Commentary: The Immediacy of the PRC Threat Requires Shift from a Focus on Land Power to Maritime Power

One of the biggest news stories coming out of Asia for the New Year was the alleged purge of senior People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers, most notably the former PRC Minister of Defense Li Shangfu who went missing in late August 2023 and was formally removed from his position in October. This so-called purge, which also included three senior defense industry officials, was in fact the result of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) annual announcement of the new slate of delegates for the upcoming Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body of the PRC’s annual National People’s Congress (NPC), that is held each year, usually in early March.

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Commentary: The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion Part One

In 2016, when President Xi Jinping delivered a speech calling for the “Sinicization of religion” in a nation of one billion, he was espousing a century-old impulse among his people while also inadvertently underscoring a persistent paradox that Chinese Communists brought with them when they took over the country in 1949 – and have never shaken.

The impulse is that the major faiths observed in China are not indigenous to the world’s oldest civilization. Buddhism was imported from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in overland trading routes and human migration from the Middle East, while Christianity, another Abrahamic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and America. To Communist leaders, and many Han Chinese civilians, these traditions represent potentially destabilizing foreign influence. 

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Gordon Chang Commentary: It’s Time to Bankrupt China

“We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on March 29 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. “They’re going to do that in accordance with their own plan.”

Milley is wrong about China’s nuclear weapons ambitions. He is, unfortunately, expressing the same pessimism that pervaded the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, when the American foreign policy establishment took the Soviet Union as a given and therefore promoted détente.

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Commentary: China Builds the New World Order with Biden Asleep at the Wheel

China is rapidly growing economically, militarily, and influentially, and none of this is good for the United States. Since diplomatic ties with China were officially established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, each president has done a fair job (some better than others) of keeping China in check on the international stage, despite China’s growth. All with the exception of President Joe Biden, who has allowed China to lead a global coalition and a new world order against the United States of America, which has fulfilled our worst fears.

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Feds’ ‘Foreign Corruption’ Double Standard: They Protected Bidens as They Bore Down on Trump

At the same time that Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, DOJ documents and federal court records reveal.

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Poll: Plurality of Americans Believes We Are Heading for Next World War

As the war in Ukraine and tensions with China intensify, more Americans fear we’re on the brink of World War III, according to a new Convention of States Action poll. 

The survey of more than 1,000 U.S. voters, conducted Feb. 22-26 by The Trafalgar Group, finds more than 43 percent of respondents worry that Russia’s continued war and threats against other European nations, as well as China’s aggressive actions, have put the world on the precipice of another global conflict.

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Commentary: China Insults a Submissive Biden Desperate to Talk to Xi Jinping

“Doubled-faced.” That’s how Beijing just described two senior Biden administration officials who had traveled to China, seeking to repair relations with the Chinese regime.

Last week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and Laura Rosenberger, the senior director for China at the National Security Council (NSC), flew to Langfang in Hebei province for talks with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng.

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Marsha Blackburn Commentary: Firing Servicemembers over the COVID-19 Shot Threatens Our National Security

President Biden said it himself: the pandemic is over. So why is his Department of Defense (DoD) willing to look at the brave men and women who volunteered to serve our nation and say, “you’re fired” – all because they chose not to get the COVID-19 shot?

In the United States, the number of new servicemembers joining the military has reached a record low. Every single branch struggled to hit its recruitment goals this year, including the U.S. Army, which fell 10,000 soldiers short. At this rate, they will face a deficit of 21,000 soldiers next year. The National Guard also missed the mark by about 12,000 recruits, and expects to discharge up to 14,000 more by 2024 for refusing the COVID-19 shot.

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China Poses ‘Most Comprehensive and Serious Challenge’ to America, New Defense Strategy Says

The Pentagon identifies China as the No. 1 threat to U.S. national security in the latest version of the National Defense Strategy, released just days after the leader of the communist regime secured a third five-year term.

“The key theme … is the need to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence with the People’s Republic of China as our pacing challenge,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday during a press conference on the new document.

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Commentary: Communist China’s Plot for World Domination

Earlier this year, Ian Easton, a former China analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses and currently senior director at the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank that focuses on U.S. security interests in the Indo-Pacific region, wrote a book titled The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy. In his author’s note, Easton describes the book as an analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “plan for world domination.” Easton contends that a close reading of President Xi Jinping’s speeches — some of them never before translated — reveals that that CCP is committed to spreading China’s communist totalitarian model of rule around the world.

