Back to Cold War: Communist China Expects to Bury Us by 2049
It is a good time to talk about what is happening in China. The origin of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China—what the Chinese authorities knew and when, and why they decided to reveal what they did—is shrouded in secrecy, manipulation, and utter relativism (translation: what is good for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is what is true or better than what is not good for the CCP).
The parallel with the once-hot specialty of Kremlinology is evident. The doings of the Soviet Communist leadership were dubbed “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Well, that might have been true of the details, but if you had even a nodding familiarity with Marxism-Leninism, and its endlessly, bluntly repeated long-term goals, the “mystery” was in the details only.
Here, we depart from the Wuhan virus and turn to what Americans do not know about China.
Here, we depart from the Wuhan virus (acknowledged to be a mystery, after all), and turn to what Americans do not know about China. China is mysterious for a different reason than the Soviet Empire. China, as compared with the Soviet Union, is open to the world in some ways. Some readers will disagree, but I mean that China knows and does not conceal that its singular long-term goal—global hegemony, displacing and humiliating the United States—can be achieved only by exploiting the progress made by the rest of the world. That is, the progress made while China stagnated.
People will believe the China narrative and ignore evidence to the contrary. That has been a winning strategy.
But despite this openness, the CCP is confident that it can manipulate opinion in China, world opinion of China, and, despite “openness,” keep its strategy, its goal to become world hegemon, a “mystery” and an “enigma.” Because people will believe the China narrative and ignore evidence to the contrary. That has been a winning strategy.
From when I was a young man until my forties, the threat to America, my country, was Soviet communism and its proliferating satellites. Reportedly, the Soviet Union had reached “parity” with America in nuclear weapons. As Moscow strove to enlarge the Soviet sphere at the expense of the “free world,” always America’s responses were constrained by the ever-present fear of “escalation” to an exchange of hydrogen bombs. It became an obsession in my life, my conversation, and my writing.
I believed that Soviet socialism was doomed to self-destruction, all market economics had revealed the fatal flaw in purely economic terms.
I believed that Soviet socialism was doomed to self-destruction, an analysis presented by the Austrian School of Economics, but all market economics had revealed the fatal flaw in purely economic terms—the impossibility of economic calculation without market prices and therefore of allocating resources to meet demand. Not to mention the totalitarian society’s destruction of the fountainhead of progress: the freedom of the individual mind, creative freedom, innovation. I owed this fundamental insight to the philosopher Ayn Rand, born in Russia, living through the Bolshevik putsch that seized power from Russian’s first democratically elected Duma, educated under the Soviets, and finally risking all to escape to America. She had predicted from the outset the inevitable collapse of communism. Less than a decade after her death, I spent five of the most exalted days of my life as the Soviet European empire disintegrated, the Communist Party lost power in Moscow, and a final desperate countercoup of Soviet hardliners collapsed.
It was a glorious time. No longer would I stand on my terrace in midtown Manhattan, looking at the New York City skyline, and wondering if the bombers and missiles would fly in some desperate miscalculation. I thought of the great essayist, E.B. White’s conclusion to Here is New York. If the bombers and missiles should fly—as on each side they were poised day and night to strike their targets, and his protective reaction to the vision of Manhattan, “this mischievous and marvelous monument, which, not to look upon, would be like death.”
A poetic way, perhaps, to contemplate the nuclear incineration of millions of Americans and Russia’s enslaved millions, of course. But it captured what many noticed. It is possible to imagine and mourn the death of my mother and brother, my friends, my colleagues. It is not possible to imagine and mourn the death of 100 million Americans. What we think, instead, is what White captured: All this creation of the effort, creativity, desire, and love of free men over decades—all gone in an hour, a night.
Those days in 1990 lifted from me that weight. The sentinel of freedom in the world, its ideological exemplar, and its most compelling demonstration of the potency of the free mind had triumphed. Whatever the confusion, the misconceptions, the risks and sacrifices from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan, the great republic had stayed the course, paid the price in lives, spent the treasure—and now had defeated its sworn enemy, handily dubbed the “Evil Empire” by President Ronald Reagan.
