In this episode, we sit down with Gordon Chang, author of the new book, “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America,” to understand the Chinese regime’s strategy to destabilize America, from fentanyl warfare to election disinformation to suspicious activity at the border.
“We’re seeing a change in composition of Chinese migrants. So if we go back two or three years ago, it’s basically family groups. Now you’re seeing packs of single males, groups of five to 15, military-age, traveling without family members, some of them pretending not to speak English. And as Chairman [Mark] Green noted, U.S. Border Patrol knows some of them have links to the Chinese military,” Mr. Chang says.
We also discuss China’s growing nuclear arsenal, tensions in the South China Sea, and where things may be headed.
“We have these extremely belligerent, provocative acts, some of which constitute acts of war against the Philippines. … We see this right now at Sabina Shoal. Last month, it was Second Thomas Shoal. Before that, it was Whitsun Reef. But all of these areas are very close to the main islands of the Philippines and very far from China. They are within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.”
America has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and has issued multiple warnings—with little effect.
Watch the video:
“We see momentum toward war, and we Americans have got to ask ourselves, what is going to stop this momentum to war?” Chang says.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Gordon Chang, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Gordon Chang:
Well, thank you so much, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek:
Back in 2020, the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping said that the East is rising and the West is declining. He meant the East being China and the West being the USA. How do you read this?
Mr. Chang:
Well, I know a lot of people say the U.S. is declining. And if you look at America, let’s say over the last three or four years, yes, we’re not as strong as we were. But decline really talks about relative standing. And since that time when Xi Jinping spoke, the Chinese economy has fallen. It is now in a grave state. Chinese people are leaving the country because they do not see a future for China. And a lot of people are just lying flat, as they say.
So the country has so many problems, whether we’re talking about the ability of governments to deliver services or just demography. China sits on the edge of the biggest demographic fall in the absence of war or disease. You just run through the list. I don’t think that you can say that China is rising. Look at Russia. You know, Russia in that time now is on the ropes, as we can see in the war in Ukraine, unable to achieve its goals. So I'd say that on a relative basis, the U.S. is stronger today than it was three or four years ago when we compare it with what’s going on in China and in Russia.
Mr. Jekielek:
Basically you’re saying everyone’s level has gone down a bit. But I think this idea of decline, it’s a broader thing. I mean, I’ve heard even comparisons to the Roman Empire, right? This is about Americans talking about America, right?
Mr. Chang:
They talk about our country in that way from time to time. So during the Carter years, you know, during the 1970s. This whole issue of detente was because we felt we couldn’t keep up with the Soviet Union. So yes, this is something that afflicts us from time to time. But America is strong because of all the countries we know of, especially when you compare us to China and Russia, we have the ability to solve our problems. Matter of fact, we’re the only of the three that can solve our own problems. And although China and Russia can be considered to be strong, they are by no means resilient.
Mr. Jekielek:
We can solve our problems, right? Please tell us about that, because of course, the Chinese regime is a significant part of those problems.
Mr. Chang:
Yes. And clearly China is in difficulties. But one thing about China is that Xi Jinping has decided he is not going to boost consumption, which is really the only sustainable basis for the Chinese economy. And what he’s decided to do is to export his way out of problems. That means he’s put his fate in our hands because he needs to sell to our market, the EU, and the global south. So he has mortgaged his future to others. Others are making decisions about the future of China.
That’s not true of the United States because of our problems. When we look at the domestic afflictions we have, a lot of them are just self-inflicted. Our government is doing stupid things, as President Obama said, in perhaps a different language. But, yeah, we have the ability to solve our problems. And we can deal with China, should we choose to do so.
Mr. Jekielek:
You have a new book that you’ve written, Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America. Let’s flesh out what that looks like. For some people today, that’s still a very strong statement to make. Really, China’s trying to destroy America? Isn’t it dependent on America, like you just said?
Mr. Chang:
Well, it is dependent on America. But the Communist Party, People’s Daily in May 2019, People’s Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, in a landmark editorial declared a people’s war against us. And we’re American, so we think we can ignore what our enemies say. But for Communist China, people’s war is a phrase that has great resonance. Going back to the beginning of the People’s Republic of China, just about a year ago, PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Daily actually defined people’s war for us. It said, people’s war is total war.
