Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, How to Save Western Civilization
“If we don’t act now, ultimately, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order free societies have built. If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the CCP, whose actions are the primary challenge to the free world. The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.” – US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo
“The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg”
US Attorney General William Barr, in a powerful speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan on July 17, 2020 made China’s intentions very clear:
The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world. It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rule-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship. How the United States responds to this challenge will have historic implications and will determine whether the United States and its liberal democratic allies will continue to shape their own destiny or whether the CCP and its autocratic tributaries will continue, will control the future.
What’s at stake these days is whether we can maintain that leadership position and that technological leadership. Are we going to be the generation that has allowed that to be stolen- which is really stealing the future of our children and our grandchildren?
And last week, the FBI Director Chris Wray, described how the CCP pursues its ambitions through the nefarious and even illegal conduct, including industrial espionage, theft, extortion, cyberattacks, and malign influence activities.
Xi Jinping, who has centralized power to a degree not seen since the dictatorship of Mao Zedong, now speaks openly of China moving closer to the center stage, building a socialism that is superior to capitalism, and replacing the American dream with the Chinese solution. China is no longer hiding it strength nor biding its time. From the perspective of its communist rulers, China’s time has arrived.
The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent technological superpower.
“Made in China 2025” is the latest iteration of the PRC’s state-led, mercantilist economic model. For American companies in the global marketplace, free and fair competition with China has long been a fantasy. To tilt the playing field to its advantage, China’s communist government has perfected a wide array of predatory and often unlawful tactics: currency manipulation, tariffs, quotas, state-led strategic investment and acquisitions, theft and forced transfer of intellectual property, state subsidies, dumping, cyberattacks, and industrial espionage. About 80% of all federal economic espionage prosecutions have alleged conduct that would benefit the Chinese state, and about 60% of all trade secret theft cases have been connected to China.
A Short History of China
To better understand China’s motivations and intentions in today’s world, it is useful to study some Chinese history.
Since Mao Zedong’s Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has grown from a rag-tag army of rebels to the largest – and arguably the most disciplined – political organization on the planet, with some 90 million members.
The word hegemony is a useful word in describing Chinese politics and ambitions. Hegemony means the domination or predominant influence of one state over another. An autocratic ruler can also be described as a hegemon, because, effectively, he is the state.
As American demographer, Sinologist and author Steven Mosher says, “The PRC is bent on becoming the Hegemon, the Ba in Chinese, defined by longstanding Chinese usage as a single, all-dominant power. A Hegemon, it should be understood, is more dominant than a mere superpower, more dominant even than a ‘sole superpower,’ the international role that the U.S. currently occupies.”[i]
The role of the hegemon is firmly embedded in China’s national history, intrinsic to its national identity, and profoundly implicated in its sense of national destiny.
China’s long imperial history as the dominant power of East and Southeast Asia has left no doubt in the minds of the Chinese elite that they are the cultural and intellectual superiors of all other people on the planet.
The political order of the hegemon that commenced 2,800 years ago is based exclusively on naked power. Total control of a state’s population and resources was to be concentrated in the hands of the state’s hegemon, who would employ this power to establish his hegemony over all the states in the known world.
What Chines strategists of old had invented, then, is an early form of totalitarianism,
In the old, and enduring Chinese view of the world, chaos and disorder can only be avoided by organizing vassal and tributary states around a single dominant axis of power.
Even today, China still seems to classify her “neighbors” into one of two categories: tributary states that acknowledge her hegemony, or potential enemies. Present-day Beijing does not desire equality in external affairs, but deference, for it governs as an all-encompassing civilization.
China’s absolutist traditions go back to the very founding of the Chinese state, the Shang dynasty (c. 1766-1027 BC).
The Shang dynasty was succeeded by the Zhou dynasty which carried on its autocratic traditions. The authority of the king of Zhou over his land and people was absolute, as is suggested by a famous passage from the Book of Odes, “All land under heaven belongs to the King, and all people on the shores are subjects of the King.”
The Zhou dynasty lasted longer than any other dynasty in Chinese history. The military control of China by the royal house, surnamed Ji, lasted initially from 1046 until 771 BC for a period known as the Western Zhou and the political sphere of influence it created continued well into Eastern Zhou for another 500 years.
During the Zhou dynasty, the origins of native Chinese philosophy developed, its initial stages beginning in the 6th century BC. The greatest Chinese philosophers, those who made the greatest impact on later generations of Chinese, were Confucius, founder of Confucianism, and Laozi, founder of Taoism.
The Zhou kings maintained control by some dispersal of power to feudal lords, bestowing on them limited sovereignty over portions of the domain.
The concept of hegemony arose out of the weakness of the Eastern Zhou dynasty. Whilst its predecessor, the Western Zhou dynasty, was also feudal in nature, the center was strong enough to command the obedience of most of its vassals, as well as to maintain a central authority.
Over time, the ties that bound the nobility to the king began to fray and the king’s authority diminished. This led to a series of wars. Within a span of two-and-a-half centuries, dozens of wars were fought among the scores of feudal states in existence.
The death of King You of Zhou and the sack of the Zhou capital in 771 BC rendered the position of the central court untenable and eventually dependent on the protection of neighboring states.
The concept of the Hegemon was important to the interstate relations during the Spring and Autumn period, since the Hegemon was nominally charged with underwriting the stability of the whole system, often heading a league of smaller states whose security was to some extent guaranteed by the state, in exchange for tribute.
Finally, a strong leader, Duke Huan (685-643 BC) arose and brought peace by uniting the warring states. He became China’s first hegemon. Duke Huan’s success owed much to do with a series of political reforms initiated by his prime minister, Guan Zhong.
Guan Zhong was one of the first “Legalists,” as the school of statecraft dedicated to exalting the ruler and maximizing his power came to be called. The essence of Legalist doctrines was the supremacy of the ruler; power could only be concentrated in the hands of the ruler by weakening the nobility and further subjugating commoners.
To strengthen the state at the expense of the nobility, the Legalists advised their sovereign that they should no longer share power with a class of hereditary feudal lords. Within the court, aristocratic officials serving in inherited posts found themselves replaced by appointed bureaucrats. In the countryside, feudal lords were displaced by appointed magistrates who served at the pleasure of the ruler. By appointing officials who were mere extensions of themselves, Chinese rulers crushed the nobility and gathered yet more power into their hands.
Duke Huan of Qi was one of five rulers in this period who were known as hegemons
The institution of the hegemon languished after Duke Huan’s death, but his system of government spread to other states.
The struggle for control intensified during the period known as the Warring States.
But it was the kingdom of Qin, under the direction of the great Legalist Shang Yang, that took the most drastic measures to eliminate feudalism, centralize political power and militarize society.
