China: What We Must Do, What We Must Not Do

by Gordon G. Chang Gatestone Institute OPINION

• The truth is that the United States is defending more than just its position in the international system. We are defending the international system itself, the system of treaties, conventions, rules, and norms.
• Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, does not believe in that system. He is trying to impose China’s imperial‑era notions of the world.
• In short, Chinese rulers believed that they had the mandate of heaven over tianxia, meaning “all under heaven.” Recently, his pronouncements have become unmistakable.
• In the last few months, Xi Jinping has seen an historic opportunity because the United States has been stricken by the disease that China itself has pushed out… What must we do? First, let us talk about what we must not do. We must not save Chinese communism again. In the past, American presidents, when China has been stressed, had ridden to the rescue of the Chinese state.
• On May 13 of last year, Beijing declared a “people’s war” on the United States. This means the contest with China is existential. There is going to be one survivor. It is either going to be the Peoples’ Republic of China or the United States of America, but not both.
• What should we do? In my call for action, there are eight items. First, we need to cut off trade with China. Now, I know a lot of people think we should not do this, or this would be unfortunate. Yes, this is unfortunate, but the point is that China’s communism cannot be reformed, so the only way we can protect American society and Americans is to reduce our exposure to China and our great exposure, of course, is trade… we should not be enriching a hostile state with the proceeds of commerce with the United States.
• China’s Communist Party does not have sovereign immunity…. We have the Global Magnitsky Act.
• We need to “rip and replace” all the equipment in our telecom backbone that has been supplied by Huawei Technologies… China has been using that company’s equipment to spy on others. We should have no Huawei equipment in our backbone
• Also, we should be turfing out even more Chinese journalists. Those “journalists”… work for China’s intelligence services.
• Unfortunately, China does not believe in comparative advantage, it does not believe in being a responsible member of the international community. Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is what many people think is unthinkable, and that is to cut our ties with China…. We cut our ties until… the Communist Party no longer rules [and] the Chinese people govern themselves…. I believe the Chinese people eventually will get this right.

China has attacked America with coronavirus. At this moment, more than 100,000 Americans have been killed. We brace ourselves for the deaths to come.

Today, I’ll do two things. First, I’ll talk about the nature of that attack. The second thing, what we must do to protect ourselves.

First of all, China is not, as many people will tell you, just a competitor. It is an enemy. China is trying to overthrow the international system, and in that process, it is trying to make you subject to modern-day Chinese emperors.

I know this sounds as if it cannot be true, but we must listen to what Chinese leaders say. When we do that, we realize that to defend the American republic and defend our way of life, we are going to have to decouple from China.

On May 6, President Donald J. Trump said that China’s attack was worse than Pearl Harbor, worse than the World Trade Center. “There’s never been an attack like this,” he said, and he is right.

Most critically, Chinese leaders publicly admitted that the novel coronavirus, the pathogen causing COVID-19, could be transmitted from one human to another on January 20.

Yet doctors in Wuhan, the epicenter, were noticing the contagiousness of this virus no later than the second week in December. Beijing knew a few days after that. If Chinese leaders had said nothing during that five‑week period, that would have been grossly irresponsible.

What they tried to do, however, was deceive the world into believing that this was not transmissible human-to-human. As a result of that campaign, the World Health Organization (WHO) propagated China’s false narrative, especially with that infamous January 14 tweet:

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”

At the same time, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China since 2012, pressured countries not to impose travel restrictions or quarantines on arrivals from China. Again, WHO helped China, this time with its January 10 statement opposing these restrictions.

What happened was arrivals from China — when Chinese officials knew this virus was human-to human-transmissible — turned what should have been an epidemic contained to China into a global pandemic.

I don’t know what Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, was thinking, but if after having seen what the coronavirus did to cripple China, he decided to cripple other societies to get even, he would have done exactly what in fact he did do.

That means there is only one inescapable conclusion. This conclusion is that China maliciously spread this virus around the world, sickening people, killing others.