And we have seen China wage a campaign of unrestricted warfare against the United States. I think that the Communist Party views the U.S. as an existential threat. And it views us as an existential threat, not because of anything we say or do, but because of who we are. You have an insecure regime in Beijing that’s worried about the inspirational impact of America’s values and form of governance on the Chinese people. So I believe the Communist Party does not think it will ever be safe as long as the United States exists.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, I want to touch on this. This isn’t something you talk about in the book as much, but a lot of people are concerned with America’s sort of accelerating debt. Even the debt payments have become a significant portion of annual revenues. And at the same time, the Chinese economy is deeply intertwined with the American economy, right? And as much as there’s some level of so-called de-risking or even decoupling beginning to happen on the American side, we know that Xi Jinping is pursuing that on his own terms. Over on the other end, there is still this, you know, kind of tight connection. It almost seems like there’s no way to avoid some pretty significant pain. I don’t know what you think about that.
Mr. Chang:
Yes, there will be pain. We have pursued misguided China policies for five decades. So no one should think that we can get out of this without pain. And there will be. But we have to do that if we’re going to maintain our independence and our sovereignty, because China is maliciously attacking us. We’re not defending ourselves, which is one of the reasons why I’m so concerned, because a weaker society can destroy a stronger one. That’s
happened throughout history, and it could happen very well now. But I wrote the book because I felt that we need to talk about China in realistic terms, because we don’t comprehend the danger from it.
Mr. Jekielek:
So let’s talk about this unrestricted warfare, or sometimes called asymmetrical hybrid warfare. China has been using all sorts of means under the Chinese Communist Party, all sorts of means to destabilize, less than America, you know, kind of push America into this decline. And so just why don’t you kind of lay out for me some of the pieces of this puzzle, what that looks like.
Mr. Chang:
Right now we’re in an election season so one of the things that China’s been doing is creating fake posters on social media, and then trying to divide the American people by making these outrageous statements about all sorts of things, like reproductive rights, for instance, which is very controversial in America. So there’s that. And then in TikTok, they’ve clearly decided to support one candidate. So they’re using that in a way to elect a president that they want.
And this also goes back to 2020, where China’s interference in both the primaries and the general election was substantial. So there’s that piece to it. But of course, there’s intellectual property theft. People have estimated this to be about a half trillion dollars a year. I mean, we don’t know exactly the full dimension of it, but it’s a very substantial amount. Then there’s China’s promotion of fentanyl. That’s about 75,000 lives that we lose every year. 75,000 Americans die from doses of illicit Chinese fentanyl every year. So this is a project of the Communist Party to weaken America. And the list goes on and on. China uses every point of contact with the United States to take down our society.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about fentanyl. We’ve covered this issue on the show quite a bit. But it’s the Mexican cartels that are kind of delivering the fentanyl across the border primarily. Why is it called Chinese fentanyl?
Mr. Chang:
First of all, the precursor chemicals for fentanyl come from China, and they are mixed by Chinese technicians who work for the cartels. And the cartels do smuggle it abroad. Before this, the Chinese were selling the fentanyl already mixed into the United States, delivering it through a number of means. The U.S. cracked down on that, so they then started to go through the cartels. But we’ve got to remember that the fentanyl producers, some of them in fact are state-owned enterprises, and some of them are just criminal gangs.
Mr. Jekielek:
The precursors, you mean, right?
Mr. Chang:
Making the precursors, and the pill presses, and all the other paraphernalia. mail you. The Communist Party runs a total or a near total surveillance state. And these large fentanyl producers and gangs couldn’t operate without the knowledge and approval of the Communist Party. But it even gets worse than that, because we know that Chinese diplomats give cover to the fentanyl producers.
Every container that leaves China is inspected by Chinese officials. The fentanyl gangs launder their proceeds through the Chinese state banking system, Chinese-owned TikTok promotes illicit drug use in the U.S. The list goes on and on. Xi Jinping has made promises now to three American presidents to stop this; Trump in 2018, Obama in 2016, and most recently to President Biden last November.
This is unrestricted warfare. And this is very effective because as a society, we’re not dealing effectively with what the Communist Party is doing. We just sort of say, oh, this is crime by, you know, bad elements in China. No, it’s not. Well, the Communist Party is a bad element. But it is, we do not understand the nature of the crime and we don’t understand the fundamental nature of this. What nature do we need to understand?
Mr. Jekielek:
What are we missing?
Mr. Chang:
The Communist Party is evil. Nothing else to say. It is evil.
Mr. Jekielek:
These are categories that some people don’t even maybe accept exist today, right?