Easton makes clear in the book that China’s goal of “world domination” does not envision Chinese armed forces conducting a long series of military invasions with “hordes of tanks, and fascist storm troopers swarming across the map” and “goose-stepping into fallen capital cities.” The CCP’s global strategy, he explains, “is much more sophisticated” than Hollywood visions or American novels of World War III. Instead, the CCP’s strategy involves “a protracted campaign of silent invasions to replicate on a global level what it sees as its own superior system.” The CCP’s geopolitical goal is a “totalitarian world order” led by China.

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China’s Economy Craters as Severe Lockdowns Continue

China’s economy grew by just 0.4% year-over-year for the second quarter of 2022, according to data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Friday.

The figure underperformed analysts’ predictions of 1.0% growth, according to CNBC, and was the worst since the first quarter of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading in China, The Wall Street Journal reported. The lackluster growth was a result of strict COVID-19 lockdowns designed to constrain a resurgent strain of the virus, particularly in the major financial hub of Shanghai, the WSJ added.

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Gordon Chang Commentary: The Chinese Economy Is Collapsing

Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has staked his rule on making China larger, by annexing neighbors. Taiwan is not his only target. He needs success to assure a precedent-breaking third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary, but the Chinese people, preoccupied by a failing economy, are in no mood for their leader’s aggression.

We start with the Party’s storyline that the relaxation of COVID-19 lockdowns is leading to an economic revival.

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China Bans Its Own National Anthem as Anger over Lockdowns Rises

China’s censors banned social media posts featuring the communist country’s national anthem after internet users co-opted its lyrics to protest Shanghai’s ongoing lockdown, multiple sources reported.

Censors are actively removing Chinese posts containing the first stanza of “The March of the Volunteers,” which features the lyrics “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves,” NY Daily News reported.

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Commentary: ‘Genocide’ Is Not a Throwaway Term of Abuse

Joe Biden

Soaring inflation is leaving Americans battered and bruised—and not just inflation in prices. Inflation in rhetoric is also doing a number on the people of our republic.

We’ve seen it unfold with depressing regularity. Donald Trump was a “fascist dictator,” we were told. The Capitol riot was a “coup” and an “insurrection.” Climate change poses an “existential threat” to all life on earth. And, just this past week, after failing to get the legislative redistricting map he wanted from the state Supreme Court, Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers declared: “At a time when our democracy is under near-constant attack, the judiciary has abandoned our democracy in our most dire hour.”

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American Elites Have Deep Ties to a New Chinese Spy Chief

The new deputy head of a propaganda and espionage agency in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has documented ties with business tycoons, university heads and other elite members of American society.

Chen Xu, former party secretary of one of the PRC’s most prestigious universities, Tsinghua, was promoted to deputy head of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), according to an updated leadership roster on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) portal, which was first reported in Chinese media on Feb. 28.

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Intel Bends Knee to China, Scrubs All Mentions of Xinjiang Forced Labor from Letter

U.S. technology company Intel scrubbed all mentions of forced labor in Xinjiang, China, from its letter to suppliers after receiving stiff backlash from China.

Intel sent a letter written by vice president Jackie Sturm to suppliers in December 2021, urging them to avoid sourcing from the Xinjiang region, home to China’s Uyghur Muslim minority, citing the company’s forced labor policies.

“Multiple governments have imposed restrictions on products sourced from the Xinjiang region,” Sturm wrote. “Therefore, Intel is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.”

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Commentary: Denying China’s Quest for Regional – and Global – Hegemony

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

One might quarrel with Sun Tzu’s numbers in this famous formulation from the approximately 2,500-year-old Chinese classic “The Art of War.” But Western authorities on war starting with Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz agree with Sun Tzu that knowledge of one’s strengths and weaknesses and knowledge of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses are essential to sound strategy.

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Financial Ties Link Biden Family, Political Networks to China

Xi Jinping and Joe Biden toasting a drink

Outgoing vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten, said recently that China’s military is developing at stunning speed, and that China poses a major threat to the U.S.

As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden said that the Chinese are “not bad folks, folks” and “they are no competition for us.”

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‘Conquering Latin America with a Smile’: Chinese Influence Met with Inadequate U.S. Resistance

China’s campaign to grow its presence in Latin America has brought the country’s influence dangerously close to the U.S., but experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that America’s efforts to combat it fall short.

The communist goliath has become the number one trading partner for several countries in the region, with Cuba becoming the latest country to sign onto Xi Jinping’s Belt And Road Initiative (BRI), a massive global project launched in 2013, in October.

