CCP has virtually disintegrated the international norms that safeguard human rights.
The CCP used this method to escape condemnation and sanctions right before being admitted to the World Trade Organization. Once admitted, the CCP immediately began using economic means to tempt various countries, and again used divide-and-conquer to achieve large-scale breakthroughs in various areas.
The CCP also uses rogue tactics of hostage diplomacy to arrest and threaten both Chinese and non-Chinese until its demands are met. Before the PRC was granted permanent normal trade relations status by the United States in 2002, regime authorities arrested dissidents before almost every negotiation session, then used the release of the dissidents as a bargaining chip during the negotiations. The Communist Party disregards the lives of its own people, but it knows that Western societies care about basic human rights. Therefore, it uses its own citizens as hostages, puts a knife to the neck of the Chinese people, and uses them to threaten the enemy — the United States.
With the rapid development of the Chinese economy, the CCP has become bolder, even taking foreign hostages. Six weeks after the aforementioned Su Bin was arrested in Canada for hacking into a US military database, Canadian couple Kevin and Julia Garratt were arrested in China and accused by the CCP of espionage. [174]
After the arrest of Huawei’s vice president and chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in Vancouver on December 1, 2018, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs incited a series of protests, with the Chinese Embassy in Canada mobilizing a large number of pro-communist overseas Chinese for the action. In addition, the PRC arrested two Canadian citizens in retaliation for Meng’s arrest. [175] This was both to put direct pressure on Canada and to drive a wedge between Canada and the United States.
Lawlessness is the CCP’s modus operandi. Any foreigner in China may become a hostage at any time and be used as a bargaining chip for political, economic, and diplomatic purposes. Additionally, when the CCP threatens overseas Chinese, especially dissidents, it often uses their relatives in China as hostages.
Military Warfare
The CCP has developed asymmetric weapons, such as anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft carrier missiles. In terms of conventional weapons, the CCP has attempted to surpass the technological supremacy of the United States by having a larger quantity of matériel targeting high-value assets. The CCP has grown economically and technically, giving it greater operational space to implement cyberwarfare, outer-space warfare, and other unconventional high-tech attack vectors against the United States, as addressed in the last section.
The PLA publicly declares that the conduct of the kind of war it wishes for would “appear in a manner that is cross-national, cross-domain, and utilizes any means necessary.” In the PLA’s ideal war, “tangible national boundaries, intangible cyberspace, international law, national law, codes of conduct, and ethics are not binding on them [PLA forces]. … They don’t take responsibility for anyone, and are not restricted by any rules. Anyone can be a target, and any means can be used.” The authors of Unrestricted Warfare declare to their readers: “Have [you] considered combining the battlefield with the non-battlefield, war with non-war, military with non-military — specifically, combining stealth aircraft, cruise missiles and network killers, nuclear war, financial warfare, and terrorist attacks? Or, simply put, Schwarzkopf [then-commander-in-chief of US Central Command] + Soros [leftist billionaire] + Morris [creator of the Morris Worm computer virus] + bin Laden? This is our true card.” [176]
Internet Warfare
Through the efforts of Huawei and ZTE to seize the 5G technology market, the CCP is striving to gain a dominant position in 5G standards, and wants to play a leading global role in the new technology. The former head of the Federal Reserve of Dallas said, “If China were to win the race, they would establish the protocols for the internet, just as English replaced German as the language of science and became the language of all crucial activity on a global scale.” [177]
At present, with the impending rollout of 5G technology, the internet faces a new round of evolution. With the combination of 5G and artificial intelligence, the internet’s control over the physical world is dramatically expanding, and the rules of the entire world are being rewritten. If the CCP dominates 5G, it will be able to act unimpeded.
In addition, once the CCP’s external propaganda operations are successfully integrated with a China-controlled 5G, its efforts at indoctrinating foreign audiences will greatly exceed their current scale and impact.
