And geographically? Russia is poorly situated to present much of a threat to anybody outside Eastern Europe. Of course we have NATO allies that abut Russia, but Putin would have to be insane to even try to take one on unless he wanted to be annihilated in a nuclear fireball.

CHINA IS THE REAL THREAT

But China? Their military is growing in strength, they have a chokehold on key supply chains, and they have imperial aspirations along with a prime geographical location. The majority of world trade travels through waters near China, and they lay claim to one of the most strategically important islands in the world: Taiwan. China has not been satisfied with the status quo in world affairs, and they have the means to do something about it.

Today’s China is, ironically, a product of Western creation. When Nixon opened relations with China it was poor, politically divided, militarily weak, and an economic basket case. They, too, had nuclear weapons–although their arsenal was pitifully small. They only country they posed a significant threat to was Russia, who feared hoards of fanatical troops (at one point China stationed 1.5 million soldiers along the border) would storm across their southern border. The countries even came to blows in 1969. Both Vietnam and India were threatened by China, but the Chinese proved impotent to impose their will.

At the time of Nixon’s opening relations, America had nothing to fear from China. They posed no threat to the US, to Taiwan, or Japan. They just had no juice.

How times have changed. Over the years the US started using China as a manufacturing hub, building up their economy to the point where it now rivals the US. We depend upon China for resources, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and even some modest amount of high tech components. Were trade with China shut down tomorrow, the world economy would grind to a halt. Russia’s isolation during the Ukraine war has caused disruptions, especially in Europe, but isolating China would devastate the world economy.

The Chinese military has also transformed. Decades ago they relied of huge conscript armies and their strategy amounted to little more than using troops as cannon fodder–hoping to overwhelm their opponents by sheer force of numbers. In the modern world this strategy is nearly worthless, and the Chinese learned the lesson well.

They have professionalized their military, built up a formidable conventional missile force that threatens our navy, Taiwan, Japan, and our air force. Their Anti-Access Area-denial strategy is smart, dangerous to opponents, and threatens to give them control over vast swaths of both territory and trade routes. Already they are a regional superpower rivaling the US, and their regional dominance even threatens our worldwide military hegemony. We couldn’t defend against China and simultaneously conduct wars elsewhere.

Unlike Russia, they are not a paper tiger. When our military war games out battles with China we can lose, or force a stalemate at best. The latest CSIS war game shows that the US could lose between 500-1000 fighter jets, and as much as our entire fleet if we decided to help Taiwan rebuff an invasion. It would be a world historic disaster for the US, and leave us weakened or defenseless in other potential conflicts.

If China’s economic and military threats were the only ones we faced it would be bad enough, but that isn’t the case at all. In fact the military threat is merely an adjunct to other potentially greater problems: the infiltration of our society, our academic institutions, and our governments with Chinese influence. Necessarily my discussion here will be vastly incomplete, but it should give you an overview of the problems we face dealing with the Chinese.

Let’s take these threats one by one:

CHINESE INFILTRATION OF WESTERN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

China is no longer just a big market. It is also a wealthy one, with arguably the largest middle class in the world. Those millions of consumers are a juicy target market and our cultural creators–Hollywood, professional sports, media and news companies, and any other high value cultural institution wants a cut of the money. That means they are willing to kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party is more than willing to make demands on anybody who wants access to their markets.

That distorts our view of China. It’s not that information about the evil Chinese policies don’t filter through. They do. Many of us are aware of them. But it does mean that the spin we are given is far more China friendly than it otherwise would be.

One example among many, many others: The NBA has extensive interests in China, and owners have more than $10 billion invested in the country. That’s a lot to lose, and they are unwilling to risk it. So they keep mum, and they pressure their players to keep mum too. Lots of pressure. Even criticizing China is essentially forbidden by the League.

Hollywood obviously has similar conflicts of interest, and more often than not will do China’s bidding. In many cases our entertainment industry has become a silent partner with the Chinese government, which can shape how they are portrayed to the wider world. The near alliance between China and our entertainment industry is a huge threat in and of itself.

CHINESE INFLUENCE IN ACADEMIA

Not to put too fine a point on it, but China has bought huge swathes of our academic elite and institutions. They have flooded the zone with money, putting “Confucious Institutes” throughout the US and the Western World. The Heritage Foundation has been warning about this threat for a while now, and the message has been heard and occasional heeded. But hardly enough. Heritage’s key takeaways:

• Founded in 2004, the Confucius Institutes are a global phenomenon, enrolling more than nine million students at 525 institutes in 146 countries and regions.
• But if they are found guilty of incorrect classroom content or publications, their families in China are threatened, and they are banished from returning to China.
• The Biden White House should talk to FBI Director Wray, who takes the Institutes very seriously.

