Eye on China

Gordon G. Chang is an American journalist and political commentator. He practiced business law with American firms in Shanghai and Hong Kong for two decades before writing several books warning of China’s economic troubles and increasing aggression toward the West. His newest, Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, is published by Humanix. Here are edited portions of our conversation.

You lived in China from 1996 to 2001. When did you realize the country wasn’t what Americans thought? When my wife and I arrived, we were optimistic like everybody else, because it was a very good time in China’s history. I can remember my wife getting on the phone and saying, “Mom, China is not communist anymore.” And I agreed with her. And that’s what my clients would say when they would buzz into Shanghai. But as we lived there, worked there, traveled around the country, talked to people, we could see that the old system was still in place. After we left, Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Communist Party. He started moving China back to a state-dominated system. So, yes, this is a China which is dangerous.

You say the West and China operate by two different visions of sovereignty—Westphalian and tianxia. Can you explain? The Westphalian international system is the result of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648—two treaties, and they established the current system of competing sovereign states. Now, China doesn’t actually believe in that. Xi Jinping has been trying to impose China’s Imperial era system, where Chinese emperors believe they had the mandate of heaven to rule what they call tianxia, or “all under heaven.” And since 2017 Chinese officials have been talking about the moon and Mars as sovereign Chinese territory. So these two visions are inconsistent. You either have competing sovereign states or you have worldwide Chinese rule. You can’t have both.

You say China is working to undermine the United States from the inside. Can you give an example? Each year, 70,000-75,000 Americans die from doses of illicit Chinese fentanyl. This is not just the result of some criminality. This is run at the top of the Communist Party. We know some fentanyl producers are state owned, and we know that Chinese diplomats give cover to the fentanyl gangs. Every container that leaves China is inspected by Chinese officials. The fentanyl gangs run their proceeds through the Chinese state banking system. You know, Xi Jinping has promised three times to reduce the flow of fentanyl across the Pacific—to President Biden in November 2023, to President Trump in 2018, and to President Obama in 2016. He’s violating all of these promises, and that’s because this is an integral part of his plan to weaken the United States.

Why is China threatened by the United States? We’re in different hemispheres, and the U.S. is increasingly isolationist. An insecure regime in Beijing is worried about the inspirational impact of our values and form of governance on the Chinese people. The Communist Party believes it will never be secure as long as the United States exists.

Most attention is on China’s posture toward the island of Taiwan. Do you think President Xi is likely to launch an invasion there in the near future? We have to be prepared for anything at any place, at any time. But I think that Xi Jinping knows that he will not start hostilities with an invasion of the main island of Taiwan. He doesn’t trust his generals and admirals. He’s very casualty averse, and he knows that the Chinese people do not want war, and they especially do not want war with Taiwan.

But if President Xi has staked his legacy on reintegrating Taiwan, how does he get around that ­reluctance to start a war? The only thing he really can try and do is maybe a trade quarantine or a full blockade, and hope that the rest of the world doesn’t challenge him. But I think that he’s probably mistaken on that.

China seems a lot like the Soviet Union in a new Cold War. What lessons can the U.S. apply from how it fought that war? Well, we brought down the Soviet Union through economic means, and we should do the same thing with China. It cannot afford to attack us without our own money and technology. So we need to cut that off. It’s not just a strategic failure for allowing trade and investment to continue, it’s a moral failure.

But cutting off trade with China stands to do significant damage to the American economy as well. Our economy will be disadvantaged, but we cannot think that after five decades of misguided China policy we will get out of this without any cost. Those who think that their bank accounts should be bigger are not taking into account the lives of other Americans. China through predatory and criminal practices is taking away our technology: The number you will often hear regarding China’s intellectual property theft is half a trillion dollars a year. We should not be financing a militant regime which is determined to destroy our country.

In 2001 you mistakenly predicted China’s economy would collapse by 2011. What went wrong with that forecast? I was seeing that China was about to join the World Trade Organization, and I thought that foreign companies and foreign countries would enforce their trade rights. And that didn’t happen. The one thing that did happen, though, was the 2008 downturn, which gave China’s regime a new lease on life. They subsequently stimulated their economy, created growth, and also created enormous amounts of debt. And now I think its debt problem is so big the Chinese can’t really resolve it without a crash.

China is financially insecure at home, yet you argue it is planning some type of attack on U.S. soil. What evidence do you see for that? Well, that balloon in January and February of last year passed over nuclear weapons sites. It flew near Malmstrom, F.E. Warren, and Minot Air Force bases, where we have all of our land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Minuteman III missiles. So clearly they were surveilling the U.S. for nuclear weapons strikes. Also, the composition of Chinese migrants at our southern border has changed, going from primarily family groups coming across a couple of years ago to primarily single males of military age traveling in packs of five to 15 today. This increase coincides with Chinese males trying to intrude into our military bases and surveil them.

You say we’ve passed a historic ­inflection point? I think we’re transitioning from a period of general calm to one of constant turbulence, and we’re going to have to protect our families and our communities. This world is going to be dark unless we Christians and we people of faith and we people of morality stand up and defend what is right and what is good.