As the world looks with increasing suspicion at China and its Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime, there doesn’t seem to be much consideration given yet to how the SARS-CoV-2 virus not only could have been developed there so openly and yet at the same time with so little outside attention or concern. The natural accompanying question, likewise absent from public discourse, is how the Chinese people have come to be ruled by such an utterly amoral and tyrannical regime that could unleash this deadly pandemic on the world.
This is the first of a series of articles in which we will attempt to address these questions and more. They matter a great deal because both the CCP regime and its massive offensive, non-traditional, unrestricted Biological Weapons (BW) program continue today essentially unopposed—posing an ongoing and deadly threat to the entire world population.
The first thing to say is that the Chinese people are a great and mighty civilization, with a history that spans many thousands of years. This analysis in no way is meant to demean the accomplishments and brilliance of millions of Chinese, but only to reach some kind of understanding about what has taken hold in the Middle Kingdom these last decades and why. If we of the rest of the free world successfully are to resist being “assimilated” (as David Goldman put it in his 2020 book, “You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World”), and successfully to defend a democratic, liberal, consent-of-the-governed, representative-style of governance, we badly need to explore these questions—and quickly.
While many brilliant authors, including Gordon Chang, Bill Gertz, Newt Gingrich, David Goldman, Stephen Mosher, Michael Pillsbury, Gen. (ret.) Robert Spalding and more have written insightfully about China in recent years, we might begin our own review by looking back a bit farther in history. Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” remains the most important, as well as the famous military treatise of its kind in at least the last couple thousand years. Dating to around the 5th century BCE during what is called the “Late Spring and Autumn Period” of Chinese history, the work is a kind of military manual that presents a set of skills necessary to waging successful warfare.
Although “Art of War” runs through a whole set of troop maneuvers, command techniques, and weaponry, its true brilliance lies in instruction for how to avoid kinetic conflict in the first place by outwitting the enemy. Cunning, deceit, and psychological manipulation are all explained as the terrain on which the actual battle may be won or lost before kinetic conflict even begins. The ancient Chinese board game of Wei Qi (or sometimes “Go” in Japanese) illustrates these concepts perfectly. Wei Qi is played by two opponents, each with a set of stones, one black, one white. The objective is to surround and control more “territory” on the board than the other player through a series of strategic moves with the stones. Bishops, rooks, and castles are not knocked off the playing board, but rather the competition ebbs and flows with the movement of the stones in a fluid, but very calculated, way.
China’s history is replete with epic struggles among ruthless warlords, each trying to conquer and dominate the warlords, populations, and territory around him. The “rules” of their warfare were essentially non-existent: absent any moral or ethical code of behavior, faith-based or otherwise, the most barbarous and cunning among them usually emerged victoriously.
The lack of any sort of indigenous religion among the majority of the Chinese population (outside faiths like Buddhism and Christianity aside) is not a modern phenomenon of the CCP. There has never been a faith-based moral code among the vast majority of the Han Chinese people nor the sort of beliefs that in other societies serve at least somewhat to constrain the most savage behavior towards enemies or even one’s own people. In China, it’s always been a Hobbesian world and remains so today. Tyranny, an utter lack of individual liberty, and rampant human rights abuses define life there.
The Qin Dynasty at the end of the 3rd century BCE was the first dynasty that unified China in a centralized regime. From then onward, the pattern of subordination to a single authority continued in subsequent dynasties and to the current day. The concept of “Ding yu yi zun” derives from a Chinese proverb found in the tomb of Sima Qian, a Grand Historian of the Han Dynasty period of Chinese history (202 BCE – 220 CE). The proverb says, “Now that the Emperor rules all under Heaven, questions of right and wrong should be settled by the highest authority”. From about the 5th century BCE, orthodox Confucian mores also have contributed to the culture of unquestioning obedience with respect, leaving no space for individual freedom. Notably, today’s ruler of China, Xi Jinping himself, began to use the “Ding yu yi zun” reference in July 2018 when, at a national-level meeting of the CCP’s Organization Department, he said that “The Party center is the brains and hub (of the CCP); the Party center must have ‘ding yu yi zun’ (‘paramount authority’) and the final say” over matters.
Something of a contrast might be attempted with pre-Revolutionary Russia, for example, where Orthodox Christianity exerted perhaps a modicum of influence, and where the Russians were fending off invasions as often as seeking conquest abroad. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, though, as atheistic communism took hold, the Orthodox Church became a front for extending regime power. The export of communism to China and Mao Tse Tung followed, and today, Moscow and Beijing are “strategic partners, cooperating diplomatically, militarily, and technologically—the U.S. in their nuclear crosshairs,” according to Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, writing in a recent piece.
Another common feature of the regimes that dominate these two communist powers is an absence of boundaries between the civilian and military spheres. In China, this means that the CCP and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) are unified in wielding unchecked power.
This is how China’s massive offensive, non-traditional, unrestricted BW program that fuses civilian and military labs and research facilities across the country functions. It is how the deliberate development of dangerous pathogens in those labs with the explicit intent that they be used against world populations can be the accepted, integral element of military strategy that it is. That Beijing has been a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since 1973 matters little to a regime that disdains Western and even international legal norms. Biotechnology by contrast with expensive, advanced military weapons systems is low-cost, easier to conceal or explain away, and “efficient” on a deadly, global scale. Further, the BWC really has no serious enforcement mechanism, aside from taking complaints to the UN Security Council (where China has veto power). In this way, China’s unrestricted bioweapons program is perfect for its civilian-military fusion model.
Not that we haven’t been warned. In 1999, the English language version of “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America” was published. Written as a Master’s degree thesis by two Chinese colonels in the PLA, “Unrestricted Warfare” explicitly lists over two dozen varieties of “methods of operation”. Among these are Atomic warfare, Diplomatic warfare, Financial warfare, Network warfare, Ecological warfare, Electronic warfare, and yes, Bio-chemical warfare. This CCP-PLA regime makes little effort to hide its murderous intentions. In September 2019, strategic analyst and blogger Jeff Nyquist published “The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian”. Delivered to high-level CCP officials in about 2003, the speech by the then-Chinese Defense Minister explained in open (and terrifying) terms the Chinese regime’s long-term plan for revival and a return to what the CCP believes its rightful role as hegemon of the entire world. The General explicitly described the CCP use of biological weapons to depopulate the United States as a primary means to achieve that hegemony.
We in the West have paid far too little attention to these red flag warnings. This and the articles to come will attempt to make up for that. Part 2 will begin to describe the scope of China’s offensive, unrestricted Biological Weapons program.
This column was originally published at America Out Loud
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