This is the first time in history that one nation has attacked all the others.

That is not all. After admitting the human-to-human contagiousness of this disease, Beijing then downplayed it.

On January 21, the day after formally admitting the disease’s human-to-human transmissibility, Beijing got its propaganda machine in full gear to tell the world that this was less dangerous than SARS.

SARS is the 2002‑2003 epidemic that according to the World Health Organization infected 8,096 people across the world, killing 744. By then, on January 21, Chinese officials knew it was much worse than SARS.

According to Der Spiegel, Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, believes that on January 21 ‑‑ this is the day after China formally admitted human‑to‑human transmissibility of the disease ‑‑ Xi Jinping spoke to Dr. Tedros, the director-general of WHO, and tried to get the organization to hold back information on human‑to‑human transmissibility, as well as to delay declaring a pandemic.

Now, WHO denies that this phone conversation between Xi and Tedros took place, but it fits known facts. It also fits what the US intelligence community has been saying, according to various reports.

China’s actions had consequences. Beijing lulled public health officials around the world, including those in the United States, into not taking actions that they otherwise would have adopted.

Democrats and Chinese communists have criticized President Trump for acting too slowly after he imposed the travel restrictions on China on January 31. If that is true, it is only because people on his coronavirus task force were actually listening to what Beijing was saying and making judgments on what they had heard.

For instance, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, in her March 31 press briefing said she had seen the data from China and decided that this was no more dangerous than SARS, but realized, after the infections ripped through both Italy and Spain, that she had been deceived by the Chinese. She is not the only one. Dr. Anthony Fauci has also talked in public about how the Chinese misled him.

We must impose costs on China. We must impose costs because, first of all, what China did was a crime against all of humanity. We must also impose costs because we need to deter China. This is not going to be the last pathogen generated on Chinese soil. We got to make sure the Chinese leaders do not believe that they can maliciously spread another disease.

This means there is going to be friction between China and the United States as we Americans take steps to protect ourselves in the future. Those steps are going to cause arrogant and belligerent Chinese to move against us.

We should take a look about how the arrogant and belligerent Chinese indeed view the international system, how they view the world order. You will hear many analysts say that the friction between the United States and China is just another one of these boys-will-be-boys contests in history.

The notion is that the United States is jealously protecting its position in the international system fits in with Beijing’s narrative that their rise is inevitable and that we are in terminal decline.

The truth is that the United States is defending more than just its position in the international system. We are defending the international system itself, the system of treaties, conventions, rules, and norms.

Unfortunately, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, does not believe in that system. He is trying to impose China’s imperial‑era notions of the world. In other words, he believes that everyone around the world must acknowledge Chinese rule.

In short, Chinese rulers believed that they had the mandate of heaven over tianxia, meaning “all under heaven.” Xi Jinping has used tianxia‑like language for more than a decade. Recently, his pronouncements have become unmistakable.

For instance, in his 2017 New Year’s message he said, and I quote, “The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven” — all under heaven — “are one family.”

If this were not enough, his foreign minister, Wang Yi, in September of 2017 wrote an article in Study Times, the Central Party School’s influential newspaper. Wang Yi wrote that “Xi Jinping thought” ‑‑ “thought” in Communist Party lingo is an important body of ideological work — “made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.”

If you take 2017 and subtract 300 years, you almost get to 1648. Wang, with his time reference of 300 years, was almost certainly pointing to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which established the current international system. That system recognizes the sovereignty of different states.

Also, when Wang Yi used the word “transcended,” he was saying that Xi Jinping does not believe that there should be sovereign states, or at least no more sovereign states than China itself. The trend of Xi Jinping’s recent comments is that he doesn’t want to live within the international system. He does not even want to adjust it. He wants to overthrow it altogether.

This means China once again is a revolutionary state. Now, Xi Jinping, of course, has not had the power to compel others to accept this audacious vision of worldwide Chinese rule.

Nonetheless, in the last few months, he has seen an historic opportunity because the United States has been stricken by the disease that China itself has pushed out beyond its borders.