Narcotics Warfare
At a US Cabinet meeting held on August 16, 2018, President Donald Trump said that the proliferation of opioids, particularly the synthetic drug fentanyl from China, is “almost a form of warfare.” [178] In 2017, more than seventy thousand people died of a drug overdose in the United States, of which more than 40 percent were related to synthetic opioids (mainly fentanyl and its analogues). These drugs are primarily produced in China and then enter the United States through the US Postal Service or are smuggled in via the US–Mexico border. [179]
Markos Kounalakis, a senior researcher at the Central European University and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, in November 2017, wrote that fentanyl was “being used as a weapon in China’s 21st Century Opium War against America.” Kounalakis cited fentanyl trafficking as an example of CCP strategy: The CCP sees the real value of this chemical as a “profitable opiate export that also destroys American communities and roils the US political landscape.” [180]
Mass Mobilization Warfare
In September 2018, a Chinese family traveling in Sweden claimed they were mistreated by police after they were removed from a hotel for attempting to sleep in the lobby. A video of the melodramatic family being removed was then exaggerated by the Chinese Embassy and media, and Chinese people began boycotting Swedish companies Ikea and H&M. [181] The Swedish TV station SVT aired a satirical segment about the incident on its comedy show, which further exacerbated the situation. Tens of thousands of Chinese internet users flooded the websites of the Swedish Embassy, segment host Jesper Rönndahl, and the TV station’s Facebook page. [182]
After sixty years of destruction of traditional culture and its replacement with Communist Party culture, the CCP is able to coerce millions of Chinese people and turn them into a mass army. Before the ninetieth anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army in 2017, the CCP came up with software that can add PLA uniforms to an individual in an uploaded image. In just several days, the app received over one billion visits.
The CCP is able to use nationalism to control the public because it has suppressed information about the Party’s true history, leaving the people ignorant of its crimes. In particular, people don’t know the CCP’s history of killing. Thus, generations of Chinese people who grew up in the Party culture carry the Party culture with them. When they travel abroad to make a living, they export Party culture overseas and become part of the regime’s massive overseas army. This has strengthened the CCP’s ability to control this army in the free world and use it for subversion.
Cultural Warfare
The CCP has been peddling Party culture and its values under the banner of Chinese traditional culture and customs for many years. People all over the world have a strong interest in China’s long history and rich culture, yet their understanding is very limited. The CCP knows this well and takes full advantage of it. By adopting some of the superficial forms of traditional culture, the CCP has disguised itself as the guardian and true representative of Chinese culture, making it extremely difficult for people in other countries to see through the deceit.
Financial Warfare
The CCP has begun promoting its own financial payment system and use of the renminbi through “economic assistance” and private enterprises, in an attempt to build a global infrastructure. It intends to use the renminbi to replace the US dollar’s dominance in international currency circulation. According to the CCP’s unrestricted financial-warfare strategy, the regime can achieve its goals simply by printing massive amounts of money, thus destroying the financial system when necessary. CCP think tanks have advocated the weaponization of foreign exchange reserves.
Other Forms of Unrestricted Warfare
During the 1989 student democracy movement, the CCP ordered soldiers and police to disguise themselves as Beijing civilians and create riots so that the military could use them as an excuse for its mass killing, which it called “suppressing riots.” During the early years of the persecution campaign against Falun Gong, the CCP fabricated the “self-immolation” incident to justify the ensuing escalation of the persecution. During Hong Kong’s Occupy Central With Love and Peace movement, the CCP transported people from Shenzhen to incite violence in Hong Kong, effectively forcing police action to escalate toward violence.
In the eyes of the CCP, murder and assassination are commonplace methods, and in the future, the Party may well use any means — poisoning, assassination, explosions, the sabotage of power grids or transportation facilities, and so on — to create chaos and conflict in the West.
The core of unrestricted warfare is about mobilizing evil people to destroy mankind step by step. The CCP is highly skilled at tempting people to go against morality and their own conscience, and those who do so often end up as either passive in the face of the CCP’s abuses, or active participants. Therefore, for influential figures in the political, economic, military, media, cultural, technological, educational, and other fields, the CCP uses all means to discover their weaknesses — whether vested interests or desires — and uses them to make people willingly collaborate with the Party. When this doesn’t work, the CCP uses threats and intimidation to exploit their fears or mistakes, effectively blackmailing them into assisting the Party. In some cases, the CCP has even provided transplant organs obtained by killing to buy off influential figures in need of a transplant.