The Qin monarch, Qin Shihuang (sometimes spelled Shi Huang), annexed the territory of the last other Zhou king in 256 BC and then absorbed the last remaining states during a ten-year campaign beginning in 231 BC.
It was through the ensuing Qin dynasty that the absolutism embodied in the Legalist reforms became encoded into the Chinese political culture, to be practiced down to the present day.
The emperor of the Qin sought to make the entire population of China, at the time some 40 million people, directly accountable to him. Acting through an enormous cadre of bureaucrats, a complex network of laws, and a highly elaborated ideology, he very largely succeeded. In so doing, the emperor Qin Shihuang, became the archetype of a political monster that has become all too common in our modern age.
The military might of the Qin was matched only by its brutality. One famous general, Bai Qi, is reputed to have killed more than a million soldiers and besieged more than 70 cities. In 278 BC, he led the Qin army to victory against its biggest rival from the Yangtze south, the Chu. He then went on to defeat the Zhou, the nominal kings of China, at the Battle of Changping in 260 BC. After this battle, he had more than 400,000 prisoners of war slaughtered by burying them alive.[ii]
In 231 BC Qin Shihuang launched a series of campaigns that within ten years would bring much of what constitutes modern China into his domain, creating one of the largest empires the world had known up to that time. For the next twelve years, until his death in 210 BC, he ruled the empire with an iron hand.
A special cadre of commissars was established to keep watch over officialdom. At the provincial level, there was a civil governor, a military commander and a political commissar. Every area of life was regulated. The people were not permitted to bear arms, and all weapons were confiscated and sent to the capital. Fierce punishments calculated to squelch any murmur of resistance were meted out to violators.
In a forerunner to today’s political correctness, Qin Shihuang even sought to establish orthodox thought.
In 213 BC, Qin Shihuang ordered what is called the Great Burning of Books, suppressing freedom of speech in an attempt to unify all thought and political opinion. Hundreds of thousands of books were burned, many of them originating from the philosophies of the Hundred Schools of Thought.[iii] All books were banned, except for the legal works that promoted supreme control of the state. Anyone found discussing illegal books was sentenced to death, along with his family. Anyone found with proscribed books within 30 days of the imperial decree was sent north to work as a convict on the construction of the first Great Wall of China.
And thus took place history’s first public book burning.
Nothing much has changed over the centuries.
In today’s China, “correct” thought is controlled through constant propaganda from state-controlled media, together with a corrupted education system and strict control of the internet.
In the West, orthodox thought has been established by and for the persons on the cover of this book and their successors, together with a host of left-wing activist groups, a corrupted media and a corrupted entertainment industry centered on Hollywood. Deviant thought is punished in the courts by application of so-called “hate-speech” laws, in cyberspace by swarms of social justice warriors, and in public places by gangs of masked Antifa thugs.
Qin Shihuang and his Legalist advisor had designed – with its absolute monarch, centralized bureaucracy, state domination over society, law as a penal tool of the ruler, mutual surveillance and informer networks, persecution of dissidents, and political practices of coercion and intimidation – the world’s first totalitarian state.
The system entered China’s cultural DNA and continued to replicate itself down through the centuries and dynasties. It is little surprise that China remains a centralized, autocratic bureaucratic government even today.
So why is a study of Chinese history important in understanding modern China?
Because after Mao Zedong came to power in China, he announced that not only would he model himself on Emperor Qin, but he saw himself as Emperor Qin’s superior in cunning and cruelty. At the Second Plenum of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, Mao scoffed, “Some have accused us of being Emperor Qin Shihuang. This is not true. We are a hundred times worse than Emperor Qin. To the charge of being like Emperor Qin, of being a dictator, we plead guilty. But you have not said nearly enough, for often we have to go further.”[iv]
This might help to explain why this modern Chinese psychopath was responsible for the death of some 45 million Chinese.[v]
Mao Zedong became what he had long desired: the founder of a new dynasty, an emperor of the Legalist school, and the latest in a long line of hegemons.
Many writers have described Mao as an emperor
Like Mao and Deng before him, Jiang Zemin remained fundamentally hostile to the “imperialist-dominated” world and believed that armed conflict – sooner or later – was inevitable. “We must prepare well for a military struggle” against the “neo-imperialists”, Jiang said in 1997. He was seconded by the high command, including General Chi Haotian, whom Jiang later made the vice-chairman of the General Military Commission and the highest-ranking military officer in China. General Chi is known for such bellicose utterances as this one, made in December 1999: “Viewed from the changes in the world situation and the hegemonic strategy of the United States to create monopolarity, war [between China and the U.S.] is inevitable.”[vi]
China’s incessant cyber attacks, its growing arsenal of offensive weapons, its worsening human rights record, and its increasingly assertive territorial claims clearly reveal a growing threat to regional, and even global, stability.
After the excesses of the late Chairman Mao, whose bloody career costs the lives of tens of millions of Chinese, the survivors were determined to prevent a reprise. Led by Den Xiapong, they attempted to forestall the rise of another evil tyrant like Mao by dispersing power among those at the very top of the pyramid. They declared that the responsibility for making decisions would no longer be in the hands of one man but would henceforth be shared among the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. They let it be known that their successors would practice collective leadership.
All that changed with the succession of Xi Jinping.
The new hegemon
Elected general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party on November 15, 2012, Xi Jinping moved with startling swiftness to consolidate his power in his own hands. He purged Jiang Zemin’s highest-ranking supporters under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign and drove his predecessor, Hu Jintao, into obscurity. He seized control of the Central Military Commission, arresting its two senior members, and placed his supporters in charge.[vii]
He set up a reform commission with himself in charge, which effectively gives the Communist Party effective control over China’s government, which would normally be the domain of the Premier.
He has even taken over the domestic security portfolio – the State Security Commission. He has positioned himself, through his command of the military and the security forces, to be able to threaten those who oppose him with arrest and prosecution. The police, the secret police, and the courts all report to him.
A new Chinese hegemon has arisen. Xi is self-consciously modeling himself on the first emperor of the PRC dynasty, Mao Zedong. But like all Chinese hegemons, he ultimately harkens back to China’s “ancestral dragon,” the brutal Qin Shihuang.
Xi sits unchallenged at the very top of China’s power pyramid. He controls not only the Party (as General Secretary), but also government (as president), and the PLA (as chairman of the Central Military Commission).[viii]
It would not be incorrect to call him an emperor.
Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, died a prisoner of the Chinese state-party in 2017, after languishing in a Manchurian prison for eight years. Liu had spent decades calling for respect for human rights and far-reaching political reform, efforts that in 2010 won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Liu scorned the “bellicose nationalism” preached by the Chinese party-state and exposed the underlying national narcissism of the Chinese mind that it played upon. It was for this that he was repeatedly attacked, jailed and ultimately murdered. By denying him medical care when he became ill, the regime effectively sentenced him to death.