What must we do? First, let us talk about what we must not do.

We must not save Chinese communism again. In the past, American presidents, when China had been stressed, have ridden to the rescue of the Chinese state. In 1972, for instance, Richard Nixon went to a Beijing that had been weakened by more than a half decade of the Cultural Revolution, signaling America’s support for China’s communism. That is how people in China took that visit.

The second time, 1989, George H. W. Bush sent Brent Scowcroft, his secret emissary, to Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre. Again, America was telling the Chinese, “Don’t worry about American sanctions, don’t worry about what we say in public, we have your back.”

The third time, 1999, President William Jefferson Clinton signed a trade deal with China – at a time when the Chinese economy, in reality, was contracting. Certainly, China was suffering geopolitical setbacks. That deal was the basis of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

Despite all these saves of Chinese communism, China’s communist leaders have remained hostile. We have seen this hostility, especially since the first week of February of this year when the Global Times, which is a Communist Party newspaper, and the Chinese foreign ministry have engaged in an inflammatory disinformation campaign against the United States in an attempt to tar the US with all sorts of disease‑related sins.

This campaign culminated, reached a high point — although this campaign is still continuing today — on March 12th when the foreign ministry went on a Twitter storm. As a part of that Twitter storm, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that coronavirus patient zero was in the United States.

In other words, the disease started here. He also suggested that the US Army carried the disease to Wuhan. We were seeing daily stories about how the United States had been spreading the disease around the world.

Now, Americans, of course, were taken by surprise by this Twitter storm, but we really should not be — because on May 13 of last year Beijing declared a “people’s war” on the United States. This means the contest with China is existential. There is going to be one survivor. It is going to be either the Peoples’ Republic of China or the United States of America, not both.

We have just heard about what we should not be doing. We should not be rescuing Chinese communism.

What should we do? In my call for action, there are eight items.

First, we need to cut off trade with China. Now, I know a lot of people think we should not do this, or this would be unfortunate.

Yes, this is unfortunate, but the point is that China’s communism cannot be reformed, so the only way we can protect American society and Americans is to reduce our exposure to China and our great exposure, of course, is trade. In any event, we should not be enriching a hostile state with the proceeds of commerce with the United States.

This means, of course, that we need to get our factories off Chinese soil, but especially our pharmaceutical factories. China has been threatening to throw the United States into what it calls “a mighty sea of coronavirus,” and it has not been kidding.

For instance, we know the Chinese have turned around at least one ship carrying personal protective equipment — masks, gowns, gloves — that were on their way to New York hospitals. Moreover, Peter Navarro has said China has even nationalized one American factory in China producing those N‑95 masks.

China’s leadership always talks about how it is not possible for the US and China to “decouple.” Now, it is possible. Our job is to make it inevitable.

Second thing that we need to do: The administration is well on the way to making sure federal pension money is not invested in China’s markets. We also need to make sure that state pension money, and money from individuals, is not put into China’s markets. We should not be enriching China with our investments into its equity markets.

Third thing, we need to make China pay. Now, many people have sued the Chinese central government. There are class‑action suits in the federal district courts in Florida, Texas, and Nevada. Of course, the Chinese Central Government has sovereign immunity, but there are a number of bills in Congress, including one sponsored by Senator Blackburn and Representative Lance Gooden.

There is also another bill sponsored by Tom Cotton and Dan Crenshaw, and these would strip China of sovereign immunity. I believe Josh Hawley, the Senator from Missouri, also has a bill.

The State of Missouri, by the way, has sued the Communist Party of China, which is far more important and far richer than the Chinese central government. Guess what? China’s Communist Party does not have sovereign immunity.

People have also been talking about seizing China’s holdings of US Treasury obligations. According to official records, it holds more than a trillion dollars. In reality, it is probably a bit higher than that because China holds US Treasuries through nominees.

