China’s Push for World Domination Falters

Influence operations fail to gaslight the world

Shanghai shipyards pushing out cargo ships

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s inexorable push toward world economic domination is well underway. Xi and the Chinese Communist Party have well-laid plans that have been followed since Xi assumed power in 2014. The Chinese Communist leadership themselves have skin in the game, with Chinese President Xi Jinping placing his own credibility on the line by personally backing “Made in China 2025.” The goal of this plan is that “by 2025, China aims to achieve 70 percent self-sufficiency in high-tech industries, and by 2049—the hundredth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China—it seeks a dominant position in global markets.”

Another interlinked Chinese plan for economic domination is the “Belt Road Initiative (BRI)”, also known as One Belt One Road (OBOR). Under this trillion dollar initiative, China seeks to develop an integrated economic market consisting of “all Eurasian nations.” Integral to the network is development of a series of land corridors to facilitate overland trade, including the China–Central Asia–West Asia Corridor running from West China to Turkey. The strategy involves China underwriting billions of dollars of infrastructure investment loans in countries along the old Silk Road linking it with Europe. The ancient Silk Road was the East-West commercial route that introduced silk and spices to the West beginning in the 13^th century. The goal is exporting Chinese infrastructure capacity in order to develop new markets for Chinese goods. The strategy involves using “debt traps” in which countries that default on Chinese infrastructure loans are forced into long-term leases of their ports and internal transportation networks to China for pennies on the dollar “until the loans are repaid.”

The Chinese plan is extensive and worldwide and well-publicized. There are dozens of articles about it at Xinhua (the government-owned Chinese news service), in the South China Morning Post, in other state-run Chinese media, and in the foreign press around the world. The Chinese diplomatic corps propagate the various associated grand initiatives endlessly, including the Global Security Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative.

CHINESE INFLUENCE OPERATIONS

The communists are employing strategies from Sun Tzu who believed in multi-prong attacks on enemies: probe, retreat, probe, hit the enemy’s weak spots, etc. Could there be more at play in the overall Chinese plan than merely overt acts aimed at economic domination? What else might be ongoing behind the scenes?

In accordance with Sun Tzu’s theories, the CCP’s overarching plan involves many prongs: extensive theft of Western technology, exploiting cheap Chinese labor to capture Western and multi-national manufacturing industries, rapidly modernizing the PLA, leveraging the lure of the “huge Chinese market” to exploit “capitalist greed,” employing an extensive network of economic and military spies (technology, intellectual property, military secrets), gaining access to Western universities to train next-generation Chinese engineers and scientists (through the Confucius Institutes, the United Front Work Department, and professor exchanges), using “Chinese-American friendship organizations” to mask Chinese intentions, incentivizing influence agents in US cultural institutions (media, academia, and Hollywood) to serve ChiCom interests, and – perhaps most important – exploiting corrupt US politicians to push policies favorable to Chinese interests, as well as to gain direct access to the US political class and its collective decision-making processes in order to directly influence issues related to China. The latter involves using bribery to influence and control US politicians in ways that facilitate obtaining US intellectual property, advanced technologies, and access to US markets.

Chinese political manipulation of US politicians began with President Nixon and National Security Advisor Kissinger, who were allowed to “open China” in 1972. In their case, the corruption amounted to giving them diplomatic prestige for spearheading the rapprochement with China. The Chinese were to learn in coming years that much more effective leverage could be used to achieve their ends in the US, namely cold hard cash.

As but one example, an October 1996 classified "Sense of the Intelligence Community" memorandum was produced that examined Chinese influence in US elections at the time. (A “Sense of the IC” document is sort of a National Intelligence Estimate, but nevertheless very powerful consensus.) The contents were breath-taking. The Chinese government had reportedly set aside something like $100 million to pay for direct and indirect influence in the 1996 Presidential and Congressional elections. In the executive summary, the document stated that the trail of corruption "leads to the highest levels of the US government." The US intelligence community is by law restricted to collecting foreign intel and counter-intel, so they could not call out and identify US citizens such as corrupt politicians and others. Imagine what the communists are investing in influence operations in the US in 2024!

Over the years, Americans have learned of the ongoing bipartisan corruption of the US political class and major players in the US business community by the CCP. The list is a long one and includes current and former members of the US Congress and the Executive Branch of government. Newsweek identified the motivations of corporations to relocate production from the US to China over the past 30+ years: in pursuit of cheap labor (lower production costs) and the vast Chinese market of 1.3 billion potential customers. “The big business community made it clear—first to the Clinton administration and then to his successor, George W. Bush—that trade with China was its highest priority. Washington readily agreed. ‘The Fortune 500 and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce didn't just influence policy,’ says Alan Tonelson, a veteran trade analyst in Washington, ‘they made policy.’”

Yes, money is the root of all evil, and its pursuit in China involved a massive transfer of wealth and industrial capacity that has led to Chinese control of strategic supply chains, the vacant factories of the US “Rust Belt,” the theft of Western intellectual property and know-how, Chinese industrial overcapacity that threatens producers and manufacturers around the world, and a trade surplus that was used to rapidly modernize the People’s Liberation Army.

CONCLUSION

The world is learning what free trade policies and “most favored nation” trade status granted to communist China have wrought. The Chinese real estate market appears to be in freefall. Chinese regulations are being manipulated as part of new national security and counterespionage laws that have poured cold water on multinational corporations and their employees living and working in China. Europeans and others are concerned about China’s overcapacity of Electric Vehicles whose production is subsidized by the Chinese government and used to undermine local manufacturers. PLA and Chinese coast guard intimidation of the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, and other nations in East Asia has reached shocking proportions and continues despite complaints from governments around the world. The communist night has descended on Hong Kong, and other countries with sizeable Chinese minority populations wonder when their turn will come.

Perhaps the domestic troubles stemming from Xi’s failed “Zero COVID” policy and the slowdown in foreign direct investment in China has brought Chinese economic dominance to an “inflection point,” as noted by the Harvard Business Review, which pointed out that the US regained the lead as the country with the most companies on the Fortune Global 500 list in 2023 after a brief three-year run by China. HBR further pointed out that “[n]ot only did the U.S. have more firms on the list than China, but on average its firms had 15% higher revenues than China’s largest companies ($95.8 billion versus $83.3 billion).”

Could the Chinese economic worm be turning, or will the siren song of money to be made in China continue to drown out the concerns mentioned above? Will multinational corporations and governments continue to look the other way as Chinese clamps down on “corruption” and minority groups while continuing to exploit forced labor? If so, the “inevitability” of China’s rise that is preached by Xi Jinping will continue apace. To the world’s detriment.

The end.