In an essay entitled Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese ‘Patriotism’ at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century,[ix] Liu argued that the Chinese party-state had consciously and self-servingly channeled the collective narcissism of the Chinese people into a kind of hyper-nationalist insanity. This xenophobic, jingoistic patriotism, he believed, had led to the general loss of reason among the population, obliterated universal values of human rights, and rendered the Chinese blind to the faults of their leaders.
He also believed that the Party’s Orwellian control over society has meant the death of critical thought.[x]
It is pertinent to note that the theme of my previous book, The Assault on the Western Mind, details how the various forces ranged against the West have similarly affected a significant percentage of Western minds. In particular, the more susceptible of them have suffered a loss of reason amounting to a kind of mass psychosis – a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.
Whereas for the Chinese it has led to a deeply held conviction that their nation, culture, and race are superior to all others, for Western “progressives,” liberals, Marxists, Greens and their ilk, it has resulted in a deeply held conviction that their policies on immigration, multiculturalism, conservation, global warming and feminism are superior to all others and those that oppose them, must be, by definition, racist, xenophobic, homophobic and misogynistic.
The Communist Party encourages the Chinese people to believe they are culturally and genetically superior to every other race on the planet. The ironclad belief of China’s leaders that their nation and their people are superior to all other nations and peoples is central to the self-image of the hegemon.
To bolster this belief, the Party resurrected the ancient cult of the “Yellow Emperor.” According to this myth, all Han Chinese can trace their bloodline back to a common ancestor, the legendary Yellow Emperor. This figure, who was said to have reigned over parts of China from 2698 to 2598 BC was the “First Ancestor” of all living Han Chinese. This meant that all people of Chinese descent, regardless of where they lived, were related.
The mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor, located in Shaanxi province has been carefully restored, and in 1993 a huge Xuanyuan Temple complex, where regular sacrifices are offered, was added.
All of the propaganda and mind-bending have had their effect.
“The most pervasive underlying Chinese emotion is a profound, unquestioned, generally unshakeable identification with historical greatness,” observed Lucian Pye many years ago in his work, The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study. “Merely to be Chinese is to be part of the greatest phenomenon in history.”[xi]
The hegemon simply does not feel bound by the normal rules that govern international relations.[xii]
One of the most authoritative sources of information regarding China’s ambitions, threats and activities is the 2020 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The Commission conducted seven public hearings, taking testimony from 62 expert witnesses from government, the private sector, academia, think tanks, research institutions, and other backgrounds. The findings are summarised in a comprehensive 587 page report.[xiii]
The following are excerpts from the report.
The China Model: Return of the Middle Kingdom[xiv]
The CCP sees itself as engaged in a systemic struggle with the United States and other democratic countries over the future of the world order.
Beijing seeks to use its growing power to transform the international order, ultimately legitimizing its repressive governance system; expanding its economic, security, and political interests; and restoring China to what it views as its rightful place at the center of the world.
It desires for other countries to accept if not praise its authoritarian, single-party governance model as a superior alternative to liberal democracy and seeks to export elements of its model, popularizing internationally the norm that power, not rules-based accountability, is a legitimate basis for political authority.
The CCP hopes to remold global governance, ultimately enabling China to act unconstrained by the current rules-based order. These objectives predate General Secretary Xi’s rule and will likely persist beyond it, posing a long-term challenge to U.S. interests, the integrity of international institutions, and liberal democracy worldwide.
The Chinese government is shaping and subverting the inter-national governance system to align with Beijing’s own principles, which are directly opposed to universal values and individual rights.
Beijing uses economic leverage to secure other countries’ support for these alternative values in the UN and other organizations while exploiting leadership roles in UN agencies to promote Chinese foreign policy objectives, such as marginalizing Taiwan. Meanwhile, through a parallel order of alternative China-centric organizations, including the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is creating an integrated economic and geopolitical order under China’s leadership.
Beijing seeks to use its central role in this new parallel order to exploit globalization, using the networks and resources of other countries while limiting access to its own market. It also uses its leverage to export to developing countries elements of its economic model that threaten private enterprise and rule of law in favor of a dominant state sector and corrupt business environment.[xv]
China’s increasing aggression
Beijing has long held the ambition to match the United States as the world’s most powerful and influential nation.
Over the past 15 years, as its economic and technological prowess, diplomatic influence, and military capabilities have grown, China has turned its focus toward surpassing the United States.
Chinese leaders have grown increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of this goal following the 2008 global financial crisis and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012.[xvi]
The Chinese military flexes its muscles
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) views the U.S. military as its primary strategic adversary and has engaged in long-term efforts to close the wide capability gap with U.S. military power since the mid-1990s.
In 2004, the PLA shifted its focus to emphasize leapfrogging the United States in certain warfighting areas by introducing new concepts the PLA believed could enable it to defeat a conventionally superior opponent.
The PLA’s long-term strategy to gain advantage over the U.S. military includes developing “informationized” capabilities and exploiting ostensibly civilian information systems, likely including those built overseas by Chinese companies.
The PLA is complementing these efforts by developing cyberattack, space and counter-space, and long-range precision-strike capabilities and expanding its capacity to delay and threaten U.S. military forces at increasing distances from China’s shores.[xvii]
General Secretary of the CCP Xi Jinping continued to emphasize the military dimension of U.S.-China competition, instructing the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for a second year to prepare for a potential military conflict with a “powerful enemy adversary”—a phrase used by the CCP to refer to the United States.[xviii]
A New Middle Kingdom on the World Stage
Reclaiming what Chinese leaders view as China’s rightful place, the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of world affairs, would fulfil the CCP’s promise to the Chinese people to restore their past glory—a key pillar of the Party’s legitimacy.
Beijing’s ambition places China at the top of the international order, able to freely exploit the markets, resources, and networks of others.
At the same time, Beijing seeks to constrain the ability of others to influence its behavior or access what it controls. Andrew Scobell, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, testified to the Commission in September 2020 that CCP elites believe Beijing must “ruthlessly [battle] to monopolize international markets” in order to win a zero-sum competition with other countries and foreign corporations to acquire control over a fixed amount of natural resources.
The Chinese government’s conduct in international commerce already reflects this inclination: the CCP seeks to maintain access to the international markets, technology, and intellectual property (IP) on which China’s growth still depends while limiting other countries’ access to its own market.
