The title, Deceiving the Sky, comes from an ancient Chinese strategy used by generals to win battles called “Deceive the sky to cross the ocean.” According to legend, an emperor was hesitant to launch a military campaign against neighboring Koguryo, now Korea. So one of his generals convinced the emperor to go to dinner at the home of a wealthy peasant. As the emperor entered the house for the meal, the residence moved. The emperor had been tricked onto a boat headed for battle across the sea. Rather than disembark, he ordered the military campaign to advance, and the battle was won. The legend later became the first strategy listed in the classic Thirty-Six Stratagems, used by the Chinese for centuries as a guide to politics and war. For Chinese Communist leaders, deceiving the sky is integral to masking true goals and intentions—first to achieve regional hegemony and ultimately world domination under the boot of the Communist Party of China. According to the strategy, a leader’s determination to win in war should be so unrelenting that even the emperor, viewed in Chinese culture as the Son of Heaven or the Sky, can be deceived. For China today, the strategy reflects the Marxist maxim that the ends justify the means. Beijing practices strategic deception known in the ancient formula as using false objectives to facilitate true objectives. It is another way of describing the Communist strategy of using all means warfare against the United States—the sole obstacle to China crossing the ocean and achieving the rightful place as the most powerful state in the world.

Under President Bill Clinton, technology transferred to China prevented Chinese strategic missiles from blowing up on the launch pad and assisted with technology to launch multiple satellites that now sits atop multi-warhead nuclear missiles. Clinton foolishly extolled the liberating impact of sharing of internet technology with China. A wired China, he noted, would be a democratizing force, and he once joked that China trying to control the internet would be “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” Twenty years later, China has nailed Jell-O to the wall and is on the verge of producing unprecedented high-technology totalitarianism that not only controls the internet but may soon corner world markets for advanced technologies of the future, including the revolutionary high-speed 5G telecommunications that will fuel both military power and predatory mercantilism. Things grew worse under the administration of President Barack Obama. By 2016, the White House went so far in appeasing China that the White House issued an order prohibiting all officials from publicly talking about military and other threats from China. Under Obama, American security was damaged by ignoring and then covering up China’s massive theft of American technology. Abroad, inaction by Obama facilitated the Chinese domination over the strategic South China Sea. After reclaiming 3,200 acres of new islands, China deployed advanced anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles on the island in what the CIA described as China’s Crimea, a stealth takeover similar to the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s peninsula in 2014.

Beginning in 2017, Trump began to reverse public and government misunderstandings about the threats from China and the Chinese drive for global supremacy. He was the first president since the Communists came to power in 1949 to directly confront Beijing—by pushing back against decades of unfair trade and technology practices.

The future of the American dream of freedom, prosperity, and individual liberty must be preserved by winning this global confrontation with Communist China.

The reluctance to call out China was motivated by the often-quoted canard of Joseph Nye, the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It was Nye who led the academic community and their cousins in the US policy and intelligence communities, who put forth the noxious argument called the self-fulfilling prophecy toward China. Call out China, he argued, for its quasi-totalitarian communist system, its support for rogue states, its human rights abuses, and its use of lies and deception that are the main feature of that system, and the world will create a China threat. “If you treat China as an enemy, it will become an enemy,” said Nye, who was assistant secretary of defense in the mid-1990s. The catchphrase morphed into decades-long policies and strategies that only recently have been repudiated for having contributed to the rise of the most significant ideological and strategic threat since the Soviet Union was created in 1922 under Vladimir Lenin.

Xi seems to have shelved the China Dream after the major Communist meeting called the 19th Party Congress in October 2017. It was during the congress that Xi announced he was eliminating the age limit on Chinese leaders and that he, in effect, would be supreme leader for life. In the forty years since the ruinous rule of Mao Zedong and his personality cult, Xi had set China on course for a second personality cult. After the congress, Xi’s ideology was enshrined in the PRC Constitution as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It replaced the China Dream on propaganda banners, billboards, in schools, in newspapers, on state-controlled television, and throughout the online community and social media. Xi Jinping Thought had arrived with all the ideological appeal of Mao’s communistic zeal but with new reach to the masses through electronic media.

Rather than provide the would-be defector with protection, Wang’s asylum appeal was rejected by the Obama administration. The White House of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were horrified Wang had sought to defect days before the visit to the United States by Xi Jinping, then–vice president and the expected successor to Hu Jintao as the supreme leader in China.

The case of would-be defector Wang Lijun was among the most stunning intelligence failures in decades and reflected the culmination of the views of pro-China policymakers and intelligence officials who insisted China was not a threat to the United States and would never become one. Potentially one of the most valuable defectors, with unprecedented knowledge about the inner workings of the Communist Party of China, its corruption, and its power centers, was lost.