It is not just conservatives who recognize the threat posed by China’s expansion into Western Academia:

When the Left and the Right agree on something in these disputatious times, the wise man will want to know what it is. And what has brought these warring factions together, however briefly? The Confucius Institutes that dot American campuses.

The progressive New Republic magazine and the conservative National Association of Scholars (NAS) both warn that the Institutes are not the innocent cultural centers offering Chinese language instruction they pretend to be. They are, rather, a key stratagem of China’s “soft war” against America, crafted, in the words of NAS senior researcher Rachelle Peterson, to “teach political lessons that unduly favor China.”

Writing in the New Republic, Isaac Stone Fish referred to “an epidemic of self-censorship at U.S universities” that funnels students away from “topics likely to offend the Chinese Communist Party.” Topics like the disastrous Great Leap Forward from 1958-1962 that enforced collectivization in the towns and countryside and resulted in the deaths of 30 to 50 million Chinese.

China’s use of “hard power,” such as its aggressive weapons buildup, its suppression of free speech and assembly in Hong Kong and throughout the mainland, its stern warnings that Taiwan must not chart an independent course, and its colonization of the South China Sea, draws the headlines and attracts the attention of policymakers. Meanwhile Confucius Institutes, financed by the Chinese government and supervised by the Chinese Communist Party, are molding attitudes about China, painting an idyllic portrait in which Mao Zedong is a revolutionary hero and the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened. That the Confucius Institutes are instruments of propaganda was confirmed by Li Changchun, the head of propaganda for the CCP, who boasted that the Institutes were “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup.”

Academic institutions advertise themselves as places where the search for truth is the overriding value. Considerations such as vast sums of money, the continued flow of customers (students), and promise of power and prestige mean little compared to searching for and telling the truth.

That’s crap. Money talks.

Founded in 2004, the Confucius Institutes are a global phenomenon, enrolling more than nine million students at 525 institutes in 146 countries and regions. More than 100 institutes have opened in the United States, including at prestigious universities such as Columbia and Stanford. They are mostly staffed and funded by an agency of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Education—the Office of Chinese Languages Council International, or Hanban. The Hanban also operates Confucius Classrooms in an estimated 500 primary and secondary schools in the United States.

A 243-page NAS report described in detail the many strings attached to the goodies offered by Confucius Institutes:

Intellectual freedom. Chinese teachers—hired, paid by and accountable to the Communist Chinese government—are pressured to avoid “sensitive” topics like the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Cultural Revolution.

Transparency. Contracts between American universities and the Hanban are rarely made public. One university went so far as to forbid Rachelle Peterson from visiting their campus as part of her research.

Entanglement. Confucius Institutes cover all the expenses of classes and also offer scholarships to American students to study abroad. With such financial incentives, universities find it difficult to criticize Chinese policies like its genocidal treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Western China.

Soft power. Confucius Institutes avoid discussing China’s widespread human-rights abuses and present Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed Chinese territories. As a result, writes Peterson, the institutes “develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country”—and a major adversary. Confucius Institutes are a textbook example of soft power that causes universities in receipt of Chinese largesse to stay silent about controversial subjects like China’s use of forced labor to pick cotton, a 21^st century variation of the slavery of the ante-bellum South.

They are literally in our public school classrooms propagandizing students, at the invitation of our school officials. The draw of free money is too great to ignore.

CHINESE INFLUENCE ON OUR GOVERNMENT

You have already heard about the Biden family’s ties to China. A great deal of wealth has flowed into their pockets through the influence peddling of Hunter Biden. But that is mere the tip of the iceberg.

Accepting Chinese dollars (or the promise of future rewards for defending Chinese interests) is a bipartisan affair. The huge sums of money available to people willing to sell their souls and sell out their country for money is nearly endless. So endless, in fact, that I will direct you to Peter Schwietzer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. 

Breitbart has a great article taking down 20 Republicans who Schweitzer shows or at least argues have sold out to China. I even know or have met a couple of them myself. Unsurprisingly most of them are or have ties to the Bush family (George H.W. Bush was Ambassador to China under Nixon), but the list is large. Democrats have their own list of shame.