The resources the CCP is able to bring to bear to infiltrate other countries defy the imagination, and the facts uncovered at present are only the tip of the iceberg. People in all walks of life, especially in politics and business, have become the CCP’s pawns in its unrestricted warfare campaign. Almost all countries in the world have begun to feel the CCP’s global ambitions and its evil, unrestricted means.
4. The Communist ‘China Model’
The CCP’s nature means that it will always set itself against traditional culture, morality, and universal values. Today’s CCP is the world’s axis of evil and the enemy of humankind. The world must wake up and take action.
China has a vast territory and the largest population of any country on earth. It has become the world’s second-largest economy and, from 2010, the second-largest military power. No tyrannical force in history has had such economic and military power. The Party has absorbed the most sinister and deformed elements of modern totalitarian regimes and ancient Chinese tactics, and therefore, it never plays by the rules. Its strategies are both deep and ruthless, often beyond the imagination and understanding of leaders and strategists in other countries. By hijacking 1.3 billion Chinese people, the CCP has presented a huge and greatly coveted market to the world, attracting foreign capital, business people, and politicians. It has them turn a blind eye to the CCP’s human rights abuses and evil, and in some cases, even gets them to cooperate with the CCP in its crimes.
The CCP has killed eighty million Chinese people. In recent times, it has committed countless crimes against Falun Gong practitioners, underground Christians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, dissidents, and those at the lower end of society. Once the regime collapses, it will be brought to justice and punished for all its crimes. To avoid this fate, the CCP will not hesitate to commit more horrific crimes to protect itself.
The Chinese Communist Party is the communist specter’s main agent in the human realm. Fated for elimination, its existence has always been accompanied by a strong sense of crisis and fear. Driven by this sense of constant crisis, the CCP resorts to any means necessary at critical moments, taking extreme measures to keep itself going. It has built itself up in an attempt to replace the United States and dominate the world and is preparing for the final battle with the United States with determination and nonstop effort. At the same time, it has used a range of means to export the CCP’s model and the Communist Party’s ideology, poisoning the world.
If the orthodox morality that has helped humankind survive for thousands of years is ever truly destroyed, the result will be the destruction of the entire human race. Therefore, in addition to its military, economic, scientific, and technological endeavors, the CCP is also bent on imposing its ideology of atheism and warped views of good and evil on other countries.
All the CCP’s ambitions — which it pursues through soft power, hard power, and sharp power — are based on a total disregard for morality and are aimed at serving its larger ambition of destroying traditional morality and universal values. The CCP’s goal is to establish itself as an evil empire and world ruler. It aims to bring totalitarian oppression to the world — a global police state characterized by brainwashing, mind control, mass surveillance, the elimination of private ownership, official atheism, the elimination of religion and traditional culture, unrestrained carnal desires, corruption, and moral degeneration. Its aim is to drag the world into poverty and turmoil, turning men into beasts and sending humankind into an abyss of moral degradation. All this is the path arranged by the communist specter in its attempt to destroy mankind.
5. Lessons Learned and the Way Out
a. The Policy of Appeasement: A Grave Mistake
Ambitious and eager to assert its global hegemony, the CCP poses a serious threat to the world. Sadly, to this day, many countries, governments, and political figures still wish to befriend the CCP, oblivious of the danger. The relationship is illustrated by a Chinese saying, “If you raise a tiger cub, eventually it’ll grow up to devour you.”
Without the aid of the developed Western countries and the support of so many multinational corporations, high-tech giants, and large financial institutions, the CCP could not have developed from a weak economy with a regime on the verge of collapse to an indomitable axis of evil over the short span of just a few decades.
