The China Situation Isn’t As Bad As It Looks. It’s Far Worse.
The International Criminal Conspiracy of “Change Through Trade”
Among the challenges that citizens face in the modern world is having to base their political views on imperfect information. The information we receive about political events—especially international ones—actually comes from financial, academic, policy and media elites, each with their own set of biases, self-interests and platforms.
These perspectives are mixed and processed for public consumption by the bosses of the world’s major media outlets, each with biases and self-interests of their own—primarily shaped by those of the elites who sponsor them. Thus, when faced with a geopolitical crisis, the perspectives to which we’re exposed are heavily influenced by the self-interests of our elites.
Most of the time, this means that when a foreign adversary gets on the wrong side of the western national security machine, the resulting narratives are overly-hawkish. The classic example is the invasion of Iraq in 2003, justified by the story that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). As it turns out, Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, but we couldn’t un-invade Iraq.
Likewise, the Spanish-American War was justified by Spain’s supposed bombing of the USS Maine, but some 80 years later it was confirmed that the USS Maine had experienced a random coal fire explosion. Even worse, boys in Ohio and Nebraska were sent to fight the communists in Vietnam because, we were told, if we lost, Ohio and Nebraska would soon become communist. Instead, we lost, the Vietnamese kicked out the Chinese, tried communism for a bit, then mostly ditched it and became one of our most important potential allies in Asia.
This isn’t meant to make light of the human toll of these events. Each, to varying degrees, was an avoidable catastrophe irreparably damaging countless lives.
Yet the magnitude of each of these events is tiny when compared to that which results when the western national security machine makes the opposite mistake and—instead of being too hawkish—isn’t hawkish enough. For the reasons that follow, I’ve concluded that this is what’s happening now with regard to the west’s relations with China. And the most recent example of the type of cataclysm that can unfold when the national security community so errors is the clandestine rearmament of Germany and the resulting Second World War.
Germany’s Clandestine Rearmament as International Criminal Conspiracy
In modern times, every student of a certain age learns the basic outline of the Second World War in Europe. Basically, this super evil guy named Hitler led this creepy party called the Nazis to take over the world, but they were halted by this really steely Brit named Churchill until the Americans, Russians, and other Allies who we’ll never live up to marched in and saved the day.
This answer isn’t wrong, per se, but it only gets partial credit. Rather, the more complex and accurate view of the rise of Nazism—the view by which Nazi leaders were later prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials—is of Germany’s clandestine rearmament and subsequent conquests as an international criminal conspiracy.
First, what exactly does Germany’s “clandestine rearmament” mean? One does not simply build fields of tanks and fleets of aircraft without anyone being able to see it.
Rather, Germany’s rearmament was “clandestine” because it was enabled by a years-long campaign of denial and gaslighting by western financial, political, and media elites, in which they refused to acknowledge or publicly disclose that it was happening.
Today, the few activists who worked to shed light on Germany’s rearmament—among them Carl von Ossietzky, one of two Nobel laureates to ever perish in prison, Ambassador William Dodd, George Orwell, and Winston Churchill—are widely remembered as heroes. But throughout the 1930s, they were sidelined and ostracized by the western political establishment. As William Manchester recounts, though Churchill’s leadership during the War was extraordinary, it was really his activism in the eight years prior to it that made him a once-in-a-century leader.
As Europe toiled slowly towards its next butchery … the quintessential Churchill, the Winston the public never saw, prowled his study night after night, an inner shutter drawn in a private blackout of the mind, excluding everything but the topic before him. His prose grew in intensity as though controlled by a rheostat, as he used language to express his wrath, a fury matched only by Hitler, who was free to act while Churchill, who couldn’t even control his own spending, saw himself approaching senescence with no prospect of any change in his reputation as the leper of Parliament.
The first few chapters of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World contain several allusions to two documentary masterpieces: Joachim Fest’s Hitler: A Career and Frank Capra’s Why We Fight, which was produced shortly after America’s entry into the Second World War.
The conspiracy of German rearmament went like this. Amid the chaos in Germany after the First World War, the German people experienced a level of lawlessness and insecurity unprecedented in modern Europe. This chaos made viable a number of radical political parties who promised to do away with democratic governance in exchange for old-fashioned stability, law and order, and a sense of national identity. One such radical party, the National Socialists, began cutting clandestine deals with western financial and business elites.