For the first time, the inaccurate and misleading judgments and assessments, promoted by intelligence analysts’ groupthink throughout government on China, that there were no opposing factions inside the Chinese Communist Party leadership were exposed. The arrest of Bo Xilai proved them wrong. Reports of such factionalism were ignored or downplayed for more than a decade as a result of the influence of pro-China analysts and academics who refused to consider alternative theories to the idea of a monolithic power structure.

The pro-China policies of both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations created a dangerous precedent of conciliatory policies that resulted in the failure to gain insights into the leadership that could have been provided by the defection of Wang. Intelligence blindness on China was further damaged by the curtailment of intelligence collection operations in China under Obama over concerns about high-risk spying activities upsetting relations.

Role of pro business lobbyist ?

Intelligence failures related to Chinese factionalism uncovered by the Bo Xilai affair were not the first time the intelligence community was faulted for its bad work on China. As I disclosed in my book, The Failure Factory, in 2008, intelligence on China was so poorly produced that a report was done by an outside contractor that ripped the agencies for missing a series of military developments by China. The report was produced by the firm Centra Technologies and has remained classified since its 2005 internal publication. It concluded that American intelligence analysts had missed more than a dozen Chinese military developments over a period of nearly a decade in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These missed military systems that surprised US intelligence agencies included a new long-range cruise missile; a new warship outfitted with a stolen Chinese version of the US Aegis battle management system technology; a new attack submarine called the “Yuan-class,” which was unknown to US intelligence until after photos of the vessel appeared on the internet; new precision-guided munitions, including new air-to-ground missiles and new, more accurate warheads; anti-ship ballistic missiles capable of striking US ships and aircraft carriers at sea; and importation of advanced Russian arms.

Until the 2013 microsatellite launch, defense and intelligence officials mainly worried about China’s kinetic satellite attack capability demonstrated by the 2007 test, and ones disguised as missile defense tests years later. A new and stealthier, and thus difficult to attribute, attack capability was revealed in the Shiyan-7. “The retractable arm can be used for a number of things—to gouge, knock off course, or grab passing satellites,” the official said. However, the Chinese, through tightly controlled state media, put out disinformation that the three microsatellites were merely experiments in satellite maintenance and debris collection. The US official scoffed at the explanation: “This was an ASAT test.” The Chinese were practicing with their orbiting killer satellites that can intercept and either damage or destroy target satellites.

At the time of the space experiment, the Obama administration deliberately hid the weapons aspect of the test from the public, as part of that administration’s penchant for not publicly discussing such foreign threats to American security. “There is a Star Wars threat to our satellites,” the official told me, adding that the Obama administration did not want the American people to know about it because it “would require plussing up defense budgets” to counter the space warfare program.

Doug Loverro, former deputy assistant defense secretary for space policy, testified to Congress that US military forces are ill-prepared for space warfare. “We have a satcom jamming threat today,” he stated in 2018. “Today if we went to war in the Pacific, our Pacom commander would be hard-pressed to communicate, and yet we have nothing on the books until about 2027 to solve that problem for him. And by that time, the adversary will have gone through two or three generations of his capability.”10

PoisonIvy is well known in international hacker circles as the favored software of the PLA. It is a remote access tool (RAT) and, while not the most advanced software on the international hacker black market, would turn out to be 3PLA’s extraordinarily effective cyber intelligence-gathering weapon. The reason PoisonIvy is so widely used is simple. All computers and networks using Microsoft Windows operating systems are easy prey. Once inside, the malware allows remote key logging, screen capturing, video capturing, massive transfers of files, password theft, system administration access, internet and data traffic relaying, and more. The email from the 3PLA officer seeking PoisonIvy cyber-spying software had been intercepted by the National Security Agency and would eventually lead to the arrest and conviction of a major Chinese cyber espionage actor named Su Bin, aka Stephen Su. The case of Su Bin would reveal for the first time the Chinese military’s relentless drive to steal American weapons know-how from defense contractors, like Boeing, to build up its forces for the ultimate defeat of “American imperialism”—the term used by China in many of its internal communications to describe the Communist Party of China’s main enemy, the United States.

Ultimately, 280 C-17 aircraft were built at an average cost of $202 million apiece. For the Chinese, the operation to steal the vital secrets was an intelligence coup of extraordinary magnitude. Not only did Chinese aircraft manufacturers save billions of dollars in development costs but those companies quickly incorporated the secrets in a new PLA transport, Y-20, that cost a mere 2.7 million RMB, or $393,201.98 for the entire cyber-spying operation.

