By, Aaron Kleinheksel
April 17, 2024
China is waging full spectrum asymmetrical warfare against America by other than military means (for now). The purpose of this article is to provide a quick flyover of many of these methods. If the reader is interested, any one of these may be researched more deeply, with varying levels of effort. Google Scholar often yields good results.
Espionage - China’s espionage efforts are comprehensive in size and scope.
Human Intelligence - We know of examples such as Sen. Dianne Feinsteins driver, Congressman (and Presidential candidate) Eric Swallwell’s mistress, the Biden family’s financial and personal relationships with Chinese contacts, and many others. The simple fact is that these well-known examples are just mistakes made public, and must be understood as the very tip of a huge iceberg of Chinese spy infestation throughout all levels of our government and administrative apparatus.
Blackmail & Bribery – Unknown numbers of our leaders are compromised.
Threats – Most often associated with criminal cartels, targets and/or their families are threatened both to encourage cooperation and to prevent revealing Chinese operations
IP Theft – The Chinese have been stealing American intellectual property, technology, etc. for many years. This is accomplished through human means as well as electronic (see Cyber War below).
Special Operations – It must be assumed that China has special forces teams hidden throughout the United States in event of an escalation in hostilities. Honestly they would be fools if they did not, particularly when it is so easy to get them into the country (see Immigration below). These teams would be used to target key infrastructure, i.e. energy and electrical grid nodes, water plants, industrial & physical financial assets, food production, transportation hubs, etc. There are suspicions that this has already been happening, either as part of a shadow campaign or for testing purposes.
2. Cyber War – China is ever at work compromising our computer networks. Their targets include but are not limited to military, governmental, financial, industrial, tech, and infrastructure networks. Everything of value is computerized and most of it is networked today – the vulnerabilities are innumerable and again our decentralization provides many opportunities.
3. Subversion of Education – China sends large numbers of Chinese national students here to our universities. They have worked in partnership with many of our schools to establish “Confucius Institutes” to spread Chinese influence, culture, and language. They use their infiltration of our universities to steal research, spread ideology, and subvert students and professors. This is far easier than it should be, but university professors and administrators have always been far more Marxist and socialist in inclination than the wider American population anyway, and so are open to influence. Our universities train our teachers, who then go out to our K-12 and spread the disease. This is a long game, but it has been going on for many decades, and is now producing poisoned fruit.
4. Social Media (primarily but not just TikTok) – All Chinese companies are associated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They all must do the bidding of the CCP when directed to do so, that is how their system of control works. They do not have fully independent companies, it’s not a thing. TikTok is effectively run by China, and as everyone knows harvests massive amounts of personal data on its users, yet that’s not its greatest threat. TikTok is actually a psychological warfare weapon. There is a reason China uses a different version of TikTok than the one they export to us. China employs the algorithms on TikTok to turn up the “heat” in various ways on our most vulnerable citizens – our youth. Ideological and psychological brainwashing are accomplished by a steady video clip diet of racial violence, moral degradation, trans propaganda, anti-military messaging, and hopelessness. The statistics show the dismal effects.
5. Business / Economic – Other than the 4 years of the Donald Trump Presidency, China has embarrassed us through mercantilist trade strategies, purchasing American assets of all types using our own free markets against us, and by working to undermine our currency.
6. Biological – While Covid-19 appears to have been an accidental viral leak from the Wuhan biological weapons facility, it was nevertheless under development with the express purpose of being used against China’s enemies, specifically us. It is an obscenity that not only were we helping and providing funding to their research, but that those Americans involved have never been brought to proper justice.
7. Immigration – This is a double-edged sword. One edge is supporting and facilitating mass illegal migration across our borders to place pressure on our economy, governmental and social systems (health care, welfare, criminal justice, housing, etc.). The second edge is using the open borders as an opportunity to infiltrate human intelligence and military assets (see above) into our country where they quickly blend into our diverse society and either get immediately to work or alternatively go underground and wait for orders.
8. Population poisoning through drug importation – Lately this has centered around fentanyl. For years China produced and smuggled the drug directly into our country through the mail, ports-of-entry and by way of drug cartels. Now they just produce all the precursors, which are shipped to Mexico to be combined into the finished product, which is then smuggled into our country through our wide-open southern border (see Immigration above). Last year over 100,000 citizens died from just fentanyl-related overdoses. Let that sink in.
9. Foreign Policy – China aggressively pursues a foreign policy in opposition to America.
They build broad alliances with nations in opposition to America. The BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, Iran, China, etc.) are one manifestation of this. They work to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency, an effort that if successful would at the very minimum heavily damage our economy, the source of our strength.
China’s “Belt and Road” initiative provides technology, infrastructure, and other “loans” in return for Chinese military presence, influence and economic dominance and extortion. They are active across the 3rd world and even in our own hemisphere (ex. Panama and the Canal).
They undermine and defeat U.S. sanctions against countries like Russia and Iran, providing markets for their energy and other products.
They routinely frustrate U.S. efforts in the UN, voting against us and our allies.
All the items described above are but a sample. It should be recognized that not all these efforts will be successful, and that our own government does work to thwart many of these to a greater or lesser degree. However, our open & ethnically diverse society, our free markets, our naïve and misguided foreign policy toward China (particularly in regard to trade policy), and our vulnerable leaders and form of government provide a target-rich environment for an enemy like China.
Postscript:
We like to think of China as a communist state, but it is far more accurate to view it today as a definitively fascist state. It is totalitarian, corporatist, socialist, and even employs the nationalist land and racial-cultural elements of the classic “blood and soil” model of fascism, making it in practice closer to historical nazism than it is to historical communism, particularly since the rise of Xi Jinping. It actively persecutes racial minorities such as the Uyghurs while establishing ethnic Han Chinese and the Mandarin tongue as true Chinese. The Chinese “Communist” Party seeks Chinese ascendancy and world supremacy. It recognizes America and its capitalist system as the only remaining real obstacle to those goals and is pursuing every available strategy to weaken and displace us.
OK I can’t resist, if you’re interested, a more detailed list of examples may be found here: https://www.csis.org/programs/strategic-technologies-program/survey-chinese-espionage-united-states-2000
