Winning a cold war with China

In a 2020 speech, FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed, “The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is … China.” This February, the U.S. intelligence community reaffirmed that view, describing China as a “near-peer competitor” that will challenge America “economically, militarily, and technologically.” Yes, Putin’s Russia is evil and dangerous, but China is the heavyweight fighter in the ring.

Four books can help Christians rise to the challenge. First, Joanna Chiu’s China Unbound: A New World Disorder offers a longtime reporter’s view of growing Chinese aggression. She’s too quick to see colonialism and Trump behind China’s actions. Still, she powerfully conveys the brutality of President Xi Jinping’s government—both inside and outside the country.

Readers hear stories of Uyghur reeducation camp survivors and persecuted human rights activists. Chiu also details Beijing’s espionage and influence campaigns in Western countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States.

Second, Rush Doshi’s The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order echoes the theme of earlier books. (See Michael Pillsbury’s 2015 The Hundred-Year Marathon.) But Doshi, who serves as director for China on the National Security Council, offers a unique approach. He uses diaries, letters, speeches, and other writings of CCP officials to outline China’s “grand strategy” to replace America as the world’s leader.

Doshi’s treasure trove of facts and quotes here will be too dry for the casual reader. But it provides policymakers and pundits with many specifics on China’s real-world threats (mines, missiles, etc.) and policy objectives.

Third, to fully love our enemies—and disarm the spiritual powers behind them—we need more than political resolve. We need moral and spiritual clarity. Jung Chang’s 1991 family memoir, Wild Swans, offers a riveting picture of moral courage at work.

Chang shows the communist revolution’s appeal through the lives of her grandmother (pre-revolution) and her mother (a CCP revolutionary). But we also see Chang herself, a daughter of the revolution, struggle to admit the failure of communism in her generation. After decades of suffering, Chang’s father finally asks, “It was for a fair society that I joined the communists. … But what good has it done for the people?”

Wild Swans has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, despite being banned in China. One caution: Chang includes frank discussion of the cruelty of war as well as a non-Christian view of sexuality and God.

Finally, for spiritual courage, Christians might revisit the classic biography, Hudson Taylor: The Man Who Believed God. Marshall Broomhall published the print version of the biography in 1929 on behalf of Taylor’s missionary society (now known as Overseas Missionary Fellowship). As a result, some of the book feels like hagiography, and we hear little about the Chinese people whom Taylor loved and served for more than 50 years.

Still, Broomhall offers readers some benefits—and they’re especially enjoyable in the 2000 Blackstone Audio version. He draws readers into Taylor’s difficulty in learning to follow Christ, especially trusting God for provision.

At one point, Broomhall movingly relates how Taylor gave his last coin to a poor woman’s family. “The struggle had been keen and crucial, but now joy filled his soul. ‘Not only was the poor woman’s life saved’ he later wrote, ‘but my life, as I fully realized, had been saved, too.’”

President Xi Jinping’s government continues to persecute Chinese Christians and threaten freedom around the world. These four authors provide wise counsel needed to beat back darkness and win the new Cold War—not only “economically, militarily, and technologically,” but spiritually as well.