The Chinese even went so far as to publicly boast about the F-35 theft. The Chinese Communist Party–affiliated Global Times newspaper reported in January 2014 that key technologies in the J-20 were obtained from the F-35.

According to a classified NSA briefing slide made public in 2013, NSA had detected more than 30,000 incidents related to Byzantine Hades, 500 of which were described as significant intrusions of Pentagon and other computer systems. More than 1,600 network computers were penetrated, compromising 600,000 user accounts and causing more than $100 million in damage to rebuild networks.

NSA is so proficient it has been able to spy on the spies, a practice the agency calls “fourth-party collection.” It involves secretly tapping into foreign intelligence systems used to spy on third parties and stealing the information they were collecting—all without them knowing. The agency calls the practice “I drink your milkshake,” taken from a scene in the film There Will Be Blood. In the movie, actor Daniel Day-Lewis’s character compares using a straw to drink someone’s milkshake to covertly drilling into a nearby oil field owned by someone else and secretly draining their underground reserves. NSA’s “milkshake” at the United Nations was its ability to scoop up some of the UN documents secretly stolen by the Chinese through Byzantine Raptor.

In 2011 a dissident Chinese news outlet, China Digital Times, published details of an official propaganda directive describing how the 50 Cent Army works and its key themes. According to the memo, a main target is countering the influence of democratic Taiwan.

These methods, according to the memo, include: 1.  To the extent possible, make America the target of criticism. Play down the existence of Taiwan. 2.  Do not directly confront [the idea of] democracy; rather, frame the argument in terms of “what kind of system can truly implement democracy.” 3.  To the extent possible, choose various examples in Western countries of violence and unreasonable circumstances to explain how democracy is not well-suited to capitalism. 4.  Use America’s and other countries’ interference in international affairs to explain how Western democracy is an invasion of other countries and [how the West] is forcibly pushing [on other countries] Western values. 5.  Use the bloody and tear-stained history of a [once] weak people [i.e., China] to stir up pro-Party and patriotic emotions. 6.  Increase the exposure that positive developments inside China receive; further accommodate the work of maintaining [social] stability.

For the Central Intelligence Agency, its disaster was disclosed in 2018. And the damage was, in a word, devastating. Beginning around 2010 and continuing through 2012, as many as thirty of the CIA’s recruited agents inside China and elsewhere were uncovered and either killed or imprisoned.

The influence operation against Guo was outlined in a special section of the 2017 annual report to Congress by the bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The report called the disinformation operation unprecedented in its ferocity. For publicly criticizing the Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign and revealing high-level CCP corruption, Chinese state-run media labeled Guo a “criminal suspect”—without producing any evidence or formal charges as was done for other cases. The propaganda operations “launched an international publicity campaign, including releasing a videotaped confession by a former senior intelligence official accusing Mr. Guo of corruption and uploading videos to YouTube on a channel called ‘Truth about Guo Wengui,’ to discredit him,” the report disclosed.2 The campaign was described as “unprecedented” and “unusually sophisticated.” Former White House Strategist Steve Bannon who was close to President Trump in 2017 revealed that he had never heard of Guo until “a parade” of American business leaders with ties to China began streaming into the Oval Office to try to convince President Trump to send Guo back to China. One example involved Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas casino magnate who owns casinos in the Chinese enclave of Macau, which requires licenses granted by the Chinese government in order to operate. Wynn met with Trump in 2017 and presented him with a letter from Xi Jinping stating the return of Guo would be a “personal favor” for the Party leader.

I first met Guo in 2017 after his interview on the US government’s Voice of America (VOA) Chinese-language service was cut short—also under pressure from China. The former chief of VOA’s Mandarin service, Sasha Gong, and several VOA employees were suspended and eventually fired for conducting the live Guo interview that was cut after an hour and twenty minutes, though it was planned and approved to be a three-hour session. Gong would later be fired and is convinced pressure from the Chinese Foreign Ministry on VOA Director Amanda Bennett was to blame for the canceled radio interview. The Chinese Foreign Ministry threatened to “respond seriously” if the Guo interview was not halted, asserting the interview would upset China’s forthcoming major Communist Party Congress set for October 2017, Gong said.

