China and America Are Already at War (One Side Just Doesn't Know It Yet)
China and America Are Already at War (One Side Just Doesn't Know It Yet)
US politicians won't meaningfully respond until it's far too late
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
―Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Xi Jinping is easily the world’s greatest politician.
The son of a scorned Communist revolutionary, Xi rose from the poverty of seven years of hard labor in a rural re-education camp, to chemical engineer university graduate, to party secretary of a middling province, to party chief in Shanghai, to member of the Politburo Standing Committee, to General Secretary of the party and President of China, before immediately purging his rivals.
The really crazy part? No one knows exactly how he did it. Clearly, you don’t get to become the lifetime emperor of a 1.4 billion-person nation without unparalleled political acumen, ruthless determination, and an unquenchable thirst for power.
He’s not a good and moral man — he sanctions genocide and mass surveillance, after all — but as a politician on the global stage, Xi runs Usain Bolt-level circles around the likes of Trump, Biden, Putin, Boris, and pretty much every other world leader on planet Earth.
But in no field of endeavor has Emperor Xi distinguished himself so greatly as in his war against the United States.
To be certain, America would destroy China in a hot war. Sure, China has twice as many active personnel and 8 million reserves, but American spends nearly three times as much money on their military, allowing them to maintain triple the armored vehicles, double the aircraft, triple the helicopters, and ten times as many nuclear warheads.
Because a hot war would mean the end of nearly all life on earth, and China knows the costs of war far exceed the profits of peace, so they’ve decided to wage war against America using the art form they’ve perfected over thousands of years.
America’s sociopathic and incompetent corporate-captured politicians are, of course, too stupid to see it, and completely incapable to stop it.
Let’s look at a few of the many battlegrounds on which China is gaining a strategic advantage over America.
Intellectual property
“It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Move over America and Great Britain, there’s a new top thief on planet Earth.
Because China is now a conformist culture — Xi Jinping’s own daughter went to Harvard University — it has to rely on outsiders to do the creating and innovating before either copying or simply stealing international intellectual property. In fact, rather than innovate on their own, China literally has a foreign technology wishlist.
Never mind their rip-off Venice, fake medieval London, cloned Manhattan, knock-off Jackson Hole, new Old Quebec, mini-Hallstatt, or seven copycat Eiffel Towers — China steals $3–6 trillion in intellectual property from America per decade.
To comprehend this scale of theft: That’s enough money to educate all American students through university, or deliver universal healthcare and save 40,000 American lives per year, or rapidly transition America to renewable energy independence. (Or, you know, fund the American war machine for about thirteen seconds.)
Former NSA director General Keith Alexander has called China’s technology theft “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.”
And they aren’t just stealing music and movies:
China is now dotted with “fake Apple stores, counterfeit KFC restaurants, and imitation IKEA big-box outlets.”
They’re establishing institutes on American university campuses to siphon innovation and steal biomedical records.
They’ve stolen at least 35 billion pages of academic data including a huge amount of chemical and pharmaceutical patents, using professor-turned-spy recruitment initiatives like the Thousand Talents Program.
They’ve also stolen aerospace secrets, semiconductor technologies, and a shocking amount of weapons systems, including the F-35 fighter jet.
FBI Director Christopher Wray puts it starkly:
“As I stand here talking with you today, the FBI has investigations involving China’s attempted theft of US-based technology in all 56 of our field offices. We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. And at this very moment, China is working to compromise American health care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions conducting essential COVID-19 research.”
China simply doesn’t care that we have pieces of paper that allow private interests to monopolize profits on any given product.
For China, every idea is a free-for-all.
Production
“So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
―Sun Tzu, The Art of War
American capitalism has evolved into an earth-and-humanity-destroying machine with a dead-simple business model:
Startups with huge debt or investment backing bleed unfathomable amounts of cash while they underprice their competition until the lesser-funded entities either die or become acquirable.
The new monopoly then lobby-bribes Congress to give them once-illegal advantages in order to extract wealth from employees, suppliers, and customers alike — now they’re getting to the point where they not only dominate the means of production, but they’re keeping the products as well.
