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September 15 - October 12, 2018
Employing economic carrots and sticks
Applying indirect pressure via proxies
Conducting cyberattacks and physical assaults
in the military context the Assassin’s Mace refers to a set of asymmetric weapons that allow an inferior power to defeat a seemingly superior adversary by striking at an enemy’s weakest point.
China was far less interested in conventional force projection than it was concerned with countering the American threat.
As China’s leaders see it, America has sought to dominate China since at least the time of Abraham Lincoln.
China’s Seven Fears are as follows:
America’s war plan is to blockade China.
America supports plundering China’s maritime resources
America may choke off China’s sea lines of communication
America seeks China’s territorial dismemberment.
America may assist rebels inside China.
America may foment riots, civil war, or terrorism inside China.
America threatens aircraft carrier strikes.
One perceived U.S. weakness is America’s reliance on high-tech information systems.
the People’s Liberation Army has sixteen spy units that “focus on cyber penetrations, cyber espionage, and electronic warfare.”
“China has downloaded 10 to 20 terabytes of data” from a Pentagon computer network.
cyber intruders had accessed more than twenty-four American weapons system designs, including “the Patriot missile system, the Aegis missile defense system, the F/A-18 fighter, the V-22 Osprey multirole combat aircraft, and the Littoral Combat Ship.”
the United States depends too much on “information superhighways” that are vulnerable to attack by “electrical incapacitation systems” that could disrupt or destroy electrical power systems, civilian aviation systems, transportation networks, seaports, television broadcast stations, telecommunications systems, computer centers, factories, and businesses.
China’s development of Assassin’s Maces begins with weapons that can disable surveillance systems, land-based electronic infrastructure, or U.S. aircraft carriers. They include electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, which knock out all electronics over a wide area by replicating the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear explosion.
Imagine trying to fight World War III after computer viruses and weapons that emit EMPs and microwaves have incapacitated America’s computers, cell phones, and air traffic control centers on the home front, and the command-and-control mechanisms for fighters and smart bombs on the battlefield.
For two decades, China has been building a number of Assassin’s Mace weapons to destroy or incapacitate those satellites, including a land-based laser that would either blind American satellites or blow them up.
In the First Gulf War, the U.S. Navy used nineteen million gallons of oil a day and twenty times more ammunition than in the Korean War.
the United States’ Aegis missile defense system is “ineffective against these supersonic cruise missiles.”
Shkvals, which have a range of 7,500 yards and travel at the lightning speed of 230 miles per hour, can sink battle groups. The United States has “no known defense” against these torpedoes.
Beijing’s strategy is to be like the boxer who uses his knowledge of vital body points to knock out a bigger opponent.
For two decades, the Chinese have been building arrows designed to find a singular target—the Achilles’ heel of the United States.
An economic backwater in 1980, China now boasts the world’s second-largest economy, behind only the United States.
By 2014, roughly half of China’s economy would still be in the government’s hands, decades after the myth that capitalism had arrived.
“Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” popularized by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and in vogue at the time. According to Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the theory states that “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.”
Among the key messages China sent then were that the SOEs would be phased out, free market policies would be forthcoming, China’s currency would not be manipulated, China would not accumulate large trade surpluses, and America’s innovations and intellectual property would, of course, be respected. WTO membership requires all this.
Even in 2014, six hundred million Chinese farmers still do not own their land.
Although the United States, Europe, and Japan placed sanctions on China in the aftermath of Tiananmen, the World Bank was quietly assisting the Chinese.
In a country of 1.35 billion people, there are just twenty-nine banks owned by the central and local governments, thirty-four banks in Special Administrative Regions, and two privately owned banks.45 These sixty-five Chinese banks contrast with the approximately nine thousand privately owned banks in the United States.
Chinese leaders may wish to move slowly to avoid the worst of the Russian experience in the post-Soviet era—the selling of state industries to political cronies for pennies on the dollar, resulting in a small number of incredibly rich oligarchs running sclerotic companies unable to compete internationally.
10 to 30 percent of China’s GDP is founded on pirated and counterfeited products.
By 2050, China’s economy will be much larger than America’s—perhaps three times larger, according to some projections1—and the world could then be a unipolar one, with China as the global leader.
Stefan Halper of the University of Cambridge.30
!!!!!!
Since the 1980s, China has built ten thousand petrochemical plants along the Yangtze River and four thousand plants along the Yellow River.
in 20 percent of its rivers the water quality is too toxic to touch safely, let alone drink.
the wastewater that Chinese factories dump into rivers causes about sixty thousand premature deaths annually.
China’s cancer rates are still below those of the United States,
How can that be?
A core component of China’s successful growth strategy is acquiring, often through illegal means, foreign science and technology.
So dramatic is intellectual property (IP) piracy in China that a software company sold a single program in China and then received thirty million requests for an update.
China and several other Asian countries developed an organization that they viewed as a potential counter to NATO—the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO’s members are China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
the “Chinese dream” is for China to be the world’s only superpower—unrivaled economically, militarily, and culturally.
If accurate, his account implied that China’s surpassing America’s economy would occur within a decade.
Hu reportedly confided to his closest advisers that it is easier and cheaper to “buy” Taiwan than to conquer it.
It wasn’t until a trip to Beijing in the fall of 2013 that I realized how wrong we had been and how quickly China has mobilized to take advantage of America’s decline,
STEP 1—RECOGNIZE THE PROBLEM