It doesn’t take a prodigious memory to recall how viciously Donald Trump was attacked when he identified China as a serious adversary and took action. (Not enough action, in my view, but a good start). The Establishment™ has done very well for itself by allying with China, and as in so many things Trump rocked the boat. It was one of the many reasons he was reviled in the Swamp.

CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE INFILTRATION

Again the list of consequences of the Chinese infiltration is endless, and our time together is not. So I will concentrate on a few examples.

One example: Scientists at America’s top nuclear lab were recruited by China to design missiles and drones, from NBC News last month.

At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked on government-sponsored research at the U.S.’s foremost national security laboratory over the last two decades have been recruited to do scientific work in China — some of which helped advance military technology that threatens American national security — according to a new private intelligence report obtained by NBC News.

The report, by Strider Technologies, describes what it calls a systemic effort by the government of China to place Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were first developed.

Many of the scientists were later lured back to China to help make advances in such technologies as deep-earth-penetrating warheads, hypersonic missiles, quiet submarines and drones, according to the report.

Scientists were paid as much as $1 million through participation in Chinese government “talent programs,” which are designed to recruit Chinese scientists to return to China. Such talent programs have long been identified as a source of concern, but U.S. officials said they had not previously seen an unclassified report that described the phenomenon in such detail, naming specific scientists and the projects they have worked on.

The talent transfer “poses a direct threat to U.S. national security,” said Greg Levesque, a co-founder of Strider and the lead author of the report. “China is playing a game that we are not prepared for, and we need to really begin to mobilize.”

During the Cold War the United States would never have recruited Russians who had been educated in the US at the expense of the Russian government to work in US national security labs. It would have been inconceivable. Yet China has such influence in academic and government circles that it has become normal. So normal, in fact, that at least 154 of these scientists who were placed into sensitive national security positions could just fly back to China to transfer knowledge and technology to a US adversary with no consequences.

Another example, outside the US but in the same vein: Red Alert: Former British Military Pilots Are Training China’s Pilots To Fight The West from Forbes.

British intelligence has issued a rare “threat alert” stemming from Chinese recruitment of approximately 30 former U.K. fighter and helicopter pilots to provide adversary training to Chinese military pilots. As dismaying as this news is, the fact that Britain has no legal code explicitly banning its pilots from providing training to China is jolting.

Reports of the recruitment of British pilots emerged Monday. According to The Guardian, headhunters started courting active and former RAF pilots in 2019. The effort is believed to have expanded with the end of COVID restrictions, and those targeted include pilots from other western countries.

Have former U.S. military pilots have been similarly recruited by China?

According to a U.S. Air Force official speaking on background, the service is “not aware” of a similar issue with former U.S. pilots though it was notified of the U.K. threat alert in advance. The broader Pentagon, the Navy and Marine Corps have not yet responded to the question but this article will be updated if they do.

China has also been recruiting military pilots from other countries. Australia is investigating whether or not some of their pilots have done the same thing. Canada too.

The Department of National Defence said it’s investigating whether former Canadian fighter pilots are helping the Chinese military after reports in Britain and Australia that Beijing was recruiting Westerners to train its own air force.

The British government announced this week it was taking steps to stop China trying to recruit serving and former British military pilots to train the Chinese armed forces.

“We are taking decisive steps to stop Chinese recruitment schemes attempting to headhunt serving and former U.K. Armed Forces pilots to train People’s Liberation Army personnel in the People’s Republic of China,” Britain’s Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

The BBC, among other British media outlets, reported on Tuesday that up to 30 former military pilots had gone to train members of China’s People’s Liberation Army. The Australian newspaper reported that Australians were among this group of pilots and the Daily Mail said Canadians were also being recruited.

The British and Australian governments have said they’re investigating.

Daniel Le Bouthillier, head of media relations at the Department of National Defence, said Ottawa is now probing the matter too.

“We are aware of these reports, and we are looking into this further with federal partners,” Mr. Le Bouthillier said, noting that Canadian military veterans are still bound by secrecy commitments after they leave the Canadian Armed Forces.’

One contributor to this trend: woke policies where militaries have made clear they want to diversify their pilot ranks, leaving experienced pilots on the sidelines. Some of these sought lucrative work in China.

I could go and on with examples, but these make the point. China is not only our adversary–a clear danger to our national security–it is also far too influential within the West for our own good.

Focusing our ire on Russia may be the right thing right now, but our attention and effort shouldn’t be directed by ire as much as the threat. Punishing Russia for its aggression is timely, but in the grand scheme of things far less important than kneecapping China’s power before it is too late.