Western elites would provide the Nazis with funding, support, and positive press, while turning a blind eye to their violence, lawlessness, illiberalism, and fanatical goals as the Nazis modernized Germany’s industries, dismantled its democratic institutions, and systematically eliminated their rivals. In return, the Nazis would effectively act as pit bosses, promising stable business conditions, low wages, preferential investment opportunities, and extraordinary financial returns—at least, on paper.
(Throughout this section, I’ve included links to various segments of Why We Fight. While the entire film is a must-see, for purposes of this article, it’s intended that readers watch just a minute or two of each segment.)
Yet once the Nazis obtained power, overwhelming evidence began to mount that they weren’t just using their funding to modernize Germany’s industries, but instead to construct the world’s most powerful military arsenal, flagrantly violating the Treaty of Versailles.
By then, however, their supporters among the western elite felt they were in too deep. They’d already lent the Nazis so much money that if their loans weren’t repaid, some might go broke.
So Hitler renegotiated the terms of the deal, promising these elites even better financial returns so long as they turned a blind eye to the Nazis’ military buildup, treaty violations, deteriorating human rights conditions, concentration camps and arbitrary oppression of religious minorities—and so long as they ensured that these issues weren’t discussed in their media outlets.
Western elites didn’t think it likely that the Nazis would cheat them, because they believed they could always fund the Nazis’ political opponents and turn the German people against them if need be—and anyway, Hitler didn’t seem all that smart. In other words, they thought they were in control.
But what they didn’t realize is that modern technologies had afforded the Nazis an unprecedented level of control over the German people, breaking all social bonds other than loyalty to the state, and allowed them to carefully craft a personality cult around Hitler which kept much of the population fanatically loyal under any circumstance to an extent that no previous regime ever could.
Further, western elites failed to appreciate that by agreeing not to mention German rearmament in their media outlets, they weren’t just deceiving their middle-class citizens—they were deceiving themselves as well. They believed themselves immune to propaganda, but when they saw their peers mutually pretending that nothing was wrong in Germany, they were falsely reassured, and they became enmeshed in a false reality of their own making.
Meanwhile, the Nazis began softening up their geopolitical rivals, sponsoring stooges and agents in democratic countries to demoralize them and diminish their will to fight.
By 1938, the Nazis had constructed the world’s most powerful war machine. But they still needed more manpower and resources. So instead of attacking outright, they began testing western leaders’ limits, occupying more and more territory while signing and saying whatever was necessary to mollify western politicians along the way.
Under pressure from a war-weary public and financial elites who still hoped their loans would be repaid, western leaders tried to appease Hitler by letting him break his prior commitments in return for promises of peace, having never in their lifetime experienced or heard of a counterpart who could lie so pathologically.
But what these leaders failed to grasp was that Hitler wasn’t like them—he hadn’t been given power democratically, and he wasn’t accountable to anyone. Hitler had taken power the old-fashioned way: By silencing, manipulating, killing, and betraying anyone who stood in his way, and he’d soon do the same to them.
As it turned out, Adolf Hitler wasn’t a very nice guy. And he wasn’t western elites’ buddy after all. What western leaders further failed to account for was that although Hitler may not have been especially bright, modern technologies had given the Nazis the power to extract loyalty even from their most intelligent subjects—this was a key feature separating the 20th century’s new “totalitarian” regimes from previous authoritarian regimes. In fact, the Nazis had carefully and clandestinely plotted the entire conquest of Europe, using never-before-seen military strategies, down to the last square mile.
Today, Neville Chamberlain is rightly associated with appeasement and moral cowardice—though by the standards of today’s leaders he was hawkish and brave. Chamberlain had sent an expeditionary force to Norway to try to stop the Nazis there, but by then it was too little and too late. The most terrifying military arsenal that had ever been constructed was unleashed indiscriminately on anyone who dared stand up for freedom.
The scale of the war that resulted from this series of avoidable missteps was far beyond the comprehension of nearly any person still living today, claiming over 60 million innocent lives and destroying the vast majority of material wealth across Europe and Asia.
Today, the young men and women who were sent to fight in this morass are often lionized as fearless heroes. But as Joseph Heller captured in Catch-22, the reality was both intellectually insulting and monstrously unfair—these young people were sent to fight against a war machine that had been funded in secret by their own elites!
