As always Qiao collective delivers a deeply researched explainer that synthesizes dozens of books and probably the equivalent of hundreds of lectures into one article that can be read in under an hour.
Interesting excerpts:
In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in “multi-domain” “hybrid warfare” with China. This is warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement. On the ground this involves:
- Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary & secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain); attacks on Ant Financial's IPO.
- Legal Warfare, or “lawfare,” including over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30 trillion in “Covid damages”; the long arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive
- Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change.
- Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot”), the use of air bases in Taiwan for military surveillance, and plans to station intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery. [2]
- Civil Subversion: color revolution, urban terror, destabilization and delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization & training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities.
- Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the U.S. (currently 2700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional” “collectors" and “spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.
- Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information warfare. The stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing independent Hong Kong,” are part of this information warfare.
Why The U.S. Is At War: Culture shock and the challenge to supremacy
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region to generate global power…. The U.S. must…protect a new order that [convinces] potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must…discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. - Marshall’s protégé, Paul Wolfowitz in a 1992 defense planning document
I don't know that I agree with the idea we're actually prepping to enter a hot war with China. I do know that there are powerful elements who want to and distressingly powerful elements who would gladly press the button, send the nukes and end the world rather than accept the complete collapse of US power and who may do so either with their backs up against the wall as a revenge strike or foolishly thinking they can use nuclear weapons in a decapitating first strike as part of a larger attack on China where they could come out ahead or to paraphrase the general from Dr Strangelove "Mr. President there is a very good chance if we launch all we have right now we can catch them with their pants down and suffer minimal and acceptable casualties on our side." Remember the US is the only major power not to renounce the use of nuclear weapons as a first strike and reserves the right to use them in order to even the playing field against overwhelming conventional forces.
i think its gonna be a hybrid war, with the US funding terrorist groups in China while waging diplomatic, cybernetic and economic warfare, like Russia vs Ukraine, not a hot war
Well as noted here that's already active. I guess the thinking is if this fails the US may attempt to provoke them into a conflict situation, with the idea that a victory over them would bring allies and others back into their sphere of influence out of fear and also cow China because in such a situation the US would be positioned to crash their economy with a naval blockade and could demand all kinds of things in exchange for not doing that. Anyways the issue is western public sentiment is not necessary for information/cyber warfare, it isn't necessary for academic warfare necessarily, it isn't necessary for civil subversion necessarily (not at the heights they've ratcheted it up to, westerners have long accepted China as "totalitarian" and thus "democracy" initiatives inside them as things the public supports, but this with Xin'jiang, HK, Tibet, Outer Mongolia, etc is a whole new level), nor for diplomatic warfare. It helps for the economic warfare but what's worrying is it is a necessary precondition for actual warfare. Go to reddit, see people demanding we attack China, comparing them to Nazi Germany with the Jews and saying we have moral duty to stop them as we did the Nazis, people eager themselves to go and fight China, people saying we should nuke them. The issue is once you turn the western public up like this with this false moral righteousness you can't just dial it back down past a certain point, the people themselves will crusade for and demand (under the auspices of human rights) of their leaders stronger and stronger actions, they'll itch for war with China and increasing this means tense military encounters could quickly spiral out of control into open war with the citizenry of the west wooping and cheering for it.
The US hated the Soviet Union, they taught their citizens to hate the Soviet Union. But for the most part they didn't engage in these big atrocity propaganda pushes as far as I know. Oh sure they said that back in the 30s muh Kulaks and such and muh Stalin killed millions. But they were not pushing and agitating the public saying "USSR is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions right fucking now". They said they were evil, that they imprisoned and repressed political "dissidents", that they brutalized their population with harsh conditions and so on and the US has long said that about China and for a long time much of the public has shrugged, said "that sucks bro, oh well, glad I wasn't born there" and little more. This is something frankly more.