Mr. Chang:
Let’s talk about evil. We are seeing China commit genocide and other crimes against humanities, against the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs, and other Turkic minorities, against the Tibetans. They’re now spreading it to the Mongolians, which is their new aspect to this. The persecution of people of faith, Falun Gong practitioners, organ harvesting, the most ghastly practice I can think of.
I think that Xi Jinping, more than any other figure alive today, is responsible for more deaths. We don’t know how Covid-19 started, but we do know that once it broke out into Chinese society, Xi Jinping made decisions to deliberately spread it beyond its borders. We know that for a period of at least five weeks in December 2019 and January 2020, the Chinese regime lied to the world about the transmissibility of this disease. They knew it was highly contagious. They told the world it was not. And while they were locking down their own country, lockdowns are controversial, but by locking down China, Xi Jinping was saying to the world he thought lockdowns were an effective way of stopping the disease.
So while he was locking down China, he was pressuring other countries, especially the United States, to take arrivals from China without travel restrictions or quarantines. Jan, you put those two things together, and it is indisputable that Xi Jinping made a decision to spread this beyond China’s borders. That 7 million people outside of China died from Covid-19. Those people were murdered, and that includes 1.2 million Americans. We can argue about the number, you know, but the point is any number above zero is unacceptable.
Mr. Jekielek:
I think you make a compelling case. I just recently watched the new Reagan film, and I was just reminded that one of the things that Reagan did, which was controversial at the time, was basically to say that the Soviet Union was the evil empire, right? And that was also, I guess, as it might be controversial today to say that the Chinese regime is the evil empire. How would you compare the level of the threat of the Soviet Union back in the time of Reagan to the Chinese Communist Party today?
Mr. Chang:
They both said that they were going to destroy us, but China has more means to do that. And the Chinese leaders today are more willful than the Soviet leaders in the 1980s during the Reagan time. You know, we can talk about Stalin, a murderous figure, but by the time you get to Brezhnev and Chernenko and Andropov, those guys were just caretakers.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, one of the things you often hear about, and I think maybe America sometimes has a propensity for this, you hear the term isolationism. The idea is something like this. Of course, America has been involved in a number of wars over past years, you know, years, trillions of dollars in treasure, for example, in Afghanistan, many lives lost, not clear what the benefit was ultimately, given where we are today. And the question is, maybe America should step back from these types of engagements and just kind of focus on its own problems, which are plentiful. How do you react to that? And maybe it’s even American aggression at some level that is provoking these regimes on the outside. How do you react to that?
Mr. Chang:
With regard to China, we hardly provoke them. We worked for decades to integrate China into the international system to make it stronger. There have been a number of instances where American presidents have come to the rescue of Chinese communism and saved it from failure. So I don’t think you can say that we have provoked China.
Mr. Jekielek:
Could you maybe expand on that a little bit about these rescues?
Mr. Chang:
The first one would be 1972 when Nixon went to Beijing and met Mao. This was during the end of the Cultural Revolution, a period of great abnormal period, and a time where the Communist Party had been discredited completely throughout society. And by Nixon going there, he was signaling his support, American support for the Communist regime at a time when Mao, who was in very poor health, where the Communist Party might not have survived.
Then you have George H.W. Bush right after the Tiananmen Square Massacre June 4th 1989 sent Brent Scowcroft on a secret mission to say, yes, we’re sanctioning you but don’t really don’t worry about it we’ve got your back. That was a time where communism could have failed. But what we did was we gave communist leaders the knowledge that we would support them through a very difficult time for the party. I can make the case for 1999 when President Clinton signs a WTO accession agreement with China. China then actually joined in 2001 and went on for a period of trade success. One can argue a lot about it, but the point is it certainly materially helped the Communist Party then.
So we have these instances where the United States really has been indulgent. And after China joined the WTO, you know, we have a series of presidents who don’t enforce China’s trade obligations to us and allow China to engage in predatory conduct, criminal conduct. And that certainly made the Communist Party much stronger. The whole notion was that if we help the party, it will see it in its interest to support the international system. That did not work out. That, I think, is the grandest wager in American history, and it could be the last big wager that we make, because this one could be done in the United States, actually.
Mr. Jekielek:
Presumably, unless something changes, right?
