While the US political world focuses on Joe Biden’s post-debate resignation furore and disgraced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle refuses to answer questions about the assassination attempt on President Trump, the key question is not which faceless White House official is in charge, but who is keeping an eye on Xi Jinping.
The current situation in China closely resembles the Korean crisis of the fall of 1950. Before its massive human wave invasion in October and early November, China infiltrated secretly and then conducted a series of probes in what was called the “first phase offensive.”
With any luck, these actions may be able to restrain Xi Jinping until the Biden crisis is over and delay a possible Chinese lurch into war.
Washington sat back and refused General Douglas MacArthur’s request to bomb Chinese troop concentrations on the Yalu River. China gauged the U.S. reaction and set a trap.
As winter approached, about 500,000 Chinese poured over the mountains. Because U.S. air forces were barred from invading China to destroy rear areas and the vital Yalu River bridges, a massive Chinese human naval assault forced U.S. and UN forces across the 38th Parallel and into Seoul. It took another two and a half years to retake the 38th Parallel and sign an armistice. And we’re still there.
These “probing attacks” foreshadowed the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to use all of its military power to start a war with the United States on the Korean Peninsula, the only place China could operate at the time.
Today, the United States may be in a similar situation, but the stakes are much higher: China’s relative power and strategic influence are far greater than they were nearly 75 years ago, and they now potentially extend across the Pacific Ocean to U.S. shores.
We believe Joe Biden’s domestic political problems and the resulting national security turmoil have not gone unnoticed by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
In the past few weeks, China’s Coast Guard has clashed with its Philippine counterpart, blockaded Philippine shallow waters bases, detained Taiwanese fishing boats and their crews, aggressively prowled the uninhabited Japanese islands, and blatantly violated Taiwan’s airspace and territorial waters.
Faced with these incidents, Monday’s Pentagon briefing It was about China… Arctic!
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks stood on a wooden box to overlook the podium and delivered the briefing with the urgency of a bored schoolteacher handing out math homework.
China will become more aggressive
Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, China’s broader actions in the region are being ignored, much like Washington ignored Chinese surveys on the Korean border in 1950. This ignorance is particularly worrying given the current political turmoil in the US caused by Biden’s “difficulties.”
Recall that in 2013, Xi Jinping stated that “Western constitutional government, universal values, civil society, and journalism are false ideological trends.” He also claimed that China will become the world’s number one military and economic power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In other words, China aims to become the new global hegemon.
As Practice Continue his DictatorshipHe is using China’s military might to get his way, and Hong Kong is a perfect example.
In 2023, Xi Jinping detailed China’s need to meet world-class military standards by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army before World War II. Xi also spoke of accelerating the construction of a “strong system of powerful strategic forces” and of “informationization” (i.e. artificial intelligence) to “enhance the presence of combat forces in new areas and with new qualities, and promote combat-focused military training.”
We believe that Xi Jinping’s stance could ultimately lead to war with the U.S. Please see our website for more information. Winning the Peer Wars.
While Xi Jinping’s long-term goals are clear, he may also take opportunistic short-term actions between now and his inauguration in January. These actions short of war with the United States could include occupying and holding some of the disputed waters or islands, actively supplying munitions to Russia, and using Chinese personnel for non-combat roles to keep Russian soldiers out of the fight.
Xi Jinping could also enlist the more than 50,000 military-age Chinese men living illegally in the United States to engage in low-level nuisance attacks such as tampering with railroad switches, sabotaging pipelines, and destroying transformers. He could also launch nuisance cyberattacks to probe U.S. weaknesses while maintaining deniability, especially amid the chaos created by the Biden Administration’s problems.
Strategic Paralysis
In late February, the House Select Committee on the Communist Party of China held a hearing exposing the seriousness of the current Chinese cybersecurity threat to the United States. The overall findings were alarming, not because of China’s apparent capabilities or long-standing hacking operations, but because the five senior U.S. government officials were isolated by their respective organizations, which made it difficult for them to understand the broader organizational implications of the findings. They were shortsighted in their understanding of the larger Chinese threat, and therefore ill-prepared for the realities of 21st-century warfare against a peer competitor fixated on war through “strategic paralysis.”
This concept of strategic paralysis was detailed in the seminal book on China’s strategic goals and methods, “Unrestricted Warfare,” written by then-Colonel Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangrun in 1999. The book outlined a decades-long plan to wage a slow, gradual war against U.S. diplomatic, information, military and economic strengths until China was strong enough to face the U.S. in an equal conflict.
In retrospect, “unrestricted warfare” is exactly what China has been doing for a quarter century, and it aims to end it in 2049, or sooner. We’ve offered suggestions for countering Xi Jinping’s plan in the long term at Winning Peer Wars, but here are some recommendations for the coming months:
Immediately maximize reconnaissance activities by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
Declassify and release as open source sensitive information about Chinese military operations.
Opening up U.S. ships, aircraft, and bases to global media to ensure comprehensive coverage in the Indo-Pacific region.
Conduct significant U.S. Air Force and Navy visits to the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and other friendly nations.
With any luck, these actions may be able to restrain President Xi Jinping until the Biden crisis is over, delaying a possible Chinese escalation into war.