But oh, the ironic twist of fate:
China practices capitalism abroad to enforce “communism” at home.
Like any good monopoly, Xi Jinping is using debt-fueled financialization to predatory-price global competitors out of business in a bid for a massive monopoly on global trade:
That’s the reason why China now produces nearly 70% of the world’s solar panels — check out this panda-shaped solar field — and controls 85% of the global magnesium market, a core component in aluminum, iron, and steel.
It’s why they now control 80% of the world’s raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, and much of what goes into your cell phone.
It’s the same reason why Huawei is so cheap compared to its competitors.
And why they have a complete global monopoly on shipping containers.
The Chinese government simply bankrolls their biggest firms with cheap coal power, an abused workforce, generous credit, and generous investments so they could predatorily underprice their global competition and bankrupt nearly every competing firm on earth, leaving the world totally reliant on China for their magnesium/cobalt/shipping container/etc needs.
Infrastructure
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” ―Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Using debt-trap diplomacy (the new name for colonization), China is now the world’s largest creditor and has begun acquiring the biggest productive assets in America and elsewhere.
China’s colonial continent (Africa) has become home to more than one million Chinese nationals in the past decade, with more than 10,000 Chinese corporations opportunistically building new cities and ports and railroads at a crippling long-term cost to locals (namely, all their natural resources.)
Clearly, America doesn’t have anywhere the natural abundance of Africa, but when you’re engaged in a centuries-long war, it pays to control all the material inputs you need and to keep them out of the hands of your enemy.
China especially loves ports. So far, the CCP has seized control of nearly two dozen overseas ports from their vassal debtors, including a dozen in Europe. They own more than 100 ports across 63 nations including Greece’s famed Piraeus port, known as the “Pearl of the Mediterranean” and now the fastest-growing port in the world. In fact, China already has a near-monopoly on global trade routes from Asia to Africa to Europe.
China has already acquired the second-largest port in America (thankfully they were forced to sell it), plus they have port investments in Seattle and the third-largest port (Los Angeles — ironically promoted as “America’s Port”) and it’s likely that they’ll consume many more as corrupt politicians hand them over for quick cash.
Investments
“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” ―Sun Tzu, The Art of War
China owns New York’s iconic Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where US Presidents traditionally stayed while visiting New York.
And the JW Marriott Essex House.
And the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C.
And American companies including Starwood Hotels, AMC, Riot Games, GE Appliances, the Chicago Stock Exchange, America’s largest pork producer, and the film company that made Jurassic Park… and more than 2,400 other American companies.
China is not only the biggest foreign purchaser of American commercial real estate but also residential neighborhoods, buying tens of thousands of houses per year. They’re also huge into American agriculture, with hundreds of thousands of acres bought up so far, and growing tenfold in the past decade.
Cyberspace
“If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Engage people with what they expect; it confirms their projections, settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds…
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
China is eating America’s lunch on the Internet.
And we’re not just talking about their thousands of hackers. While China-created Tiktok devours billions of hours of Western children’s time — and gathers facial recognition and voice data on hundreds of millions of people — the host country has effectively banned it from their domestic audience behind their Great Firewall.
While China is protecting its children by un-addicting them from social media and limiting online hours so they get a good sleep at night, they’re simultaneously keeping Americans screen-staring themselves into oblivion.
We may never know how many billions of hours of American life have been wasted arguing with Chinese chatbot farms or warring over Chinese-created “grassroots” political groups, but we can be certain that all this systematic divisiveness will eventually tear America apart from within.
In conclusion
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” ―Sun Tzu, The Art of War
China and America are already at war.
America just doesn’t know it yet.
Eventually, everyday Americans will wake up and see that they’re just another one of China’s colonial outposts, a short-term nation being drained of wealth to enrich a far-sighted foreign power.
Maybe America will even try to fight back.
But with what remaining wealth, infrastructure, power, or sense of national unity?
By then, it will be decades too late.
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