Old Bolshevik Dmitry Z. Manuilsky, former president of the United Nations Security Council, was convinced that the capitalist West was doomed. In 1949 he wrote: “We shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist.”
Manuilsky believed that the idea of individual autonomy was a dead letter, that the traditional ethos of Western civilization with its emphasis on the Judeo-Christian moral imperative was on the way to becoming a historical fossil, and that the profit-motive spelled the demise of free-market enterprise. A quote, possibly spurious, generally attributed to Lenin, accentuates this third point: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” The trope appears to have some truth to it.
There does seem to be a ropist epidemic in progress. This is currently the case with respect to China where American companies have found it profitable to do business. According to the Hoover Institute, more than fifty American companies report that they generate at least 20 percent of their revenues from China.
Big Tech is in bed with the CCP: Google and IBM are selling surveillance equipment to the Chinese company Semptian; Facebook censors articles critical of China’s implication in the COVID scandal; YouTube removes content that contradicts the W.H.O., an organization that takes it marching orders from China (“anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy,” said CEO Susan Wojcicki). As Andrea Widburg remarks at American Thinker, “There’s nothing good about the nation’s self-appointed gatekeepers allowing information from only an organization that shills for China, is frequently incorrect, and has an open bias against the one drug that seems to work.”
It is, however, not only our corporate tycoons and industrialists who are selling their birthright to the common enemy. As we see today, Communist China is a rising hegemon that, apart from owning a sizeable portion of the American Treasury, products it manufactures, including medicines, pharmaceuticals, appliances, ordinary goods, and technologies are everywhere.
Cheap Chinese goods appeal to the American pocketbook. Chinese funding of the entertainment industry and sports is greedily accepted, serving its propaganda interests. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, American universities find it immensely profitable to admit Chinese students—currently, a cohort that numbers 370,000—and have received gifts and contracts in the vicinity of $1 billion since 2013, providing China with a golden opportunity to pursue its espionage program of stealing proprietary technology.
The slow but inexorable intrusion of China into the country’s internal affairs has been abetted by an educational system that has succeeded in turning two generations of its graduates against the country’s Constitutional history and promoting a socialist agenda and collectivist ethos that envisions state control of both the economy and the culture—the Chinese modus operandi. And yet, China is generally regarded, at least by the Democratic Party and much of the country’s millennial population, as a friend and ally rather than an adversary devoted to the decline of American power, prestige, and economic ascendancy.
The truth is that China is no friend. The aforementioned Hoover Institute’s report on Chinese influence, which runs to some 200 pages, is exhaustive and damning. It exposes Chinese penetration of think tanks and research institutes with Americans providing intelligence to Chinese interlocutors, “whose main purpose is to take the information back to their government [and to] transmit Chinese government policy perspectives.” Xi Jinping advised Chinese participants to establish a presence in the U.S. in order “to advance the Chinese narrative.” The effort underway to seduce American scholars, editors, and journalists, known as the “borrowed boat” strategy, has been a fixture for years. Publishing firms such as Random House and Yale University Press have been friendly to Chinese interests.
The effort underway to seduce American scholars, editors, and journalists, known as the “borrowed boat” strategy, has been a fixture for years. China is supporting an increasing number of local chambers of commerce in the United States with direct ties to CCP officials. Meanwhile, China has increased its efforts “to pressure, co-opt, and sometimes even coerce foreign corporations with the aim of influencing politics in their home countries.” The list goes on. And on. Chinese officials know that only President Trump stands in the way of China’s relentless advance. No wonder China prefers Biden and will do whatever it can to jeopardize Trump’s prospects of re-election.
William R. Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said: “We assess that China prefers that President Trump—whom Beijing sees as unpredictable—does not win reelection. China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States…[I]ts public rhetoric over the past few months has grown increasingly critical of the current Administration’s COVID-19 response, closure of China’s Houston Consulate, and actions on other issues.”
Tyler O’Neil points out in PJ Media that Joe Biden’s son Hunter has “raked in cash from lucrative business deals in China”—a well-known fact by now, that Biden père assures us the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and are “not competition for us,” that Biden “went soft on the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in the South China Sea,” and that President Trump’s resolute response to an unscrupulous regime’s threat of domestic destabilization amounts to “casual racism and regular xenophobia.”
In the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, given Trump’s actions against Chinese spying efforts and his move against the popular Chinese-owned app TikTok, it’s clear that the U.S. is “no longer tolerating their misbehavior and the risk they’re creating to the United States. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone that they’d prefer a president that didn’t take that approach.”
Biden seems to believe that his election would persuade China to “change its behavior,” that is, if one can make any sense of Biden’s verbal porridge. More likely it will smooth the way to increasing Chinese influence in American politics, business, culture, and education while enabling its imperialist ambitions on a global scale. A vote for Biden is a vote for selling rope. It is a vote for Xi Jinping and, on a sobering note, it is a vote for the nation from which the next pandemic is likely to emerge.
It comes down to this. Will it be Manifest Destiny or the Mandate of Heaven? Do we want a Shining City on the Hill or do we want the Great Hall of the People that sits on the western edge of Tiananmen Square? The time to decide is at hand.
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David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing, 2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
Autonomous Zones Are Not Autonomous
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