Our Problem with China. Part One

Victor Davis Hanson

Much of Trump’s widely diverse foreign and domestic initiatives have something to do with China, which he sees not just as America’s chief rival but as bent on world domination at our (deadly) expense.

Consider the following:

China is behind the fentanyl crisis, sending the raw product to the Mexican cartels for the expressed purpose of seeing it used to kill 70,000 Americans.

China is behind much of Mexico’s current $175 billion trade surplus, as it circumvents our retaliatory tariffs by having assembled exported products in Mexico to enter the United States near tariff-free.

China is behind coaxing, cajoling, bribing, and leveraging Panama to give it port controls on either end of the Panama Canal—a waterway that China knows is not key to its own commerce, but essential to the U.S., especially in times of war. China’s long-term strategy for Panama was a Panamanian veneer on what would be otherwise a wholly run Chinese subsidiary, with the ability to control American east-west maritime traffic, and north-south landward migration and travel flows.

China is behind the North Korean constant threats. It views Pyongyang as a useful, crazed pit bull—from time to time, it unleashes and feigns, “Oh my gosh, Kim Jong-Un broke his leash and is biting and barking around the neighborhood. How did that happen?”

China is behind Iran’s nuclear bomb project and missile arsenal. Without Chinese raw products and expertise, and diplomatic and military support, often through its surrogate North Korea, Iran could never get the bomb. The Chinese strategy is to recreate another nuclear North Korea in the Middle East—Iran acting as another useful rabid dog that the Chinese can occasionally let loose to bother and check its geopolitical rivals.

China is behind much of the intellectual and scientific theft that transmogrified American high-tech into sophisticated Chinese fighter jets, missiles, ships, and drones that always end up looking eerily like our own.

With some 300,000 students in the U.S. and with billions of Chinese dollars endowed on our blue-chip universities, China feels that if only 1 percent of its students are actively gathering classified information (3,000 students) then it has a huge conduit of high-value information imported to the PLA straight from Silicon Valley and university research teams.

China was behind the Covid-19 virus. It lied about the Wuhan lab origins. It lied about the phony pangolin/bat transmission. It put a travel embargo on all flights from Wuhan—domestically—but not for two weeks to Europe and the U.S., almost ensuring that the virus would infect the West and shut down its economy. The People’s Liberation Army either controlled the lab from the beginning or took control after the virus “escaped.”

The only remaining mysteries about the PLA’s role in birthing the virus that killed a million Americans, is whether the virus 1) was part of a bio-weapon project; or 2) a) was released accidentally and immediately prompted efforts to control it; b) was released accidentally and was then uncontrollable, and thus better to be sent abroad as soon as possible to share the misery; or c) was released by some insane PLA officer, scientist, or the communist government itself to harm the West and in particular the Trump administration as it headed into a favorable election year?

China’s asymmetrical tariffs, protectionism, product dumping, monetary manipulation, and copyright and patent violations are all predicated on creating huge European and American cash and product dependencies on China.

There is also only one real obstacle to what the Left calls the “rules-based order,” and it is a rogue China that violates every trade statute on the principle that by now it is too big and powerful to be controlled by anyone.

China is responsible for almost all the tensions in Asia. It plans to produce a facsimile of the 1940 Japanese Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, substituting itself for Japan, and imposing mercantilism on the Asian subcontinent and Pacific.

That is, China’s agenda is to subjugate Southeast Asia, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Taiwan to client status, in which they provide either raw materials or scientific expertise to China, and in exchange are told to buy only Chinese products, curb their militaries, and break off close relations with the West—or else.

But is China as strong as it claims? To be continued…