Mr. Chang:
Unless something changes. We are far stronger than China. We are far stronger than China and its friends—Russia, Iran, and North Korea all combined. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to win this struggle because there are periods throughout history where weaker adversaries have destroyed stronger societies. And especially right now, China’s waging war on us and we’re not defending ourselves. So we’re at a period of mortal danger. This is a period where China’s waging an existential struggle and we as a society are not realizing the fundamental nature of that challenge.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know one of the things you reminded me of in reading your book was you know Chairman Green of Homeland Security. There’s this question of Chinese nationals of military age coming across the southern border and I remember Chairman Green basically made a statement that some of these were basically identified as being affiliated to the People’s Liberation Army, which I had actually forgotten that aspect. And that’s pretty significant, right?
Mr. Chang:
Absolutely, because we’re talking about tens of thousands of Chinese migrants coming across our southern and northern borders. And I think most of them are who they say they are. They’re just desperate people who want to live in a free society, who have given up on China. And so that’s the one side. But also, we’re seeing a change in the composition of Chinese migrants. So if we go back two or three years ago, it’s basically family groups. Now you’re seeing packs of single males in groups of 5 to 15, military age, traveling without family members, some of them pretending not to speak English. As Chairman Green noted, U.S. Border Patrol knows some of them have links to the Chinese military.
Also, just to give you an example, it’s not just the southern border. In February, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended, I think it was three Chinese migrants sneaking into Maine. And what was ominous about this was that there were Chinese nationals on our side of the border who were obviously there by pre-arrangement to help them get in. And, you know, if you want to live in the U.S. because you just don’t want to live in China anymore, you surrender to the Border Patrol because you want the debit card from New York City. If you’re trying to come in undetected, it means that you’re coming here for some sort of nefarious purposes. It could be because you’re waging war in the U.S. It could be because you’re a triad member.
I don’t know. But the story can’t be good.
Mr. Jekielek:
Some time ago, Joshua Philipp, who covers China extensively for us, did a special episode about this biolab in California. Can you just give us a picture of what we know about that at this point?
Mr. Chang:
Yes. An alert building inspector in Reedley, California, December 2022, stumbled upon what is clearly a secret Chinese biological weapons facility. Inside, investigators found at least 20 pathogens, and some for some really dangerous diseases, and almost 1,000 mice that had been genetically engineered to spread disease. One of those diseases is Ebola. Ebola has a natural fatality rate of 50 percent, and we know that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at this moment are trying to figure out how to weaponize Ebola.
So this is of grave concern. And it doesn’t take much imagination to think that this cannot be the only such Chinese facility in the U.S. So think about it. A lot of Chinese males come across. Some of them could be operatives. They pick up the mice. They spread them around the US. That’s the first sign of China’s decision to go to war on us.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, it’s interesting that when we think about the Chinese presence in America, there’s a ton of students that are in all sorts of universities. I had John Lenczowski from The Institute of World Politics on the show recently.
He was talking about how many thousands of intelligence collectors there are. There’s this whole kind of incentivization structure through the social credit system that even if you’re not some kind of agent, which of course probably most people aren’t, you’re certainly incentivized to gather bits and pieces of that and send it home for benefits, social credit benefits. And of course, like you said earlier, a ton of people come across just looking for a better life because this is where people go for that as we can clearly see. How do you deal with this whole kind of scenario because you don’t want to stigmatize everybody right? How do you see that?
Mr. Chang:
With the students just mentioned, one thing that we know is that in the U.S. Chinese consular officials and Ministry of State Security agents actually surveil those students and get them to commit espionage, get them to engage in political activities, which is inappropriate on our soil. And this is our country. We allow that. So this is something that we got to do. Remember, under the Communist Party’s top-down system, every Chinese national has to obey the instructions and demands of the Communist Communist Party.
And China’s 2017 national intelligence law actually codifies this in one area where Chinese nationals are required to commit espionage if they receive a demand. So as a matter of national survival, we have a right to give special scrutiny to the Chinese. My dad came here as a Chinese student. So I have a special place in my heart for this. But nonetheless, when we talk about the effect, this is something that we have not been able to deal with. And so we’re going to have to take extraordinary measures, measures that we now consider to be politically unacceptable, if we’re going to keep our country.
Mr. Jekielek:
Maybe you could flesh out a little bit, you know, the different ways in which the Chinese regime has infiltrated American society. You lay out a lot of them in the book. and it’s, I mean, it’s frankly, you know, extremely concerning when you see the broader picture.
Mr. Chang:
I'll give you one example. Linda Sun, who is now being accused of being a Chinese agent. She worked for Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, and for Kathy Hochul, the current New York governor, helping China’s diplomacy by targeting Tibetans and others and taking substantial sums from the Chinese government for doing that. And there are others in the New York Democratic Party who are, I think, also going to be subject to investigation. But let me give you an example of how pervasive this is.
