"It's very hard for China to take certain steps without harming its own economy," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said on June 12. "And I think we now understand that economic performance is central right now to what is important to President Xi."
"Campbell," Reuters reported, "told Washington's Stimson Center think tank China needed to reassure investors and others that it has a plan for its economy and would not be looking to create frictions that could escalate in unpredictable and dangerous ways."
The Communist Party of China, according to the Biden administration, wants stability. That is a dangerous self-delusion. Moreover, it is a view that is indefensible in light of Beijing's actions, some recent.
Americans may think they are at peace with China, but China's ruling organization has already announced otherwise. Most fundamentally, in May 2019 People's Daily, the Communist Party's self-described "mouthpiece" and therefore the most authoritative publication in China, carried a landmark editorial declaring a "people's war" on America.
This phrase sounds like meaningless propaganda to American ears, but it has special significance to the Party. "A people's war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods," declared a column carried in April 2023 by PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People's Liberation Army.
"The concept of people's war fits neatly into the CCP's Everything is War mindset," Kerry Gershaneck, author of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China's Plan to "Win Without Fighting," told Gatestone.
"The Chinese Communist Party seeks to destroy nations it targets through a seemingly endless array of what it calls 'warfares,'" he noted. "The Party's fascination with weaponizing almost every aspect of normal human interaction and calling it a 'warfare' is, on the surface, morbidly amusing, but this mentality presents an existential threat to those under attack. The CCP has developed a massive array of vocabulary and capabilities to support its many warfares and has achieved remarkable success employing them."
China has in fact weaponized just about everything. In 1999, two Chinese air force colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, in Unrestricted Warfare, listed 24 methods of warfare and advocated the use of all of them against the United States. As Gershaneck, who has advised the U.S. government and NATO on hybrid threats, explains, unrestricted warfare contemplates the turning of everything into a weapon, from business interactions to tourism to terrorism to illegal drugs to disease.
The Communist Party's Unrestricted Warfare campaign, as a practical matter, cannot work without deception, which is the core of China's interactions with the world. The most famous Communist comment on this topic came from Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong's wily successor, who said the Chinese should "tao guang yang hui," often translated as "hide your strength and bide your time."
That advice came from China's Warring States period, an era that produced proverbs, stories, and maxims about deception. The Chinese are fascinated by a treatise of misdirection, cunning, and deception of that time: The Thirty-Six Stratagems. "All of these stratagems," the Heritage Foundation's Michael Pillsbury writes in The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, "are designed to defeat a more powerful opponent by using the opponent's own strength against him, without his knowing he is even in a contest."
"We don't know we are losing the game," Pillsbury believes. "In fact, we don't even know that the game has begun."
All this brings us back to the State Department's Campbell. Campbell undoubtedly knows the Chinese do not crave stability. If they did, they would not have seized two Philippine craft at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea on June 17. That is when China's forces also rammed a boat and wounded at least eight Filipino sailors, one seriously. This is the third time China injured Philippine personnel at that shoal since March.
All of these incidents are in defiance of about a dozen written and oral warnings, from the Biden State Department and President Biden himself, that the U.S. was prepared to use force against China to discharge America's obligations to Manila pursuant to the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.
Moreover, if China wanted stability and good relations with America, it would not, among other things, poison Americans with fentanyl, steal hundreds of billions of dollars of American intellectual property each year, foment violence on American streets, counterfeit U.S. currency, maintain a secret biological weapons facility in California, or issue daily diatribes against Washington. Moreover, China would not at this moment be fighting proxy wars on three continents or trying to annex large portions of India, Japanese islands, and all of Taiwan.
The American political class—both Democrats and Republicans—refuse to see Chinese hostility and act appropriately against it. The Communist Party, therefore, did not have to deceive Americans because Americans were determined to deceive themselves. At the end of the Cold War, it was perhaps understandable for Washington officials to believe that the Chinese Communist state would eventually become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system, as the State Department's Robert Zoellick famously said in 2005.
Now, however, it is no longer possible to believe that the Communist Party will do so. Xi Jinping has made it clear that his goal is to bring down the international system, to "crack skulls and spill blood" as he announced in a landmark speech on July 1, 2021.
Campbell's words this month can only be interpreted as an attempt to put China in a good light, which will result, at an extraordinarily consequential time, in Americans letting down their guard.
Nothing good ever happens when democracies let down their guard.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and China Is Going to War, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
Kasandra