The conspiracy of German rearmament had ended in the most bitter and destructive way imaginable. Justice was obtained to some degree at Nuremberg, though the popular view of the War remains slanted. Many of the western financiers of the Nazi machine—some of whom bore more responsibility for totalitarianism in Germany than even a few Nazi leaders themselves—avoided justice entirely, and many have escaped scrutiny to this day. As a result, western elites remain liable to repeat these same mistakes, and today it appears that that’s exactly what they are doing with China.
The International Criminal Conspiracy of “Change Through Trade”
When Richard Nixon first visited China in 1972, he did so with both eyes open. American and Chinese troops had fought against each other in two wars in as many decades, and the United States had opposed the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War as well.
The United States and its allies were open, democratic societies, while China under Chairman Mao was one of the most oppressive societies on Earth. There was no reason to believe the two countries could, or should, be friends, and no particularly good reason to try to resume relations other than China’s strategic utility in opposing the Soviet Union.
So as western nations first began to normalize relations with China, they did so under the doctrine most aptly described as “change through trade.” China was still a poor country, they reasoned, and as the Chinese grew wealthier, they would naturally demand openness, human rights, and democratic reforms from the CCP.
But once they began to see the kinds of profits that could be made in China, western elites began to think maybe these CCP guys weren’t so bad after all.
“Change through trade” took on a whole new meaning, providing western elites a limitless pretext to ignore the CCP’s lawlessness, illiberalism, and fanatical goals as they modernized China’s industries and systematically repressed their rivals. In return, the CCP would effectively act as pit bosses, promising stable business conditions, low wages, preferential investment opportunities, and extraordinary financial returns—at least, on paper.
Even after the CCP killed thousands of innocent protesters marching for democracy and human rights at Tiananmen Square, economic relations only grew closer. Change through trade.
Even after the CCP brutally eliminated the Falun Gong religious movement which, at its height, had over 50 million adherents, China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. Change through trade.
Entire careers could be made or broken by one’s views on China. A whole generation of academics, journalists, policymakers, and MBAs became indoctrinated, mutually reassuring each other that change through trade was a success, growing ever more enmeshed in a false reality of their own making.
Western corporations, media organizations, political parties, universities, and even think tanks and human rights organizations became beholden to elites who insisted that the lies propagated by China’s propaganda machine be treated as reality—in human rights, economics, history, science and, eventually, public health.
But the concentration camps got too numerous, the lies too brazen, and the crackdowns too callous and cynical. So the CCP renegotiated the terms of the deal, promising these elites even better financial returns so long as they turned a blind eye to the CCP’s military buildup, treaty violations, deteriorating human rights conditions, concentration camps and arbitrary oppression of religious minorities—and so long as they ensured that these issues weren’t discussed in their media outlets. And, when the time was right, Xi Jinping used this clandestine network to shut down the world.
For the reasons that follow, I conclude that whatever the original intent, for decades “change through trade” has in the aggregate amounted to a mere pretext for western elites to sanction criminal activity, deception, illegality, human rights violations, forced labor, and oppression of minorities by the CCP and its collaborators in return for economic, political, and social favors, with the machine of clandestine relations that have developed under this pretext of “change through trade” amounting to the broadest international criminal conspiracy that the world has seen since Germany’s clandestine rearmament.
1. The Anaconda in the Chandelier: The CCP’s system of censorship is spreading globally.
One professor famously described the CCP’s system of censorship in China as an anaconda in a chandelier.
The Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is “You yourself decide,” after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite “naturally.” The Soviet Union, where Stalin’s notion of “engineering the soul” was first pursued, in practice fell far short of what the Chinese Communists have achieved in psychological engineering.
The CCP’s censorship relies on ambiguity. Through its propaganda outlets, the government makes its positions known. The permissible level of disagreement is never made clear, nor is it ever made clear whether any given individual is acting within these unspoken parameters. But the anaconda is always watching, and once you realize it’s moving, it’s already too late. The only way to get any sense of what opinions aren’t allowed is by taking note of who around you has already been eaten.
Today, the anaconda in the chandelier has slithered across the globe. It’s hard to think of any better description of the parameters and dynamics of censorship by Big Tech platforms, especially during Covid, when they’ve routinely censored legal speech while concealing the rationale behind their decisions and applying their terms of service selectively, if at all. Perhaps this is not surprising, however, given that Twitter inexplicably has a leading AI expert with deep and well-documented ties to China’s military on its board of directors.