We know that the Ministry of State Security, in the form of Christine Fang, first contacted Eric Swalwell. The Chinese Ministry of State Security didn’t first contact Swalwell when he was sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, where he would have been of great value to China. They first contacted him when he was sitting on the city council of Dublin City, California. This is not to say that Swalwell has done anything wrong, but it is to show how pervasive and how comprehensive the Chinese penetration of our political system is, because Swalwell could not have been the only person who was groomed. There must be hundreds of Swalwells, if not more, which means that there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of Ministry of State Security agents running around our country trying to
compromise American politicians.
Mr. Jekielek:
You just reminded me of something in your book. You talk about Charles Burton talking about the different color codings for ways to compromise foreign people from the Chinese perspective.
Mr. Chang:
Burton is Canada’s most incisive China watcher, because he was a Canadian diplomat in Beijing. Now, he’s at a think tank. Burton has talked a lot about Chinese penetration of Canada, which is maybe even more comprehensive than its penetration of our society.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is interesting, because I hadn’t heard about it before, how the Chinese are great planners and they organize everything.
Mr. Chang:
They’ve got this three color coded system; one color for corruption, just money, another color for sex, another color for something else. And it’s fascinating how meticulous they have been in the way that they have targeted us. But they’ve done a very good job of it because they’ve devoted enormous resources to it. They cannot accomplish their goals, they believe, unless the United States is out of the way.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why is that? I think in general in free societies, I guess most of us kind of believe in win-win. There’s such a thing as a win-win. But we can work together and grow together as well, right? Like why do you have to lose for me to win? It’s not a zero-sum game for many of us like this.
Mr. Chang:
It is for China though. First of all, they’re communists. They believe that communism must prevail around the world. There must be a dictatorship of the proletariat. There must be a perfect communist society after that everywhere. But it makes it even worse because Xi Jinping has been especially promoting the notion of Tian Xia, of all under heaven, that Chinese rulers believed that they had the mandate of heaven to rule Tian Xia. And it was even worse than that, Jan, because they believed that heaven compelled them to rule the entire world. Well, if you have to rule the entire world, you have to get rid of the United States, in addition to about 196 other countries. So there’s that.
Mr. Jekielek:
Or subjugate them, right? It’s not so much to get rid of, is it?
Mr. Chang:
With the United States, it is because we’re a democracy. Remember, the Communist Party views us as an existential threat, not because of anything we say or do, but because of who we are. You have that insecure regime in Beijing worried about the inspirational impact of our values and form of governance on the Chinese people. You know, if you go back during the Trump presidency, Trump was very popular in China, even though he was not particularly nice to the Chinese regime, because he was just so refreshing.
He was so different. Forget about politics for a moment. The Chinese people looked at that and they’ve made the comparison with Xi Jinping who you know never gives press conferences, never talks to the Chinese people except in these really controlled circumstances and then only like one a year where you have you know just an American leader just so different.
Mr. Jekielek:
Something that we haven’t talked much about on this show yet is China’s nuclear buildup and this is something that you know kind of has been really accelerating in recent years, really kind of under the noses of the other nuclear powers.
Mr. Chang:
Yes it is stunning. In November 2022, the Pentagon issued a report that said China had about 400 warheads then and projected that by 2035, they would have 1,500. Some analysts say the number of 1,500 is way under what China will have when they look at the number of delivery platforms that China’s building. They say it makes much more sense that the number is going to be, like what Rick Fisher talks about—7,000 warheads by 2035.
But yes, whatever it is, they’re on a very fast pace to do it and we’ve got to worry that this is not deterrence because China already has enough to deter the United States or anybody else for that matter. What they’re looking for is a war fighting capability. They have seen Vladimir Putin make threats to use nuclear weapons and get what he wants. For instance, he got President Biden to back off when Putin was threatening to invade Ukraine in early 2022. And by brandishing his most destructive weapons, he got the Biden administration not to provide the assistance to Ukraine that we should have been supplying.
The Chinese look at that and say, why? Why don’t I do that? And matter of fact, the Chinese have actually been threatening the use of nukes. So for instance, March 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Defense promises, “worst consequences,” for any country coming to Taiwan’s aid. Even before Putin invaded Ukraine, you had China threatening to incinerate Japan and Australia in July and September of 2021 so this has now become they want to have enough nukes to force other countries to persuade other countries not to come to aid of Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan. Yes, this is very dangerous.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why should we care about those countries?