Simultaneously, Beijing’s reaction to international criticism of its behavior increasingly expands on its refusal to tolerate criticism domestically, and it uses economic coercion to force others to defer to its preferences.[xix]
China’s global governance ambitions: “the ultimate demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism,”
General Secretary Xi has advocated for a new global governance concept that would institutionalize China’s pre-eminence. He has echoed Mao Zedong’s call for China to “stand tall in the forest of nations,” and according to Mr. Tobin he desires “nothing less than pre-eminent status within the global order.”
At the CCP’s 19th National Congress in October 2017, General Secretary Xi vowed national rejuvenation would see China become “a global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence.”
Since General Secretary Xi took power, the CCP has increasingly promoted the “community of common human destiny,” a concept for a new international community influenced by historical Chinese traditions and underpinned by an organizing vision that offers to unite the whole world, despite its differences, under the CCP’s harmonizing influence.
It is through the “community of common human destiny” that the CCP will finally secure what General Secretary Xi has called “the ultimate demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism,” and he has ordered CCP cadres to be faithful and to be prepared to make sacrifices to achieve this goal.
Ms. Rolland testified to the Commission that the “community of common human destiny” signifies General Secretary Xi’s rejection of the idea that liberal democracy is the pinnacle of human society.
It also makes the case that other countries should join it in rejecting the liberal democracy-dominated international order because this China-centric governance system presents an equally if not more viable option and will not expect them to liberalize or protect human rights.[xx]
China’s ownership of foreign ports
China’s basing model includes military facilities operated exclusively by the PLA as well as civilian ports operated or majority-owned by Chinese firms, which may become dual-use logistics facilities.
Chinese firms partially own or operate nearly 100 ports globally, more than half of which involve a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE).[xxi]
The US has launched more than 1000 investigations into China’s actual and attempted theft of American technology, swooping on scores of academics in high-profile cases that have shaken the world of academia.
Many of the 1000 FBI probes into actual theft or attempted theft of US technology involve the Thousand Talents program.[xxii]
There has also been a US Senate inquiry into China’s talent recruitment plans, the most prominent of which is Thousand Talents, with its report finding plan members had downloaded sensitive electronic research files before returning to China, submitted false information when applying for grant funds and “wilfully failed to disclose receiving money from the Chinese government on US grant applications”.
The “Thousand Talents Plan” is a Chinese Government program to recruit top scientists from around the world. It was originally designed to reverse China’s brain drain.
Under Xi Jinping’s civil-military fusion, the Thousand Talents Plan helps China achieve technological and innovation advances.
Western academics, including those in Australia, have been recruited through their colleagues, superiors or even via LinkedIn.
They are offered a lucrative second-salary, upwards of $150,000 a year, with generous research funding.
Some academics are given an entire new laboratory in a Chinese university and team of research staff.
Many are proud of their Thousand Talents link and participate with consent of their universities. Others have not disclosed the link to their universities and do not publicly admit to being part of the program.
Some Thousand Talents contracts stipulate they cannot disclose their participation in the Chinese Government program without permission.
In Australia it was found they continue to work full-time for their Australian university while making frequent trips to China to visit the affiliated Thousand Talents Plan university.
They continue to apply for Australian Research Council grants, with no checks about where the research will end up.
Their new inventions are patented in China, often secretly.
The inventions may be commercialised, with China reaping the economic benefits.[xxiii]
Thousand Talents academics may be required to recruit more academics.
Trump administration FBI director Christopher Wray said the Thousand Talents Program was a way for China to steal intellectual property that was then used to compete against the very companies it “victimised — in effect, cheating twice over”.
“Through its talent recruitment programs, like the so-called Thousand Talents Program, the Chinese government tries to entice scientists to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China — even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating our export controls and conflict-of-interest rules,” he said in a speech to the Hudson Institute on July 7, 2020.
“They’re targeting research on everything from military equipment to wind turbines to rice and corn seeds. The stakes could not be higher, and the potential economic harm to American businesses and the economy as a whole almost defies calculation.”
The “Thousand Talents Plan” has been described by FBI director Christopher Wray as “economic espionage”.
Some Thousand Talents academics keep their links to China secret even from their Australian universities, while others are open about their involvement.
Under “Thousand Talents Plan” contracts, scientists legally sign away the rights to their intellectual property to China.
A standard clause in the contracts states China: “owns the copyrights of the works, inventions, patents and other intellectual properties produced by Party B (the academic) during the Contract period.”
Many contracts order the scientist to observe Chinese legal system, stating the academic: “shall observe relevant laws and regulations of the People’s Republic of China and shall not interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
Australian academics are also warned about religious practices, with contracts often stating: “Party B shall respect China’s religious policies, and shall not conduct any religious activities incompatible with his/her status as a foreign expert.”
They are offered a lucrative second salary, upwards of $150,000 a year, with generous research funding.
Other perks include travel, tuition for their children and housing subsidies.
Some academics are given an entire new laboratory in a Chinese university and team of research staff to work for them.
They then have a “clone” team in China – often unbeknownst to their Australian employer.
The academic often makes numerous trips to China to conduct research.
The aim of the program is to ‘own’ the research conducted and paid for by western universities.
Another Thousand Talents contract states: “We anticipate that you will make several trips to China each year during the term of your engagement, but will perform much of your work remotely.”
China will benefit from the commercialisation: “Should Chinese scientists contribute to your discoveries in China, as we anticipate and our institutions will jointly own, protect and manage the commercialisation of these jointly-made discoveries.”
In one instance uncovered by federal authorities in the US, a postdoctoral researcher who was a Thousand Talents scholar working for the Energy Department’s National Laboratory, removed 30,000 electronic files before leaving for China. The researcher had claimed their work would play a “critical role in advanced defence applications”.
They “planned to leverage the Chinese university’s strength in national defence and military research to support the modernisation of the People’s Republic of China’s national defence”.
Mr Wray said in the field of academia, “through talent recruitment programs like the Thousand Talents Program … China pays scientists at American universities to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China — including valuable, federally funded research”.
“To put it bluntly, this means American taxpayers are effectively footing the bill for China’s own technological development.
“China then leverages its ill-gotten gains to undercut US research institutions and companies, blunting our nation’s advancement and costing American jobs. And we are seeing more and more of these cases.”
US prosecutions have reached the highest levels of reputable universities. The chair of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Charles Lieber, was indicted in June 2020 for “making false statements to federal authorities about his Thousand Talents participation”.
“The US has alleged that Lieber concealed from both Harvard and the NIH his position as a strategic scientist at a Chinese university, and the fact that the Chinese government was paying him, through the Wuhan Institute of Technology, a $50,000 monthly stipend, more than $150,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5m to establish a laboratory back in China,” Mr Wray said.[xxiv]
US scientist Hongjin Tan, who was part of the Thousand Talents program, was sent to prison after stealing more than $1bn worth of trade secrets from his US employer, a petroleum company.[xxv]
In another example, Texas scientist Shan Shi, also part of the Thousand Talents plan, was sentenced to prison after stealing “trade secrets” related to naval technology used in submarines.
