President Trump, according to reports, wants to go to Beijing in his first hundred days and reach a bargain with China. Unfortunately, an enduring accommodation with the Chinese regime is not possible.
Why not?
For one thing, the Communist Party of China (CCP) appears determined to kill every person in the United States. A quarter-century ago, General Chi Haotian, China's defense minister and vice chairman of the CCP's Central Military Commission, reportedly gave a secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans.
"It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans," he said. "But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the Communist Party leads the world."
Chi's plan was to use disease to clear out the vast spaces of North America so that the Chinese people could settle in the areas left uninhabited.
"The problem with the report of the Chi Haotian speech is that it cannot be verified," Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told me. "When it was revealed in 2005, it seemed fantastical that China would unleash biological warfare against the United States to massacre its population and pave the way for a Communist Party invasion, occupation, and exploitation."
So did the general in fact give that speech? Events since then show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) today exhibits the ruthlessness reportedly shown by General Chi then.
For instance, although there remains disagreement over the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, there can be no argument over the Chinese regime's actions following the outbreak of the disease in Wuhan.
For at least five weeks in December 2019 and January 2020, China tried to deceive the world about the transmissibility of the disease, contending that COVID-19 was not readily transmissible human-to-human, when it knew that the coronavirus was highly contagious. At the same time, the regime pressured other countries to accept arrivals from China without restriction while it was locking down Wuhan and surrounding areas. Moreover, Chinese authorities tried to suppress the release of the coronavirus genome sequence, apparently to prevent others from understanding the disease and developing vaccines and other preventative measures.
That means the Chinese regime was directly responsible for the killing — murder — of approximately seven million people outside China, including 1.2 million Americans. This act, an attack on non-Chinese, constituted a genocide, the largest in history.
This was the first time in history that one nation attacked every other one.
China is not done killing with disease. Its National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of "specific ethnic genetic attacks." American officials are concerned that China has been experimenting with, in the words of Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, "germ weapons capable of attacking ethnic groups."
China is now moving beyond the research stage. In March 2023, federal and state agencies raided an "unlicensed laboratory" in the city of Reedley, California and found evidence suggesting a biological warfare facility.
The facility, run by Chinese fronting for parties in China, contained lab mice — 773 live and more than 175 dead — that were genetically engineered to carry disease. Authorities also found medical waste, and chemical, viral and biological agents. There were on-site at least 20 potentially infectious pathogens including those causing coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, herpes, and Ebola.
Researchers at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology are now studying Ebola, undoubtedly to weaponize it.
"This kamikaze lab — unsecured, poorly contained, makeshift, containing a couple dozen pathogens near a population center — cannot be a one-off," Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life, said to me. "It is, I believe, a part of a large Chinese military operation to spread disease throughout the American population."
In addition, China is every year killing tens of thousands of Americans with fentanyl, a chemical warfare project run by the Communist Party itself
The United States is the CCP's main target. In May 2019, People's Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, carried a landmark editorial that declared a "people's war" on America.
In 2023, PLA Daily, the official website of the Chinese military, defined that term as "total war."
Why America? The Communist Party of China, with its strident anti-Americanism, is establishing a justification to strike America. As James Lilley, America's ambassador to Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, said, "The Chinese always telegraph their punches."
The CCP views the United States as an existential threat. An insecure ruling organization in Beijing is afraid of the inspirational impact on the Chinese people of America's ideals and form of governance. "The Chinese regime reviles the United States because it is a beacon to the world affirming the universal entitlement to individual human rights of citizens everywhere and the power of the noble principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people," Charles Burton, of the Sinopsis think tank, told Gatestone.
America is not the only target. "The Chinese regime has a strong innate hostility to all," says Burton, who served as a Canadian diplomat in Beijing. "The Chinese regime indoctrinates its people from childhood with a powerfully emotive nationalism based on a comprehensive discourse of historical humiliations. It seeks vengeance on all those who have, in its view, wronged China."
These narratives feed into the Chinese regime's efforts to replace the Westphalian international order of sovereign states with the Chinese imperial-era system in which emperors believed they not only had the Mandate of Heaven to rule tianxia — "all under Heaven" — but they also were compelled by Heaven to do so.
Driven by these beliefs, the Chinese regime has always thought it had the right to do whatever it wanted to others. Chi Haotian's comments are in line with a self-righteousness and malice inherent in Communist Party rule.
Try as Americans might, they will never have amicable relations with China as long as it is ruled by the CCP. There can be only one survivor, either the People's Republic of China or the United States of America.
Not both.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