Of course, China would engage in a vociferous propaganda campaign if we did that. Beijing would say we are repudiating our debt. They would also say we are not responsible members and stewards of the global financial system. They would be wrong, they would be incorrect, but the US might suffer reputational damage.

That is why I think we should seize Treasuries, but we should be doing this in connection with the holders and issuers of other major currencies. For instance, the Canadian dollar, the British pound, the European Union’s euro, the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen, maybe the Singapore dollar

When we act with others, this becomes not a China-versus-US issue but an issue of China versus the world. No one country is going to suffer reputational damage.

Of course, Beijing could nationalize American factories in China, but I’m not so sure they’re going to do that because China would be hurt far more than we would by that.

Remember that China’s economy is still in a contraction phase and it is still export‑dominated, which means it needs those factories on its soil.

Fourth, with the possibility of the coronavirus escaping from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we are now thinking about whether China has a biological weapons program in contravention of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.

Right now, we have seen all sorts of circumstantial evidence suggesting lab leak, and we have seen all sorts of circumstantial evidence that the Chinese military has been involved in the cleanup.

The Biological Weapons Convention does not have an inspections regime.

The item on my action list is that the United States should insist on inspections of China’s labs, and if we cannot get inspections we should withdraw from the Convention. I am not saying that the novel coronavirus was a biological weapon. We really do not know.

The one thing we do know is that in China’s labs, they have been engineering coronaviruses in the past. They have issued scientific papers on this, and what they are doing is extremely risky.

Fifth, we should make sure that China does not mess in our elections. China was extremely active in the 2018 midterms. They were concerned about President Trump’s tariffs, and they actually did have an effect in electing Democrats to the House of Representatives.

We know they are going to do that, or something like that, this time. The New York Times a few weeks ago said they are trying to sow chaos in the American public square by disseminating false rumors.

Sixth, we need to stop China from using its nationals to systematically gather information on our soil. Unfortunately, we have had a series of American presidents who have, for various reasons, either done nothing about China’s intelligence operations here, or the actions they took were deliberately ineffective.

We know that China’s diplomats operate on our soil, sometimes spying, other times in a manner inconsistent with the diplomatic status they have. Also, China’s Ministry of State Security agents operate here, freely.

We need to “rip and replace” all the equipment in our telecom backbone that has been supplied by Huawei Technologies, China’s telecom equipment manufacturer. China has been using that company’s equipment to spy on others. We should have no Huawei equipment in our backbone.

Also, we should be turfing out even more Chinese journalists. Those “journalists,” we know, work for China’s intelligence services. We have allowed them to stay on our soil for far too long. Secretary of State Pompeo has expelled many of them, and we need to complete the job.

We have to remember that China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law requires every Chinese citizen and every Chinese entity to spy if demanded, which means that Chinese nationals on our soil can be under a compulsion to engage in intelligence collection.

Seventh, let’s remove China from our cable networks and our newsstands. We should not be allowing China to exploit the openness of our system to try to end it.

Eighth, and the last, we have to deter China, which right now is engaging in what people in Beijing call “wolf warrior” diplomacy. For instance, we see Xi Jinping, with these threats to invade Taiwan.

Since the middle of February, there have been these boat-bumping and other provocative engagements in the South China and East China Seas against almost all of China’s sea neighbors. A Chinese diplomat laid the groundwork for taking over Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, and also China has moved to end the autonomy in Hong Kong.

China is lashing out, challenging everybody at the same time. This is a Maoist tactic, and it suggests problems inside the Chinese political system. In any event, we know that this is an incredibly dangerous moment for everyone.

One final note. Pushed by China, the Trump Administration is moving to an historic rupture with the People’s Republic of China. Because of this, we are seeing changes in the five‑decade‑old engagement policy.

Those changes are absolutely essential for us because, without them, we cannot be self‑reliant. For More and an Interview with Gordon Chang visit Gatestone

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow.

This article is based on a briefing to Gatestone Institute, given on May 20, 2020.

Printed with Permission 2020 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Opinions of the author are his own and do not represent the opinions of Soldier Fortune