Mr. Chang:
First of all, we Americans have drawn our Western defense perimeter since the 1800s, not off the coast of California or even Hawaii, but off the coast of East Asia. Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines are part of that critical perimeter. It means that we can defend far away from our shores, which means we protect our people. But it goes deeper than that.
You have, for instance, China just attacking the whole notion of democracy. So we cannot allow China to absorb or annex any democracy, especially as the ones that are important off of its eastern periphery. Taiwan is important because it makes, in addition, 92 percent of the world’s most sophisticated semiconductors. So if we want a society without semiconductors, we can let China take Taiwan.
But there’s also another reason, and that is after the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Taiwan has become the test of American credibility and resolve. So it’s not just East Asia, it’s also Europe. Because people are, if we allow China to take Taiwan, then people are, if we allow China to take Taiwan, then people are going to say, well, what about my treaty with you? We don’t have a treaty with Taiwan, but we have an understanding. We’ve got the Taiwan Relations Act of 1976. And we have got all the promises that we have made to Taiwan. So this is the test of American power. And this means we have a lot. Defending Taiwan is defending America, for instance.
Mr. Jekielek:
You argue in the book that Xi Jinping actually greenlit the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How do you see that?
Mr. Chang:
February 4th, 2020, when Vladimir Putin was in Beijing for the Winter Olympics, China and Russia issued their 5,300-word statement, which declared their no-limits partnership. Just 20 days after that, Putin invades Ukraine. China’s support for the Russian war effort has been from the get-go. It has been not only elevated commodity purchases, but also supplying intelligence to the Russians, supplying ammunition, drones, computer chips and circuit boards, diplomatic support, propaganda support. It’s been across the board with the exception of provision of troops.
So although the Russians may not think that they are a proxy of China, China probably views Putin as their proxy. So this is China’s war on the international system. And so yes, they greenlit the invasion and they supported Russia from the very beginning, as they are now.
Mr. Jekielek:
So I’m reminded that a very influential Chinese military strategist made the point of saying that China should keep America embroiled in different foreign wars, including one with a non-state actor. There’s this sort of approach of keeping America distracted from China, right, and what China has been up to.
Mr. Chang:
Well, Xi Jinping reveres Mao Zedong, and I think that Xi has taken two pages from Mao’s peasant movement playbook. The first one was in 1949, Mao prevailed over Chiang Kai-shek, driving him off the mainland into Taiwan. Because, as Mao said, he encircled the cities from the countryside. Xi Jinping looks at Ukraine, North Africa, the Middle East as the countryside, and we’re the city. Because China is supporting Russia and Ukraine, supporting Iran against Israel, and it’s fueling insurgencies in North Africa that look like wars.
The other thing, though, the other page is chaos. Mao Zedong wrote to Jiang Qing, his wife, in 1966. He wrote that great chaos under heaven achieves great order under heaven. By great order under heaven, Mao is referring to worldwide Chinese rule. Xi Jinping views the disruption of the international system and the destruction of societies as intermediary steps towards his control, complete control of all humanity. So yes, that is Maoism in practice and we are seeing it every day.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of the people you interviewed for the book mentions that it is the warring states period that the Communist Party today draws a lot of the inspiration for its warfare tactics of. And Mao in particular, which is interesting because Mao, of course, was responsible for the Cultural Revolution to try to destroy the entirety of traditional Chinese culture, but not this part, apparently.
Mr. Chang:
Yes. Deception is the core of Chinese policy. You know, misdirection, lying, all the rest of it. And this goes back to the warring states period, which was before the imperial era. There’s a book by Michael Pillsbury, 36 Strategies, where he talks about this. Yes, deception is a key part of Chinese policy.
Mr. Jekielek:
What about this unrestricted warfare?
Mr. Chang:
That’s a 1999 book by two Chinese Air Force colonels, which argues that China can do anything to take down the United States. I don’t know how much more clear they could have made it. As James Lilley, our late great ambassador to Beijing, said, the Chinese always telegraph their punches. The book Unrestricted Warfare is telegraphing their punches.
When you look at that, it somewhat rubs up against Pillsbury’s notion of deception as being the core of policy. But you can see the two side by side. The Chinese will tell you that puts you on notice. They told us about the people’s war going back to 2019. But in terms of when they strike us, deception will be very much a part of what they do.