“Shan Shi attempted to obtain sophisticated U.S. technology with both military and civilian uses for the ultimate benefit of China,” said Assistant Director John Brown of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “It is no secret that China is determined to achieve superiority in virtually all high-tech areas, and the FBI is equally determined to stop individuals who commit illegal acts to help China achieve its goals. The stakes are high both for U.S. national security and for American companies who invest so much money and time on research and development.”[xxvi]
China continues to prepare for war. A Chinese Government film made in late 2013 for consumption within the party and the military, Silent Contest, began with these words:
The process of China’s achieving a national renaissance will definitely involve engagement and a fight against the U.S.’s hegemonic system. This is the contest of the century, regardless of people’s wishes.[xxvii]
The United States would be defeated in a sea war with China and would struggle to stop an invasion of Taiwan, according to a series of “eye-opening” war games carried out by the Pentagon.
American defence sources have told The Times that several simulated conflicts conducted by the US resulted in the conclusion that their forces would be overwhelmed by the Chinese. One simulated war game focused on the year 2030, by which time a modernised Chinese navy would operate an array of new attack submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers.
The analysis also found that Beijing’s accumulation of medium-range ballistic missiles has already made every US base and any American carrier battle group operating in the Indo-Pacific Command region vulnerable to overwhelming strikes. The Pacific island of Guam, a base for American strategic bombers such as the B-2 and B-52, is now considered to be wholly at risk.
“China has long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles and hypersonic [more than five times the speed of sound] missiles,” a US defence source said, meaning that US carrier groups could not oppose their Chinese counterparts in battle “without suffering capital losses”.
The conclusions, described as “eye-opening” by one source, are supported by the most recent analysis provided by America’s leading experts on China.
“Every simulation that has been conducted looking at the threat from China by 2030, and there have been various ones carried out, for example in the event of China invading Taiwan, have all ended up with the defeat of the US,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China power project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a consultant for the US government on East Asia. “Taiwan is the most volatile issue because that could escalate to a war with the US, even to a nuclear war.
“In the Pentagon and state department and the White House, China is now seen without doubt as the biggest threat. We have been too passive in the past … Guam is now in range of their ballistic missiles, so the US would take a beating if there was a conflict.”
Beijing has stepped up its military activities in the South and East China Seas, harassing ships, militarising islands whose sovereignty is claimed by others and sabre-rattling over the planned reincorporation of Taiwan. President Xi has said he wants the island back under “One China” by 2050 and is prepared to use force.[xxviii]
The Chinese leadership sees America as the greatest threat to its hegemonic ambitions, so it has quietly created anti-American feelings among its population. For the past twenty-five years, anti-American propaganda of the most vicious kind has been taught to Chinese children in an effort to inoculate then against American democratic ideals. One example is the recent reprinting of a Mao-inspired 1951 history textbook, A History of the U.S. Aggression in China, which is a gross distortion of history, blaming America for every Chinese setback over the past century.[xxix]
Author Steven Mosher has this to say:
Wei Jinsheng, one of China’s long incarcerated and now exiled dissidents, notes that even today the CCP is organized and run as if it and the country it controls were at war. And in one way or another, it is. China’s military-industrial complex, which operates under the rubric of civil-military integration (CMI), is second to none. And China is at war with the world (whether the world knows it or not) through its destabilizing proxies such as North Korea, and even more directly through its theft of technology, its currency manipulations, and its highly sophisticated and incessant cyber attacks.[xxx]
Lieutenant General Mi Zhenyu, vice-commandant of the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing and one of the authors of the book Megatrends China, declared: “as for the United States, for a relatively long time it will be absolutely necessary that we quietly nurse our sense of vengeance… We must conceal our abilities and bide our time.”[xxxi]
The senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are united in their desire to enhance the reach and might of China’s military. Xi Jinping has embarked on what the Pentagon calls a “long-term comprehensive modernization of the armed forces [including] sweeping organizational reforms to overhaul the entire military structure [and] strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control over the military, enhance the PLA’s ability to conduct joint operations, and improve its ability to fight short-duration, high-intensity regional conflicts at greater distances from the Chinese mainland.”[xxxii]
China’s defense budget, which is now the second largest in the world, is testament not only to the country’s regional ambitions but to its global ones as well. According to the Pentagon’s 2016 annual report to Congress on Chinese military and security developments, China’s total military-related spending in 2015 came to over $180 billion. A more recent report, by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, puts China’s military spending at $215 billion. China’s successful cyberespionage efforts have enabled it to dramatically shrink America’s lead in military technology over the past fifteen years.
China has long been engaged in cyber warfare against the West. Its attacks on U.S. websites were already of sufficient scale that former President Obama warned, in his 2013 State of the Union address:
America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyber-attacks. We know foreign countries swipe our corporate secrets.
Now our enemies are also seeking to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems.[i]
China has rapidly caught up with Western technology by utilizing thousands of government and semi-government hackers to break into industrial and government websites of Western nations, stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of intellectual property, technology, formulae and trade secrets in the process.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all disclosed in 2013 that their corporate computer networks had been penetrated by Chinese hackers, who were apparently trying to monitor U.S. coverage of Chinese issues.
The attacks on the New York Times coincided with its investigation into the personal wealth of Wen Jiabao, the outgoing Chinese premier.
In February 2013 an anonymous-looking tower block in Shanghai was named as the alleged headquarters of hackers working for the Chinese military.
A series of large-scale cyber-attacks were traced back to the building, in the Pudong district of the city, by a U.S. cybersecurity firm.[i]
The then U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel promised to prioritize cybersecurity at the Pentagon, telling a Senate hearing: “It’s insidious, a quiet kind of threat we haven’t quite seen before. It can paralyze a nation in a second.”[ii]
China has also stepped up its hacking of utilities and other public infrastructure in the United States, laying the groundwork for a potential “cyber-Pearl-Harbor.”
A cyber-attack on electricity grids could potentially have the same impact as an EMP attack, where a high altitude nuclear explosion creates a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that takes out the electricity grid. Where a simple shutdown of an electricity grid system, due to an external event, could be overcome in hours or perhaps days, a sophisticated piece of malware may be able to pulse the grid system on and off, with resulting electricity surges destroying critical transformers and switching gear. Such an attack would require the secret pre-positioning of offensive sleeper software inside our systems. A belligerent state would do this as a matter of course, as insurance against some future conflict with the target country. It would be prudent for each of the key Western countries to assume that their infrastructure systems have been penetrated.
