Our Two Cold Wars Couldn’t Be More Different. Part Three: Our Current Cold War with China (Continued)

Victor Davis Hanson

Fourth, China’s propaganda is also brilliant. It plugs right into woke/DEI ideology. As soon as it was clear, and it was quite soon, that the Covid-19 virus did not “leap” from some sick pangolin or bat far distant from the Wuhan Lab, and when it was uncovered that Dr. Fauci and Peter Dazak had connived to evade U.S. law by funding and sending expertise and instrumentation to Wuhan for gain of function viral research, China sprang into full DEI victimhood mode.

We were told such speculation was “racist.” How dare Americans, who had lost one million to Covid, suggest it was the “China virus”! We were chastised for reviving the “Yellow Peril” paranoia.

The most ethnocentric and racist nation in the world accused the least racist of being—racist! Suddenly, if a journalist followed the evidence and wrote that China was sending its citizens from Ground Zero at Wuhan in the hundreds of thousands on flights to Europe and the U.S.—even as they were barred from flying from Wuhan to anywhere else in China—he was reviled as a racist conspiracist.

Fifth, American capitalists even before the millennium began flocking to China. Most knew that their partnerships were designed to be leveraged and expropriated by China, as soon as Beijing stole enough of the expertise of the investor to go it alone. But no matter, trillions of dollars were to be made by using cheap Chinese labor to export consumer goods to the West. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration that “globalism” could be defined chiefly as Western and especially American unprecedented investment in China.

What was the attitude of the U.S. government toward creating with American dollars and expertise an export giant that would destroy American jobs? During the two Bush administrations, the Clinton and Obama years, and the Biden disaster, the assumption was that inflation was held down by the importation of cheap Chinese-assembled consumer goods. Moreover, we were told that the more China was “Americanized” (enriched) by our investors and the larger its massive trade surpluses became with the U.S., the more it would be “democratized” and brought into “the family of nations” and the “rules-based order.”

And the rest is history.

Finally, we must ask whether we would have prevailed over the Soviet Union had there been 300,000 Russian students in American universities, with “Lenin Institutes” on major campuses?

Would we have ended Russian communism, if Moscow had given billions of dollars to fund “Russian studies” programs in our elite universities?

Or a Russian lab had unleashed, even if “accidentally,” a manufactured virus that devastated the Western world and killed one million Americans and gave permanent disability to another 10 million or more?

Or if rare earth metals, critical to our defense, were mostly in the sole possession of Moscow?

Or again if Russian “farmers” were buying acreage near our strategic American bases. Or if Russian-owned bio-labs began popping up across America?

The difference then with the two Cold Wars?

Russia waged its war with Third-World proxies, enslaved Eastern Europeans of the Warsaw Pact, dispatched legions of spies, embraced pathetic propaganda, and raised the threat of thousands of nukes?

China, however, (for now) wages the war with money, spies, students, gifts, and sophisticated propaganda that transforms an imperialist bully into a poor victim of American racism, steals American technology, and crafts a capitalism married to totalitarianism in ways that create power and wealth beyond the imagination of the old Russian apparat.