Mr. Jekielek:
Some of these warfares, there’s drug warfare, which we talked about. There’s actually legal warfare, which there’s plenty of. I think they viewed it as a technique of war against America. We certainly didn’t view it that way. I mean, all these unrestricted or asymmetrical methods, which the Chinese regime viewed as techniques of attack, we didn’t see that. And in some cases, I don’t even know if we do today yet.
Mr. Chang:
Well, we have a very different conception of war and competition. And we have a political class that, for whatever reason, does not see China the same way that China sees us. So, for instance, President Biden won’t even call the Chinese an adversary. And certainly he won’t use the term enemy. But that’s the term that China uses for us.
Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve got this critical mismatch. Let’s talk about the immediate things that we kind of need to do here in your mind.
Mr. Chang:
We need to sever all of our contacts with the Chinese regime.
Mr. Jekielek:
That is very strong and almost unimaginable. How do you do that?
Mr. Chang:
I’m not saying it’s politically acceptable, but I am saying it is necessary and the reason is we’re being overwhelmed we are being overwhelmed by a Chinese regime our law enforcement is being overwhelmed our universities are being overwhelmed our businesses Hollywood just you name it and if we can’t we don’t have a hold on this and until we are able to manage this we need to take those contacts and sever them. It’s going to be tough. It will be painful, as we talked about, but nonetheless, it’s necessary. And that’s why I’m so concerned, because we are not willing to do what is necessary to save our society.
Mr. Jekielek:
How does this play out then?
Mr. Chang:
Nothing’s inevitable, but we see momentum toward war, and we Americans have got to ask ourselves, what is going to stop this momentum to war?
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about that a little more. Now you’re talking about kinetic war specifically. What do you see there exactly?
Mr. Chang:
I see what’s going on right now in the South China Sea against the Philippines, where we have these extremely belligerent, provocative acts, some of which constitute acts of war against the Philippines. And we’ve got to be clear about what’s going on. The Biden State Department has issued 12 warnings that we are prepared to defend the Philippines because of our mutual defense treaty with Manila. President Biden himself has issued three oral warnings to the same effect. The two most recent being in October of last year and in April of this year.
The Chinese have just blown by those. They don’t care. They keep on getting even more belligerent. And that means deterrence is failing. Now, I can’t put my hand on my heart and say Xi Jinping has made the decision to go to war, but I know something 100 percent. And that is Xi Jinping has made the decision to risk war. And he’s made the decision to risk war with a treaty ally of the US, which means he is prepared to go to war with the United States at this moment.
Mr. Jekielek:
By these extreme provocations in the Philippines, that’s what you mean, right?
Mr. Chang:
Yes, they’re trying to break apart the Philippines. We see this right now at Sabina Shoal. Last month, it was Second Thomas Shoal. Before that, it was Whitsun Reef. But all of these areas, which are very close to the main islands of the Philippines, and very far from China. They are within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. That’s the band of water between 12 and 200 nautical miles from the shoreline where a coastal state has special rights.
And also in 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the case Philippines v. China invalidated China’s claims to places like Sabina Shoal, Second Thomas Shoal, and all the rest of them. China, which is a party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is just completely ignoring its obligations. It has decided that regardless of anything, it is going to break apart the Philippines. This is aggression. It may not be as clear as Sudetenland, but it is the same thing.
Mr. Jekielek:
We have the Russia-Ukraine war, which of course some people describe as a proxy war with the U.S. with so much U.S. support. We have the Israel-Hamas war. We have these situations and even some noise with Japan, increased overflights in Taiwan, a lot of aggression and these increasingly belligerent events, like the ramming of the Coast Guard cutter. These things could escalate, right?
Mr. Chang:
The 60 Minutes program aired that segment. Their crew was on a Philippine Coast Guard vessel, and the Chinese rammed it anyway. The Chinese had to know that CBS crew was on that vessel, and they rammed it. And that shows that they now want to intimidate the rest of the world.
This is a change in psychology.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is extremely dangerous. Are we on the verge of potentially a broader conflict? Because isn’t this how these world wars begin? There’s a lot of regional problems and then they combine into something much bigger and much graver. What do you think?
Mr. Chang:
There is a one word answer to your question—are we on the verge of a wider war? The answer is yes. Here is the longer version. If we go back to the 1930s, there were separate wars, and they merged into what historians now call World War II. And the question that we now have to ask ourselves is—are those conflicts that we see around the world going to merge into World War III? And the answer to that depends on China. And we see what Xi Jinping wants to do. We see the risks he’s willing to take, that he is prepared to wage war on the United States. I'll go back to that question I asked—what is going to stop the momentum of war?