The Stuxnet computer worm is a prime example – and a warning – of the damage wrought by malicious software. Stuxnet was believed to be a jointly built American-Israeli cyber weapon, designed to damage Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity. It found its way into Iran’s infrastructure systems, and, when activated, it reportedly caused the fast-spinning centrifuges, used to produce enriched uranium, to speed up and tear themselves apart. It is estimated that Stuxnet destroyed around 1,000 centrifuges, causing a major setback in Iran’s nuclear program.[iii]
Chinese use of soft power to extend its global influence
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also uses “soft power” to advance its influence and interests in foreign countries. “Soft power” is an all-embracing term, covering propaganda, infiltration of foreign political parties and institutions, influence peddling, control of foreign media, the mobilization of overseas Chinese, and threats against dissidents.
To mobilize the vast Chinese global diaspora, numbering over 50 million people, the CCP has developed a highly-sophisticated, multi-faceted plan, implemented by several well-resourced agencies targeting overseas Chinese. The history, goals, plans and tactics of this program have been revealed in detail by James Jiann Hua To, a New Zealand political scientist, of Chinese ethnicity, and a foremost authority of China’s efforts to shepherd its overseas Chinese, in his book, Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese. James To describes in detail the CCP’s policies and practices towards “overseas Chinese.” Overseas Chinese management is known as qiaowu, with the purpose of rallying support for Beijing amongst ethnic Chinese outside of China through various propaganda and thought-management techniques.[iv]
James To’s book reveals that, in the longer term, qiaowu work involves mobilizing ethnic Chinese as voting blocs and placing Chinese candidates loyal to the PRC in parliaments and public positions.[v] Much of the qiaowu work is conducted by the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the CCP Central Committee. The UFWD targets Chinese social organizations, Chinese-language media, student associations, professional associations and business leaders. The Propaganda Department of the CCP is also central to the campaign.[vi] The UFWD has grown in importance under President Xi Jinping, who described United Front work as a “magic weapon” in the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.[vii]
There are around 5 million ethnic Chinese living in America and 1.3 million in Australia. Even if only 10 per cent sided with China, it would represent a significant (and dangerous) fifth column in the event of war.
Confucius Institutes
The Chinese government has established research centers and institutes in leading Western universities. From 2004 to 2014, it increased the number of foreign universities with Confucius Institutes (CIs) from one to 465 university campuses in 123 countries,[viii] spending up to US$500,000 establishing each. By 2019 this figure had increased to 530[ix]. Most university institutes funded by the CCP are marketed as organizations dedicated to cross-cultural research and understanding.
However, members of the Chinese political class indicate that their purpose is not objective research in the time-honored academic tradition, but pro-CCP propaganda. The Economist reported that Li Changchun, once the fifth-ranked member of the standing committee of the Politburo, described Confucius Institutes as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”[x]
As early as 2008, concerns were raised about the Chinese government’s use of CIs to censor free speech on Western campuses. By 2014, discomfort with the use of Western universities as soft targets for CCP propaganda had become so intense that the American Association of University Professors issued a public condemnation of Confucius Institutes. It defined them as “an arm of the Chinese state… under the supervision of Hanban, a Chinese state agency which is chaired by a member of the Politburo and the vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China.”
Some Confucius Institute contracts include a clause that restricts criticism of the CCP, stipulating that CIs “shall not contravene concerning the laws and regulations of China.” By default, this refers to the laws and regulations of the ruling Communist Party. John Fitzgerald, president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, revealed that the CCP presented a list of topics not to be mentioned in colleges, the media or the Internet. Taboo topics include “freedom of speech, judicial independence, civil society, civil rights, and universal values in addition to criticism of the CCP.” The ideals banned by the CCP are the sustaining values of liberal democracy. Despite positive developments pertaining to China’s liberalization and adoption of capitalism, much of the CCP ideology remains Maoist.[xi]
CCP influence on major U.S. corporate media[xii]
The New York Times
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim owns 17.4 percent of The New York Times through the company’s Class A shares. As the largest shareholder, his investment allows him to vote for approximately one-third of the company’s board.
In 2009, Slim loaned $250 million to The New York Times Company, the parent company of the New York Times. That same year, Slim purchased 15.9 million Class A shares of the company.
Slim has regularly conducted business with Chinese companies with overt ties to the CCP. In 2017, Slim’s Giant Motors joined ventures with China’s JAC Motors and began manufacturing cars in Mexico to sell in the Latin America Market.
The Washington Post
In 2013, Amazon CEO and billionaire Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million cash. In January 2016, Bezos laid out a new business plan for the Post aimed at incorporating more technology.
Bezos has direct ties to the Chinese business market, which is regulated by the CCP. The production of Amazon’s most popular products—including the Amazon Echo and Kindle e-reader— take place almost exclusively in Chinese factories.
CNN
CNN is owned and operated by WarnerMedia, which has significant financial and institutional ties to the CCP. In June 2013, WarnerMedia announced it had forged a partnership with a Chinese investment fund to the tune of $50 million. The funding would directly invest in the China Media Capital (CMC), a media company with oversight from the CCP, meaning it is subject to censorship and other demands to push Chinese propaganda.
WarnerMedia considers China a “partner” in their economic and cinematic ventures.
“Increasing our global presence is one of Time Warner’s strategic priorities and China is one of the most attractive territories in which we operate, but it’s complex. This alliance will give all our businesses a savvy and accomplished partner,” said WarnerMedia Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes.
MSNBC & NBC
Both MSNBC and NBC News are operated by NBC Universal, a company with extensive financial ties to the CCP. In November 2010, NBC signed an agreement with China’s state-run media organization, Xinhua, to establish a business cooperation in international broadcast news. This was the latest market expansion by the CCP into American media.
Since the signing of the business deal, the U.S. State Department identified Xinhua and five other Chinese state-run media organizations as “foreign missions.” They have been identified as direct CCP operations and do not function as independent news outlets.
Finally, CMC Capital Partners—a Beijing investment group with financial and technological oversight from the CCP—acquired full ownership of NBC Universal’s Oriental DreamWorks, according to the Hollywood Reporter. NBC Universal gained a 45 percent stake for a steep $3.8 billion.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his company Bloomberg LP are heavily invested in China. Bloomberg LP sells terminals to their website through the Chinese market and helps finance Chinese companies by sending billions of dollars from U.S. investors to the Chinese bond market.
Bloomberg LP supported 364 Chinese firms and directed approximately $150 billion into their bond offerings. Of these companies, 159 were controlled directly by the CCP.
Marxist journalism
The New York Times, CNN and Bloomberg are among a number of U.S. corporate supporters of the CCP-controlled Tsinghua University’s Global Business School which aims to “apply Marxist theory” to journalism.