I take time to evoke memories of this face-off of human liberty and slavery, of capitalism and Marxism-Leninism—it, grossly belching after devouring an estimated 100 million victims—because I have been driven, after several decades of uncertainty, to the gravest conclusion.
The world, but first and foremost the United States of America, now confronts in the People’s Republic of China (a.k.a., communist China, Red China) a more dangerous, further advanced threat than America finally faced down from Soviet Russia.
Like so many Americans, I cheered the emergence of China’s billions from poverty—indeed, death by famine—and the opening of China to the world, with tourists flooding to China, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students flocking to U.S universities, and the smiling, soft-talking, fleshy faces of successors to Mao.
It was all wishful thinking. And now, I have begun in my reading to encounter some fellow travelers on the path I followed: The most experienced China policy experts who over decades have moved from China advocates to bearers of hard testimony: China’s leadership, exclusively the CCP, is a supremely calculating, historically informed, determined opponent of America and the free society.
I am convinced that my son, now nearly middle-age, will live in an America that awakes to the threat of totalitarian China, then seeks desperately to counter China’s rise to world hegemon, and may well see World War III, in which China’s years of military preparation (already far advanced) force an American military defeat or, at best, a negotiated U.S. surrender.
This is, of course, a kind of prophecy. And no one can predict with certainty. But it is a prediction based on decades of evidence ignored by America’s leaders. Overwhelming evidence from statements of China’s leaders, including military; top-level defectors from China; an understanding of Chinese history; and, above all, the great steps forward China has made in billions of dollars in military preparations to defeat the acknowledged military superiority of the “hegemon”—America.
All evidence points in the same direction. Many commentators on China have revealed glimpses of the story. We could have seen it ourselves (and perhaps some readers did) if not in thrall to the almost unimaginably comprehensive system of the CCP for the control of domestic and world opinion—going to extremes that George Orwell might have scoffed to include in 1984.
America and the free world have a brilliant tradition of writers—call them the heirs of liberty—who however belatedly bring to us the message, the alarm of the town crier, that we are moving into our future ignorant of our peril. Winston Churchill may have played such a role in warning against the threat of Hitler. It was U.S. labor leaders who first reported to us on slave labor in the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once and for all tore the curtain away to reveal the ghastly sub-barbarian socialist horror of the Gulag Archipelago. I give much credit to Reader’s Digest and its long-time editor, the former reporter, Eugene Lyons, who published the hugely influential Worker’s Paradise Lost. In West Germany, the historian Werner Keller alerted the world to the utter dependence of the Soviet Union on the West (that is, the free and innovative mind) in East Minus West Equals Zero. The roll call of honor of the martyrs, who would speak truth amidst the fearful cringing masses cowed by the KGB, the prospect of the Gulag, is long, indeed. To them, and those like them, we owe our freedom.
You would hope that the lonely suffering of heroes would make unnecessary, at last, another long era of tortured truth and battlefield deaths to save America’s politicians, and its military, from their slumbering illusions…
But freedom always has had those who have devoted a lifetime to awakening their countrymen to peril. Here, I call attention to the career of Michael Pillsbury and his latest book, The Hundred-year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: MacMillan, 2015). Does the title sound sensational, the kind that marketing departments favor? Halfway through Pillsbury’s book, or sooner, you see it is unadorned truth.)
It describes a strategy shared by CCP leaders since Mao Zedong, a strategy by which they judge all policies, actions, leadership itself, and “truth.” The strategy is economic, certainly; but also political; equally propagandistic; equally cultural and educational; and equally military. And it contemplates a future when war will be necessary to displace and humiliate the United States as the international “hegemon.”