Mr. Jekielek:
You think decoupling and the severing of economic connections is urgent. But would that solve this issue?
Mr. Chang:
We don’t know what will solve this issue if anything but I think that yes we need to decouple because we need to remove the incentives for people in our country to support the Communist Party. So that is that is just a necessary but not necessarily a sufficient step and you know we’re being helped by this. Xi Jinping is pushing out foreign companies. So it’s not like there’s only, it’s not just pulling our companies out. It’s they’re being pushed out.
He’s a Maoist. We got to be clear about this because, you know, it’s not only foreign companies he’s targeting. His targets also include domestic Chinese private entrepreneurs. So he believes in a state society. He doesn’t have the power to push China back to the 1950s at this moment. But when he has the opportunity, that’s what he does. This is the guy who reveres Mao, as I mentioned. He’s pushing us out. That shows you the direction this guy is going. This is not a win-win type of behavior.
Mr. Jekielek:
You hear about these doctrines of strategic deterrence that we’ve used historically, this whole idea of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Of course, no one really wants to use them. How do we create that deterrence at this point? Because isn’t that what we need?
Mr. Chang:
Yes, we need a president of the United States to say clearly that we will defend our friends and our allies. We will protect our own society. And we do not believe that it is our interest to support the Communist Party of China. If China declares us to be an enemy, then we are the enemy. If you are trying to destroy our society, which you are, then we are going to return the favor because we have no choice. We need to have a president say those things so the Chinese will back off.
Unfortunately, nobody in our political system is willing to do that. We hear this, oh, we need to cooperate with China, find areas where we have common ground. Well, the Chinese hear that and they realize what they’re doing to us. And they think, who are these Americans? You know, America has got to be one of the weakest nations on earth because they can’t protect themselves. They’re not willing to say in public what’s going on?
We just had the leaders of the Quad meet at President Biden’s beach house. There are all those statements where the U.S. sas that the Quad is not directed at any one particular country. The Chinese just look at that and say, huh? And we have got to have a determination in our society that, as Reagan said during the Cold War about the Soviets, where we win, and they lose.
Mr. Jekielek:
One thing that I’m reminded of, we were on this panel together earlier today, one of the things I asked about was public diplomacy, something that we don’t think a lot about these days, but back in the time of Reagan it was very important. Public diplomacy being the communication with the people of the regime as opposed to the leaders of the regime.
Mr. Chang:
It is something that we just stopped doing after the Cold War. We just, you know, never thought it was important. There are glimmers of hope. Mike Pompeo, when he was Secretary of State, I think it was July 23rd, 2020, he talked about America’s outreach to the Chinese people. Secretary Blinken talks about it as well. It’s just that they don’t do very much about it. And we’re going to have to because it is a very important element of what the Chinese do. You know, when you’re in an insecure regime, propaganda is critical to the regime.
But we’re Americans. We believe that we don’t have to listen to our adversaries and enemies. We’re just entitled not to. And, you know, this is a possibly fatal weakness. Remember, in 1993, al-Qaeda killed six Americans with the bombing of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. We couldn’t care less. We couldn’t care less until Osama bin Laden, on one day, killed 2,977 Americans. And then we woke up and we said, how could that have happened? It happened because we were not paying attention to what our enemies were saying.
Mr. Jekielek:
Gordon, I think what you’re advocating for here is for the American people,or perhaps the people of liberal democracies around the world to realize and understand this threat which is being broadcast to us prior to the significant loss of life, which is the thing that traditionally shocks the system enough to change. Is that what you’re saying?
Mr. Chang:
That’s right. We’re a democracy. Go back and read deTocqueville about how democracies always tried to avoid the obvious, to avoid the obvious threats. And that’s the way democracies work. Look at Britain and France in the 1930s. Look at us now. England slept, as they said. We’re the ones who are sleeping now.
Yes, we‘ll rally ourselves after a great loss of life, but I’d like to see us rally ourselves before then. I‘d like to see ourselves prevent the war that is coming. I’d like to see peace. I would like to see a stable world. But clearly right now, we can perceive the worst events in history.
Mr. Jekielek:
Potentially coming, if we don’t wake up.
Mr. Chang:
Yes, they will come if we don’t wake up.
Mr. Jekielek:
Gordon Chang, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Chang:
Thank you so much, Jan. I really appreciate it.
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