2. Leading anti-CCP dissidents are afraid of being censored by our own elites.
Seeing the western national security community warn about China, it can be tempting to think they’ve got everything under control. After all, when in our lifetime has the western national security community identified a threat and failed to stop it? News headlines are filled with critiques of China, and there are lots of anti-CCP accounts online.
Yet look closer and you’ll find that the social media accounts of leading anti-CCP dissidents aren’t all they seem. They’re siloed into specific niches. Some are focused on Hong Kong, some on the plight of the Uyghurs, some on CCP influence at the United Nations. But there are strict lines they won’t cross, narratives they won’t question, and opinions they dare not voice for fear of losing their only platform.
And who could blame them? Why would anyone risk losing their only platform for exposing the horrors their friends are experiencing in Hong Kong by potentially saying the wrong thing about, for example, CCP influence among western elites, or CCP influence on the response to Covid? This keeps their voices stilted and their platforms small. The anaconda keeps watch.
This dynamic is reminiscent of German rearmament, when anti-Nazi activists struggled to find platforms as they faced censorship and ostracism by western elites who were financially connected, directly or indirectly, to the Nazi regime.
3. Mild-mannered academics are the most hawkish about the CCP.
Often, the most nuanced and accurate views on international subjects come from academics, who develop their expertise out of a genuine passion for the subject rather than financial gain.
Some of the most eye-opening accounts one can follow about China are those of honest, mild-mannered academics. These are the professors and academic exiles whose tireless work we have to thank for the fact that we can now refer to China as “totalitarian” and that the national security community is issuing any warnings about China at all. The first thing you’ll notice when you follow these academics is that they’re often even more hawkish, and their warnings about the CCP even more dire, than much of the national security community.
The fact that academics are the most hawkish voices when it comes to the CCP, and their opinions on the subject often aren’t aired by mainstream media outlets, is chilling. This fact is, once again, eerily reminiscent of German rearmament.
4. CCP influence among western elites, a primary concern of academics, is a taboo subject within elite western media outlets and think tanks.
Talk to honest academics about totalitarianism and deteriorating political conditions in China, and among their chief concerns is the CCP’s unprecedented level of influence over western elites, a factor without which the problems in China would never be considered tolerable. Yet you’ll hear nothing about this subject from elite western media outlets or think tanks. Gee, I wonder why.
5. Despite the national security community’s warnings, the CCP is getting its way in geopolitics wherever it tries.
By a certain age, everyone knows the drill when the national security community names a new adversary. The orange alerts go up, the flag pins come out, a few dissidents are sponsored, and a few opposing opinions censored just to show it’s serious. Team America drops in and saves us from the threat, whether real or imagined.
But this time, it’s different. We’re getting the warnings about China, the orange alerts, the flag pins and the dissidents, but the CCP is still getting its way. In Hong Kong, for example, we’ve simply watched as the city falls under China’s jackboot and our friends and leading dissidents are rounded up and silenced one after another.
Team America never came. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hong Kong was sold out. In fact, around the world, individuals who are more concerned or hawkish about the CCP run a far greater risk of censorship than CCP apologists. And when it came to propagating Covid lockdowns into global policy, the CCP got away with that, too.
These activities suggest that western officials are either not fully committed to stopping the CCP or, in the worst cases, that their warnings are intended merely to mollify the public.
6. The western middle class is being kept in the dark about the strength of Xi’s personality cult in China.
What western elites with big stakes in China want is for the CCP to sideline Xi and get back to the way things were, back when they could quietly maintain the status quo. But their CCP contacts are telling them it’s not that simple—China’s population is intensely loyal to Xi. This is, of course, why Xi is getting a third term as General Secretary.
Part of the reason Xi commands such intense loyalty in China is that the CCP has crafted a personality cult around Xi similar to that crafted around Hitler in Nazi Germany. For example, images of Christ in churches all across China have been replaced by images of Xi. Yet there’s little talk of this personality cult in mainstream western media outlets, suggesting that western elites don’t want the middle class to know the degree to which conditions in China have deteriorated.
7. Some western media outlets that once painted a grim picture of Xi’s China now show obsequious deference to the CCP.
Looking back at some major media outlets’ reporting on China, a disturbing pattern emerges. Several years ago, these outlets painted a grim and detailed portrait of life in Xi’s China.
But now, even as conditions in China have, in reality, reached a new low, these same outlets show a degree of obsequiousness and deference to CCP narratives and propaganda, indicating that they’ve accepted a certain level of totalitarianism in their own reporting in their home countries.