An introductory letter to Tsinghua’s Global Business Journalism School outlines its express purpose: to accomplish the “tasks for news media” outlined by the Central Committee of the CCP.[xiii]
“We should be committed to a firm and correct political orientation. Our School has been actively exploring the theory and practices of Marxist Journalism, namely, to applying the Marxist theory in observing the world, selecting and handling news production.”[xiv]
Michael Bloomberg meets with Tsinghua University students
CCP influence on Hollywood
Attorney General Barr:
Take Hollywood. Hollywood’s actors, producers, and directors pride themselves on celebrating freedom and the human spirit. And every year at the Academy Awards, Americans are lectured about how this country falls short of Hollywood’s ideals of social justice. But Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights. This censorship infects not only versions of movies that are released in China, but also many that are shown in American theaters to American audiences.
The story of the film industry’s submission to the CCP is a familiar one. In the past two decades, China has emerged as the world’s largest box office. The CCP has long tightly controlled access to that lucrative market — both through quotas on American films, imposed in violation of China’s WTO obligations, and a strict censorship regime.
Increasingly, Hollywood also relies on Chinese money for financing. In 2018, films with Chinese investors accounted for 20 percent of U.S. box-office ticket sales, compared to only three percent five years earlier.
China buying up foreign assets
All over the world, China is buying up agricultural land, mines and oil fields at a frenetic pace, often paying more than the going rate, just to get its hands on the resources. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker, the value of China’s overseas investment and construction is approaching $1.8 trillion, including $172 billion just in the United States.
The interested reader can download a full list of China’s foreign asset purchases from the China Global Investment Tracker website.[xv]
The assets range across hydro, aviation, energy, real estate, utilities, oil, railways, coal, shipping, banks, agriculture, hotel chains, radio stations and many others.
Some of the largest U.S. companies the Chinese have purchased are: Starwood Hotels (the company that owns Waldorf-Astoria), Ingram Micro (specializing in aviation and logistics), General Electric Appliance Business, Terex Corporation (which makes machinery for construction), Legendary Entertainment Group (producers of such hits as “Jurassic Park” and “Pacific Rim”), Motorola Mobility, and AMC Entertainment Holdings.
In healthcare they have purchased AppTec Laboratory Services, Datascope Corp., Complete Genomics, and Zonare Medical Systems. In technology they bought Westinghouse (turbine generator), IBM (PC business), Quorum Systems, Hoku Scientific, ION Geophysical, Mochi Media, Boston-Power (financing), iTalk, and A123 Systems. In energy, they scooped up First International Oil, The AES Corp., Oil & Gas Assets, Friede Goldman United, Chesapeake Energy, Cirrus Wind Energy, GreatPoint Energy, Wolfcamp Shale, Mississippi Lime, and Woodbine Acquisition. In finance, China owns a large stake in Morgan Stanley and Blackstone Group LLP. In property, they own Sheraton Universal Hotel, Cassa Hotel and Residences, Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, General Motors Tower, and One Chase Manhattan Plaza.[xvi]
China a greater threat to the U.S. than terrorism
The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2018 National Defense Strategy report[xvii] claims China’s fast-growing technological and military capabilities make it a greater threat to America than terrorism.
“Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in a speech outlining the plan at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (a division of the John Hopkins University) in Washington on January 19, 2018.[xviii]
The report singles out China’s military modernization and expansion in the South China Sea as key threats to U.S. power. It also highlights Russian actions to undermine democratic processes in Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine, as well as Moscow’s efforts to “shatter” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system by exploiting its benefits while simultaneously undercutting its principles and ‘rules of the road’,” according to the report.[xix]
Dictator for life
Xi Jinping will remain Chinese President indefinitely after 99.8 percent of delegates to the National People’s Congress voted on March 11, 2018, to remove from the Constitution the provision that the President and Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.
They also backed inserting into the constitution his doctrine, “Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”
Of the 2,963 who voted, two unknown (and brave) delegates opposed the moves, while three abstained.
The move provoked a strong reaction from China watchers.
“A bombshell,” said Susan Shirk, one of the United States’ foremost China specialists.
Shirk, who was U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton, said: “What is going on here is that Xi Jinping is setting himself up to rule China as a strongman, a personalistic leader – I have no problem calling it a dictator – for life.”[xx]
Some China watchers believe that China’s trade and diplomatic contacts with the outside world will eventually see China embrace democracy and Western values of human rights and the rule of law and perhaps even a form of capitalism. Unfortunately, Xi’s recent pronouncements scuttle that hopeful theory.
While small businesses have been allowed to thrive, the core of China’s economy, transport, communications, resources, energy and all other utilities and media remain firmly in state hands.
And all private companies beyond small retail, both locally and foreign-owned, are now expected to include Communist Party branches with an important say in strategic decision-making.
On April 23, 2018 Xi, when presiding over a Politburo group study session, stressed the necessity to “apply the scientific principles and the spirit of The Communist Manifesto to the overall planning of activities related to the great struggle, great project, great cause, and great dream.”[xxi]
On May 4, 2018, Xi said during a magnificent event honoring the German philosopher in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing: “Writing Marxism on to the flag of the CCP was totally correct … Unceasingly promoting the signification and modernization of Marxism is totally correct.”
During the celebration, Xi described Marx as “the greatest thinker in human history,” and instructed all party members to study Marxist theories as a “way of life” and a “spiritual pursuit.” He said Marxism should be the guiding ideology promoted in all campuses and classrooms.
“This grand gathering” in the Great Hall was conducted “with great veneration … to remember Marx’s great character and historic deeds and to review his noble spirit and brilliant thoughts.”[xxii]
Marxism, said Xi on May 4, 2018, was a “powerful ideological weapon for us to understand the world, grasp the law, seek the truth, and change the world.”[xxiii]
Attorney General Barr concluded his speech at the Gerald R. Ford museum with these words:
The CCP has launched an orchestrated campaign, across all of its many tentacles in Chinese government and society, to exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them.
To secure a world of freedom and prosperity for our children and grandchildren, the free world will need its own version of the whole-of-society approach, in which the public and private sectors maintain their essential separation but work together collaboratively to resist domination and to win the contest for the commanding heights of the global economy.
America has done that before and we rekindle our love and devotion for our country and each other, I am confident that we — the American people, the American government, and American business together — can do it again. Our freedom depends on it.
[i] Ibid.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] “Stuxnet”, Wikipedia.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
[iv] James Jiann Hua To, Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014).
[v] Ibid., p. 42.
[vi] Ibid., pp. 73-80.
[vii] Marcel Angliviel de la Beaumelle, “The United Front Work Department: ‘magic weapon’ at home and abroad”, China Brief (Jamestown Foundation, Washington, DC), Vol. 17, Issue: 9, July 6, 2017.