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Commentary: The New Nuclear Arms Race

President Joe Biden and Personal Aide Stephen Goepfert walk through the Colonnade, Friday, August 6, 2021, on the way to the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

The Defense Department just released its annual report on China’s military power, and the report undermines those in the Biden administration who are promoting nuclear arms reductions with Russia and the adoption of a policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons — a policy that is opposed by most of America’s allies.

The Pentagon’s report could not be clearer: “Over the next decade, the PRC aims to modernize, diversify, and expand its nuclear forces.” It is “expanding the number of its land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this major expansion of its nuclear forces.” This includes the construction of “fast breeder reactors and reprocessing facilities” that will enable China to “produce and separate plutonium.”

The report projects that the PRC will have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027, and perhaps 1,000 by 2030, significantly more than the Pentagon projected in last year’s report. China has what the report calls a “nascent ‘nuclear triad,’” with the capability to launch nuclear missiles from land, sea, and air platforms. It has expanded its silo-based force and moved to a “launch-on-warning” posture. Last year, the PLA “launched more than 250 ballistic missiles for testing and training,” a number greater then the rest of the world combined. It is growing its inventory of DF-26 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and those missiles are capable of launching multiple independent warheads — known as MIRV capabilities. The CCP has ordered the construction of “hundreds of new ICBM silos” and is “doubling the number of launchers in some ICBM units.” China’s CSS-10 Mod 2 ICBM has a range of 11,000 kilometers, which makes it capable or reaching most targets within the continental United States. China is also investing in space and counterspace capabilities, including kinetic-kill missiles, orbiting space robots, and ground-based lasers.

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Commentary: Thinking Critically About China’s Responsibility for COVID-19

When the Chinese authorities last year arrested the late Dr. Li Wenliang, along with seven others, for warning his fellow citizens about a deadly new coronavirus, those authorities, as usual, were engaged in a cover-up.

What were they seeking to hide? A naturally occurring zoonotic disease that had leapt to humanity in a Wuhan wet market? Or a virus that had escaped from a supposedly secure facility where it was being studied and modified?

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Top Chinese Official Sees ‘New Window of Hope’ with a Biden Administration

The Chinese government sees “a new window of hope” for improved relations with the Biden administration, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in an interview with a state-controlled media outlet.

“China-U.S. relations have come to a new crossroads, and a new window of hope is opening,” Wang said in an interview with CGTN.

“We hope that the next US administration will return to a sensible approach, resume dialogue with China, restore normalcy to the bilateral relations and restart cooperation,” added Wang, who accused the Trump administration of trying to start “a new Cold War” with Beijing.

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Commentary: The Chinese Gutting of America

Just as China has gutted America’s manufacturing base, it has gutted most of our nation’s foundational institutions.

When President Trump imposed import duties on a wide range of Chinese goods, we discovered just how reliant our nation had become on the communist People’s Republic of China for a wide array of manufactured and finished goods.  

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Commentary: Recognizing the Sovereignty of Taiwan Could be a Real October Surprise

President Trump has an opportunity to make his boldest moral, strategic, and catalyzing move yet, entirely in the interest of the American people and the free world: to recognize the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) as a sovereign nation. His administration has already taken significant steps to “bolster” Taiwan’s status. This move wouldn’t be so subtle. More than a Tweet; Trump could recognize the island nation, constantly harassed and illegitimately claimed by the CCP, before the United Nations. He could challenge democratic, freedom-loving allies and acquaintances to do the same, and in so doing, ascertain who exactly has the intestinal fortitude to call out the evil empire, and who is willing to subordinate their people to it in the decades to come. President Trump should remind our nuclear adversary why it is that the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet routinely transits the Taiwan Strait and for whom, and that the United States of America remains a force for good in the world.

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Commentary: Advancing Liberty by Divesting from China

No President in our lifetimes has been tougher on China than President Donald Trump. The Trump administration has courageously and steadfastly taken on China’s many trade abuses, threats to national security and human rights abuses. His Art of the Deal got China to agree to a phase one trade agreement even though it left tariffs of 25 percent on $250 billion of goods and another 7.5 percent on the remaining $300 billion of goods. The administration have made it clear to Beijing that its continued actions that threaten Hong Kong and Taiwan will not go unchecked. And the Defense Department has named 31 companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges that are either owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and military.