8. The CCP appears to have developed an unprecedented level of influence over global elites, such that they treat the most obvious lies from China’s propaganda machine as reality.
During the response to Covid, we watched elites all over the world repeat the obviously false claim that the CCP had eliminated the virus from all of China through a two-month lockdown of Wuhan, based on data that even a cursory glance would have revealed to be fraudulent.
Even after more than a hundred countries tried and failed to recreate China’s “results”—with lockdowns that were often far broader than the CCP’s—western elites continued to treat this lie as reality, leading to the deaths of countless thousands of their own people.
9. Honest accounts from within China paint a far grimmer picture of life than elite media outlets would have western citizens believe.
For nearly two years, the New York Times implored the United States and the rest of the world to be more like China with regard to its lockdowns.
But in 2022, the Times finally reported what life was really like during the lockdowns in China that they’d spent nearly two years advocating.
Thanks for that, New York Times.
10. International governance organizations have effectively been turned into front organizations for the CCP.
The World Health Organization and, to some degree, the United Nations and World Economic Forum have effectively been turned into front organizations for the CCP, lending a cosmopolitan veneer to CCP narratives with a near-total disregard for the truth.
11. Western media giants are serving the CCP to a worrying degree, carrying CCP narratives while refusing to cover the CCP’s deadliest actions.
Not only are western media outlets kowtowing to CCP narratives, but they’ve flatly refused to cover or even mention the CCP’s deadliest actions.
For example, the WHO’s guidance on mechanical ventilators in the initial months of Covid came from Chinese sources and led to a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65—effectively a death sentence. This ventilator guidance killed countless thousands of innocent patients all over the world, terrifying the public and setting the stage for stricter lockdowns. It may have been issued by mistake, but there’s no way of knowing whether that’s true until a proper inquiry is conducted into how the Chinese could have possibly gotten the guidance so wrong. And so far, there’s been nothing but deafening silence about this horrifying issue.
If our elites aren’t willing to call out the worst things the CCP does, then it begs the question of whether they really intend to hold the CCP accountable for anything at all, and it sends a message the CCP that they’re free to kill as many westerners as they want so long as they don’t harm the interests of western elites.
12. Clear instances of undue CCP influence on policy are going unreported by media outlets and unquestioned by western elites.
In several instances, individuals who have shown levels of sycophancy to China wholly inappropriate to their organizational roles have also been central to the propagation of CCP narratives into global policy based on logical absurdities and outright lies. Despite being of paramount importance to our national security, these instances have gone wholly unreported by western media outlets.
13. Western elites’ Covid narrative is logically and intellectually incoherent, and the only possible explanation is sycophancy toward China.
Relying on the initial information obtained from China, western governments have spent more than two years treating the coronavirus as a pandemic-level supervirus for purposes of suspending citizens’ rights under a state of emergency that stands to be renewed into 2023. However, they’ve made no effort to hold the government of China accountable for covering up the spread of this virus in the early weeks, despite wide confirmation that the government of China knew of it by mid-December 2019 at the latest, several weeks before they reported this fact globally.
If the virus were, in fact, as dangerous as western governments have been pretending for purposes of their emergency powers, then China’s initial coverup cost countless thousands of lives around the world, an unforgivable crime against humanity. But they’ve made no effort to hold China accountable for this act. In short, they’ve been treating the virus as a pandemic-level supervirus for purposes of their domestic emergency powers, while treating it as an ordinary virus for purposes of their relations with China.
14. The CCP appears to have vast networks of stooges and agents carrying its narratives around the globe.
In addition to mainstream media outlets, the CCP appears to be sponsoring vast networks of smaller, generally far-left organizations and agents who carry its narratives even more dutifully. This too is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, which sponsored local fascist parties all over the world.
15. Even many “China hawks” may be acting as CCP agents.
Even many individuals who fashion themselves as hawkish about China may in fact be acting as CCP agents. This includes former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx and former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, each of whom may have acted as agents for the CCP with regard to the response to Covid. In another example, Guo Wengui, a Chinese tycoon who’s fashioned himself as ultra-hawkish against the CCP, was confirmed in court filings to have actually acted as “a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of” the CCP.
The infiltration of China hawks by the CCP is particularly chilling for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the CCP sees the risk of fomenting anti-CCP sentiment as being outweighed by the benefit of controlling those who are trusted to hold the CCP accountable. Second, it suggests that the CCP may be even more dangerous than these “hawks” have been saying.