Pillsbury, the national security expert, has argued that the West all along has held unrealistic expectations of the CCP, such as believing that China would inevitably become more democratic, that it longed for an American-style capitalist society, that it would inevitably integrate into the international social order, that US–China exchanges would bring about full cooperation, or that the hawkish elements in the CCP were weak, and so forth. In his 2015 book, he strongly urged the US government to quickly face reality and adopt counter-measures against the CCP, lest it allow the CCP to win. [183]
A March 2018 article in The Economist reflected on the policy that Western countries adopted toward China — specifically their gamble that China would head toward democracy and the free market economy. It conceded that the West’s gamble has failed; China under the CCP isn’t a market economy and, on its present course, will never be one. On the contrary, the CCP treats business and trade as extensions of state power and controls them as such. It uses its monopoly on power to shape the global economy, uses money to manipulate trading partners, and punishes individuals and groups it does not agree with. [184]
b. Why the West Got China Wrong
The West got China wrong for many reasons: the communist specter’s complex arrangements mentioned earlier, the duplicity and chameleon-like nature of the CCP, and the difficulty that free societies have in differentiating the CCP from China. In addition, the West got China wrong because of the pursuit of short-term gains, whether by individuals, companies, or entire nations. This provided yet another opportunity for the CCP to exploit.
The morally corrupt CCP targets gaps in the morality of people in free societies, people whose pursuit of short-term profits allows the CCP to infiltrate and corrupt the very foundations of these societies. Policies adopted by the United States regarding the CCP, are largely based on considerations of short-term gain instead of the most fundamental, long-term interests of America — such as the spirit upon which the country was founded.
Humankind’s glory and authority come from the divine and are determined by humankind’s moral level. The prosperity and strength bestowed on an ethnic group or nation also depend on its level of morality. Using ordinary means, humans are incapable of negating the arrangements made by the communist specter. Following this logic, where the West has gone wrong becomes clear — whatever the human methods applied, ultimately these cannot succeed in overcoming the forces of evil.
Many governments, large companies, and business people may, for a period of time, ostensibly obtain benefits from the CCP in exchange for the sacrifice of their moral principles. But in the end, they’ll lose more than they gain. Such ill-gained, superficial benefits are all poisonous.
The CCP is not a political party or regime in the normal sense. It does not represent the Chinese people. It represents the communist specter. To associate with the CCP is to associate with the devil. To be friendly with the CCP is to appease the devil, aid it, and play a role in pushing humanity toward destruction. Conversely, to push back against the CCP is to engage in the battle between good and evil. This is not a simple matter of countries fighting over national interests. It is a battle for the future of humanity.
c. The Way Out
Today, China and the world are at a crossroads. For the Chinese people, the Chinese Communist Party, which owes countless debts of blood, cannot be expected to make any real reforms. China will be free only when the Communist Party is consigned to history.
For people around the world, China is known as the land of an ancient civilization characterized by courtesy and righteousness. Free of the Communist Party, China will once again be a normal member of the civilized world — a nation whose human and natural resources, diverse ancient traditions, and cultural heritage will be part of the wealth of humanity.
Moving forward during times of great difficulty, more and more Chinese people are coming to realize the evil nature of the CCP. With the publication of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party in November 2004, a growing number of people began to regain their moral courage and made the decision to separate themselves from the communist specter. More than 350 million Chinese have renounced the CCP and its affiliated organizations. If the free world can support the trend of renouncing the CCP and sever all ties with the specter, the CCP will not be able to continue to act as it does.
The seemingly indomitable Soviet Union dissolved overnight. Though the CCP is baring its fangs globally, its dissolution could occur just as rapidly once the world recognizes its evil nature and makes the righteous choice.
The rise of the CCP resulted mostly from moral corruption and from people’s being blinded by the pursuit of vested interests. To escape this fate, we need to summon up our moral courage, revive traditional values, and firmly believe in the divine.
To defeat the CCP, simply depending on ordinary secular means will never be enough. The communist specter has greater power than humans, and this is the underlying cause of the CCP’s continuous expansion. However, evil can never rival the divine. As long as humans can stand by the divine and abide by divine will, they will be blessed and overcome the specter’s infernal arrangements.
The CCP is the enemy of all humanity, having established the bloodiest yet most powerful tyranny history has ever seen. All nations and peoples must resist its global ambitions if they are to secure their future and that of all civilization. The evil CCP is destined for elimination; thus, to reject the CCP is to avoid sharing in its fate.
Read Next: Conclusion
Updated July 2, 2020.
Read the series here: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
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