URL: https://jamestown.org/program/united-front-work-department-magic-weapon-home-abroad/
[viii] John Sudworth, “Confucius institute: the hard side of China’s soft power”, BBC News, December 22, 2014.
URL: www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30567743
[ix] https://www.digmandarin.com/confucius-institutes-around-the-world.html
[x] “A message from Confucius: new ways of projecting soft power”, The Economist (UK), October 22, 2009.
URL: www.economist.com/node/14678507
[xi] John Fitzgerald, quoted in Jennifer Oriel, “Managing Chinese soft power without killing trade is the key”, The Australian, September 12, 2016 [paywall-protected article].
URL: www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/managing-chinese-soft-power-without-killing-trade-is-key/news-story/5968bdbfc83bb8a2011a7cdda293587e
[xii] https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/04/has-china-compromised-every-major-mainstream-media-entity/
[xiii] http://gbj.tsjc.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/jcgbj/412/index.html
[xiv] https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/establishment-media-collaborators/
[xv] China Global Investment Tracker (American Enterprise Institute).
URL: www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/
[xvi] https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/10/china-means-to-take-over-the-world/
[xvii] Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (U.S. Department of Defense, the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia).
URL: https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf
[xviii] Transcript of remarks by U.S. Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis on the National Defense Strategy, DoD News (U.S. Department of Defense, the Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia), January 19, 2018.
URL: https://dod.defense.gov/news/transcripts/transcript-view/article/1420042/remarks-by-secretary-mattis-on-the-national-defense-strategy/
[xix] Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, op. cit., p. 2.
[xx] Susan Shirk, quoted in Tom Phillips, “‘Dictator for life’: Xi Jinping’s power grab condemned as step towards tyranny”, The Guardian (UK), February 26, 2018.
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping-china-presidential-limit-scrap-dictator-for-life
[xxi] Rowan Callick, “Karl Marx is big again in Xi Jinping’s China”, The Australian, May 10, 2018.
URL: www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/rowan-callick/karl-marx-is-big-again-in-xi-jinpings-china/news-story/8fe4e85e2c1c63e0a943af9daabe88a6
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Quoted in Zheping Huang, “China’s huge celebrations of Karl Marx are not really about Marxism”, Quartz (New York), May 4, 2018.
URL: https://qz.com/1270109/chinas-communist-party-and-xi-jinping-are-celebrating-the-200th-birthday-of-karl-marx-with-a-vengeance/
[i] Jon Swaine and Raf Sanchez, “China ‘must stop unprecedented wave of cyber attacks’, says Obama administration”, The Telegraph (UK), March 11, 2013.
URL: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9923173/China-must-stop-unprecedented-wave-of-cyber-attacks-says-Obama-administration.html
[i] Testimony of Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (Front Royal, Virginia, USA), before a special hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations Chinese Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy through U.S. Educational Institutions, Multilateral Organizations and Corporate America (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC), February 14, 2006, pp. 5–17, at pp. 9–10.
URL: www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2006_hr/060214_2-transcript.pdf
See also: Steven W. Mosher, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017).
[ii] Sun Jiahui, “Massacres in ancient history”, The World of Chinese (Beijing), June 18, 2015.
URL: www.theworldofchinese.com/2015/06/massacres-in-ancient-history/
[iii] The Hundred Schools of Thought (Chinese: 諸子百家; pinyin: zhūzǐ bǎijiā) were philosophies and schools that flourished from the 6th century to 221 BC, during the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring states period of ancient China.
[iv] John Man, The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World (London: Bantam Press, 2008), p. 383.
[v] Paul Monk, “Mao Zedong and Communist Party evils laid bare by Frank Dikotter”, The Australian, April 23, 2016.
URL: www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/mao-zedong-and-communist-party-evils-laid-bare-by-frank-dikotter/news-story/f6e544dae1d5500f7afb17146532ff10
[vi] General Chi Haotian’s statement, December 1999, quoted by Mosher in his testimony before the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee. February 14, 2006, op. cit., p. 13. Also quoted in Mosher, Bully of Asia, op. cit.
[vii] Mosher, Bully of Asia, op. cit., p. 149.
[viii] Ibid., p. 171.
[ix] Liu Xiaobo, “Bellicose and thuggish: The roots of Chinese ‘patriotism’ at the dawn of the twenty-first century”, in Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, NO Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013). Foreword by Václav Havel.
[x] Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “In new book from dissident, a warning on China”, New York Times, November 30, 2011.
URL: www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/world/asia/01iht-letter01.html
[xi] Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit Of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study Of The Authority Crisis In Political Development. [1968] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, new edition, 1992), p. 50.
[xii] Mosher, Bully of Asia, op. cit., p. 113.
[xiii] https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/2020_Annual_Report_to_Congress.pdf
[xiv] “Middle kingdom” is the literal translation of the Chinese word for “China.” The Qing Dynasty first used this phrase to refer to China in an official legal document in 1689, and the Republic of China adopted it as its short-form name in 1912, followed by the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The most widely accepted interpretation of this phrase is that China sees itself as the center of global culture and civilization that others seek to emulate. Wee Kek Koon, “How China Got Its Name, and What Chinese Call the Country,” South China Morning Post, October 5, 2016.
[xv] Ibid p.3
[xvi] Ibid p.31
[xvii] Ibid p.32
[xviii] Ibid p.329
[xix] Ibid p.85
[xx] Ibid p.86
[xxi] Ibid p.386
[xxii] https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-1-000-probes-chinese-intellection-property-theft-164149834.html
[xxiii]https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/fbi-exposes-beijings-hitech-thievery/news-story/5bc2d37de7f3210dbfe48df42c60c518
[xxiv] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/12/31/top-10-2020-lieber/
[xxv] https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/scientist-sentenced-for-theft-of-trade-secrets-052720
[xxvi] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-convicted-conspiracy-commit-theft-trade-secrets
[xxvii] “Silent Contest”, Wikipedia.
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Contest
See also: “Silent Contest”, ChinaScope.org (Global Communications Association, Washington, DC), March 5, 2014.
URL: http://chinascope.org/archives/6447/92
[xxviii] Michael Evans – The Times reprinted in The Australian 21 May 2020
[xxix] Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), p. 349: note.
[xxx] Mosher: Bully of Asia, op. cit., pp. 75, 76.
[xxxi] Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), p. 240.
[xxxii] U.S. Department of Defense, Military And Security Developments Involving The People’s Republic Of China, annual report to Congress, April 26, 2016.
URL: https://china.usc.edu/us-department-defense-military-and-security-developments-involving-people%e2%80%99s-republic-china-2016