16. The CCP’s totalitarian influence appears to have extended into the institutions most responsible for monitoring the CCP’s totalitarian influence.
Western security services appear to be co-opted, directly or indirectly, to such a degree that they’re staying silent about, or even abetting, some clear-cut cases of CCP influence, such as the widespread indulgence of China’s Covid data as true or the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator’s long acting on the belief that China’s Covid propaganda was real. In effect, these actions may amount to acts of war on their own people, as the lockdowns in question were unprecedented in the western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi’s lockdown of Wuhan, failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of young people in the United States and every other country that tried them.
Western elites have lost control of the China situation. More specifically, they’ve lost control of the clandestine network of illicit payments, favors, and quid pro quos that have developed to facilitate the exploitation of low wages in China through the CCP under the pretext of “change through trade.” This has given Xi Jinping an amount of power over global elites without precedent in the modern world.
To be clear, not all of these illicit payments and quid pro quos are made with the CCP directly, and many individuals in this network may not know they’re answering to the CCP. Some western officials may instead have been groomed through various national political machines with indirect ties to the CCP and selected for the traits that Xi most admires in western leaders: submissiveness, cowardice, deference to China, and sociopathic tendencies. But CCP leaders are the only ones with anything close to a full accounting of where exactly this network of influence extends.
While there are important similarities in worldview and methods of control, Xi’s China is not Nazi Germany. China’s military strength relative to its peers does not compare to Germany’s in the 1930s.
But the CCP has far more control over global elites than the Nazis had, such that the CCP has been able to convince these elites to countenance what may amount to acts of war on their own people on the thinnest of pretexts. The influence of this clandestine network appears to extend into western intelligence agencies, such that there doesn’t appear to be any institution really monitoring its activities. This conclusion further aligns with intelligence reports that the CCP’s primary goal is “superseding their cultural and political values” to those of the west.
In that sense, in contrast to the Nazis’ militaristic imperialism, the CCP has resurrected a more ancient form of imperialism in which they’ve bought and groomed foreign elites to be more loyal to them than to their own people. Since the early 19th century, no illiberal regime besides the Soviet Union has had the wherewithal to co-opt western elites to that degree, and relations with the Soviet Union were limited. But the amount of western cash running through China over the last few decades appears to have made this ancient form of imperialism viable for the CCP.
This is, by all accounts, a sad story. China is running out of money. The CCP made promises to the Chinese people that they couldn’t keep, and they’re therefore resorting to increasingly ruthless ways of obtaining cash while dragging the world into totalitarianism with them, as we saw with lockdowns. They’re simultaneously resorting to increasingly ruthless methods of robbing their own people, such as bank defaults and jailings of billionaires, while doubling down on domestic controls.
Decoupling from China need not be permanent. China is a great civilization, and I have no doubt that China can right itself and rectify its institutions within our lifetime. But we can’t risk our democracy and the lives of our young people while we wait for that to happen. We need to be on the highest level of alert with regard to the CCP and treat the war as if it’s already begun. There’s presently no legitimate reason why we should be engaging with Xi’s China any differently than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Under these circumstances, given the CCP has enough influence over western elites to get them to place relations with China over the lives of their own people, it simply isn’t safe to support any leader who won’t acknowledge CCP influence on the response to Covid, support decoupling from China, and support the investigation of CCP influence among western elites. The only way to avoid the type of cataclysm we saw in the 1930s is for this to be an issue of highest priority among western citizens. If all do their duty, then I have full confidence that we shall prove once again able to defend our democracy and outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary, alone.
Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.
One more thing. At the beginning where you mention how Western Elites were funding the Nazis. I guarantee you that MOST people don't have a clue what you are talking about.
Most people consider those facts to be conspiracy theories. Obviously they are not, it's well documented, but many people STILL don't know these facts!
China is in a much better position than Germany was, because they have far more influence on the Western nations than Germany ever had. China learned from the mistakes of the world's previous totalitarian states, and have perfected the processes of evil and oppression.
And as you pointed out. It's all at the hands of Western Elites.
One pundit put it very well, I can't remember who it was, but they said something to the effect of, "The only reason that communism appears to 'work' in China, is because the United States is propping it up! Left alone, it would fail, like any other communist state."
People need to pull their heads out of the sand. It is probably is too late. Amazing how people on top
don't realize they are being played.
Thank you for your exhaustive research, writing, and all your work.