Mr. Pillsbury (b. 1945), director of the Center for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, has spent his long career as a policy analyst, scholar, and writer on China and its relationship to America and the world. He has traveled in China, conducted hundreds of interviews, established confidential relationships, and reported. He has debriefed every Chinese defector in recent decades. Here is an irony: Mr. Pillsbury has been an advisor on China to U.S. presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. He has been on the staffs of four Senate committees, a U.S. Defense Department analyst, and an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
But … now he claims that throughout that period U.S. policy has been largely blind to China’s true aims; bedazzled by the cherished phantom of “liberalization” and “increasing democracy”; disastrous in supplying China with everything it could wish to become the new superpower; and never believed—actively dismissed—every evidence that China with quietly fierce aggressiveness is patiently awaiting the day it can decisively defeat and displace the United States.
Mr. Pillsbury has changed his mind. Completely. Full reversal. From a “panda hugger” to repudiation.
And Mr. Pillsbury’s book demonstrates those propositions beyond a rational doubt. The cumulative evidence is overwhelming. But wait! Mr. Pillsbury was in the inner circles of U.S. policymaking toward China for half-a-century, nonstop, his voice and advice everywhere. Now, his book says that policy was and is a disaster?
That is correct. Mr. Pillsbury has changed his mind. Completely. Full reversal. From a “panda hugger” and a member of the U.S. China policy “Red Team” (China’s private term for its “friends” in policy circles) to repudiation of the entire “build-up, open, and liberalize China” strategy. His change came slowly; China, after all, has not been a stationary target of analysis since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. There has been a fierce, ongoing policy debate about how China’s two paramount goals can be achieved:
- To sustain and strengthen the Chinese Communist Party against all “counter forces” and establish beyond doubt the legitimacy of the Party as the sole, never-to-be-contested power in China; and,
- To prevail in the 100-year race to reverse and avenge the “century of humiliation” of China, which ended only with the 1949 communist revolution and dictatorship of Mao Zedong. At the end of that 100-year marathon, China again will be at the center of a tributary world, the heavenly kingdom, above all other peoples and nations. The target date, of course, is 2049.
It began with Nixon’s “opening to China,” which few realize was initiated by China. Nixon and Kissinger responded to China’s secret overtures. Mr. Pillsbury maintains, still, that it made sense to seek rapprochement with China, entailing decades of massive transfers of science, technology, education, and wealth to build up China against the Soviet communist empire. The Soviet arms build-up, nuclear armaments, military pressure on Western Europe, conquests for communism of one nation after another—North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, African nations, Latin American nations—seemed unending. All U.S. presidents since Nixon, especially Ronald Reagan, (and most recently, Barack Obama’s transfer of money and expertise to establish the ill-fated Wuhan Virology Institute) could not transfer technology, technical aid, and education opportunities fast enough.
“And what we haven’t given the Chinese,” writes Pillsbury, “they’ve stolen.”
“And what we haven’t given the Chinese,” writes Pillsbury, “they’ve stolen.”
None of this would have achieved its goal—a powerful China—without the fierce policy battles within China. Mao’s close, long-time comrade and colleague, Deng Xiaoping, coming to power as “core” leader, rejected (we discovered only later) the decades under Mao as “lost,” a disaster, for China’s 100-year plan. What the Mao era did accomplish was to halt foreign intervention in China, halt “bullying,” and make China feared, again. Economically, Marxism-Leninism was a catastrophe to the economy; it caused and let continue the worst famine in the history of the world, from 1958 to 1962, with some 28 million deaths; and tore the fabric of Chinese education, culture, and life itself during the insane Cultural Revolution.
Deng Xiaoping discarded Marxism-Leninism as an ideology to guide China. What guides CCP now is the goal of ensuring the permanent total power of the Party, its unqualified acceptance by the masses as the legitimate, permanent ruler of China, and “making China great, again”—a slogan taken very seriously in China. To try to imagine how seriously, you should imagine America undergoing a century of decline, displacement from world preeminence, several invasions with widespread slaughter and rape, internal chaos blamed on foreign intervention—and much more—and then vowing to “Make America Great Again.”
*This is Part I of a three-part article.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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