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America’s Marathon: Chinese Hegemony Inevitable Only If Cowardice Prevails

Much has been said and written about Thucydides’ Trap of late, ever since Graham Allison thoughtfully addressed it in his 2015 Atlantic article “Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” and in his follow-up best-selling book in 2018 concerning that same question, Destined For War. The premise is that China has overtaken the United States and is in the process of edging it out, economically, politically, and militarily. There is a parallel between China and America’s dynamic now, with Pericles’ Athens and Archidamus’ Sparta in the 440s BC (where the former began to outgrow and out-power the latter), as well as with Germany outpacing England at the turn of the 20th Century, and in fourteen other major historical cases, the vast majority of which resulted in war. Whenever there has been discombobulation as a result of a rising power displacing a ruling power, fear results, and when a capable military power is fearful and unwilling to bend a knee to the new, war becomes inevitable.

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Commentary: Playing the Russia Card

America was at a historic crossroads in 1971. The war in Vietnam increasingly was seen as unwinnable, while triggering ongoing unrest in cities and college campuses across the nation. The economy was challenged with rising inflation and rising trade deficits. In August 1971, the British ambassador turned up at the Treasury Department to request that $3 billion be converted into gold. That same week, President Nixon ordered a freeze on all prices and wages in the United States.

In the Communist world, America’s problems were trumpeted as the inevitable collapse of capitalist imperialism. Russia and China stood triumphant over a declining West. And what did Nixon do? He stunned the world by traveling to China. His goal: To drive a wedge between the two Communist superpowers.

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Internal Chinese Report Warns Beijing to Prepare for Armed Conflict with US Over COVID-19 Backlash, Sources Say

An internal Chinese report warns Beijing officials that backlash from the coronavirus pandemic risks tilting China into a full bore armed conflict with the United States, Reuters reported Monday.

Anti-China sentiment hasn’t been this white-hot since the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than three decades ago, sources familiar with the paper told Reuters. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report, which the sources say was presented to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other officials in April.

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Overwhelming Majority of Americans Hold Chinese Government Responsible for Coronavirus

A bipartisan consensus has emerged among Americans of all political stripes regarding the Chinese government’s culpability for the spread of coronavirus.

Some 90% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats and 75% of independents believe the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the virus, according to a Harris tracking poll of 1,993 American adults surveyed between April 3 and April 5.

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Commentary: What Price Should China Pay for Causing the Coronavirus Pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic thus far has spread to more than 145 countries, causing high levels of infection and thousands of deaths. The worldwide costs of combating COVID-19, including efforts to overcome severe economic hardships for millions of people and organizations, undoubtedly will amount to many trillions of dollars.

There is widespread agreement and indisputable proof that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leaders are directly responsible for the worldwide spread of COVID-19.

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Commentary: China Replaces Ten Commandments with Socialist Propaganda

Congregations in China’s officially recognized Protestant church have been forced to replace God’s commandments to Moses with a quotation about the triumph of socialism, according to a religious liberty watchdog. The action literally substitutes socialism as an idol, in violation of the First Commandment. The Chinese government’s attempt to change the teachings of the 60,000-church Three-Self Patriotic Movement unmasks how socialism crushes religious liberty and reduces Christians to subservience – or elevates them to martyrdom.

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Countering China, Trump Seeks to Increase Domestic Production of Rare Earths

President Donald Trump recently invoked a provision of the Defense Production Act to ensure the timely delivery of rare earth materials to the nation’s industrial base. Having made the determination rare earths are “essential to national defense,” Trump authorized a wave of potential investment in the industry.

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Public Policy Group Calls for Ban on Sale of All U.S. Equipment to Huawei, Which is Accused of Having Ties to People’s Liberation Army, Chinese Communist Party

  In the wake of President Donald Trump’s meeting with China’s Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan Saturday, the Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) called for a halt to the sale of all U.S. equipment to the Huawei communications company. Trump announced that “U.S. companies can sell their equipment…

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China Imposes Tariffs on $60 Billion in U.S. Exports in Response to President Trump’s $500 Billion Tariff Hike

Xi Jinping

  China said Monday it would impose tariffs on $60 billion worth of imports from the United States, retaliating after President Donald Trump boosted taxes on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods sent to the U.S. and moved to impose duties on another $300 billion of Chinese exports. The Chinese…

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Commentary: China Left Trump with Little Choice but to Put 25 Percent Tariffs on $200 Billion of Goods

by Robert Romano   Just when it appeared that a new trade agreement with China was being finalized last week, Beijing abruptly attempted to change all the terms of the deal and walk back prior concessions that had been made to head off President Donald Trump’s threat to increase tariffs…

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