Low, a fugitive who would be indicted in October 2018 and charged with making bribes under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, initially approached Michel in 2016 and sought the entertainer’s help in working out a deal with the 1MDB investigation. According to court papers in the Higginbotham plea, Michel then contacted Robin Rosenzweig, Broidy’s wife, who recommended that Michel retain her law firm, Colfax Law Office, of which she was the chief operating officer. Low approved, then both Brody and Rosenzweig met with Michel. During the meeting, Broidy agreed to work with the two men but insisted that payments not come directly from Low. He wanted $15 million, but the price was negotiated down to $8 million. By March, the Broidys had worked out an agreement where in exchange for lobbying for the Justice Department to end the 1MDB probe, Low would pay an additional $75 million if the case was dropped in six months, or $50 million if it took a year. Broidy and his lawyers declined to discuss the matter. According to Higginbotham, in May 2017, Michel told him that Low had made a second lobbying request involving the Trump administration, separate from the Malaysian 1MDB case. The effort was described as “potentially more lucrative” than the money Malaysia was offering to pay in the 1MDB matter. Michel explained that Low wanted Guo Wengui, whom he described as a former resident of China living in the United States on a temporary visa and who has publicly criticized China’s leadership, to be removed from the United States and sent back to China. He further said that Broidy and others would use their political connections to lobby US government officials to have Guo sent back.

China also promised to return two American prisoners being held in China if Guo were repatriated.

As shown in the Guo case, China utilizes people with access to centers of power to do its bidding. These include the many former government officials and influential analysts who can be controlled with money or access to China—who can be routinely denied visas to travel to China as a way to coerce China experts into avoiding any comments or writings that are contrary to the CCP. The unofficial leaders of the China lobby are former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Along with many like-minded pro-China business people, they arrange deals for American businesses and other businesses in China. Mattis explains how it works:11 These consultants, especially former officials, are paid by the US business, but Beijing may [have] directed the company to engage this or that consultant as a way to reward their service…. The business gains access to China. The consultant gets paid and then assists the CCP in delivering its reassuring messages to colleagues still serving in government. The rewards of this approach, especially as retiring government officials, can be quite lucrative. For example, former Australian trade minister Andrew Robb received an AUS$880,000 per year consulting contract with a Chinese firm after he left government in 2016. The Pentagon highlighted the danger of Chinese influence operations for the first time in years in its 2019 annual report on the Chinese military.

Robinson and his team are convinced China, as of 2019, is preparing a massive issuance of Asian dollar-denominated bonds over the next thirty-six months totaling as much as $1 trillion. This view is shared by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. According to Goldman Sachs, an estimated 80 percent of these bonds are expected to be Chinese corporate and sovereign debt.

The threat of Chinese financial warfare is compounded by the lack of any capital markets screening or diligence with regard to national security or human rights concerns administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Treasury Department, or other agencies of the Executive Branch. “There exists no systematic, security-minded screening mechanism for US capital markets, similar to the Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the US,” Robinson said, adding that, at minimum, new security-oriented disclosure requirements are urgently needed.2

RWR has conducted what Robinson calls “a biopsy” of China’s presence in US capital markets and realized the problem uncovered is merely the tip of a huge financial iceberg of, in effect, covert Chinese financial warfare. The survey revealed that, at least ten Chinese entities engaged in nefarious activities were found inside US capital markets. PLA-tied companies initially discovered included Zhongxin Telecommunications Corporation (ZTE), which was sanctioned for illegal dealings with Iran; Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a subsidiary AVIC Aircraft, maker of China’s warplanes; and China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, which is building China’s first indigenous aircraft carrier and other advanced military systems. As revealed in chapter 6, AVIC subsidiaries were the beneficiaries of the massive cyber espionage against Boeing that compromised vital technology from the C-17, F-35, and F-22 aircraft.

The parameters of that type of warfare were first outlined in a landmark book published by the Chinese military in 1999. Two Chinese colonels, Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui, wrote Unrestricted Warfare, which would lay bare China’s drive for global supremacy. The two younger-generation PLA officers, who, like their senior generals and admirals, were so dazzled by the United States’ war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, they designed an entirely new way of waging war. The colonels set out a plan for a revolution in military affairs that recognized that China would be unable to confront American military power characterized by arms warfare driven by high technology and intelligence. Qiao and Wang set out a strategy for how China’s less technologically advanced military could prevail against the main enemy—the United States—using a new and radical form of warfare. In February 1999, Unrestricted Warfare revealed that victory in the twenty-first century would require China to employ both military and non-military warfare in various combinations—war without boundaries. Even the use of terrorism was advocated if that was what was required to win and maintain rule by the Communist Party of China. Qiao told a state-run newspaper after the book came out that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”

China in 2015 and later in June 2017 passed a new national security regulation. Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law states that all Chinese organizations and citizens, without exception, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.” That translates into requiring all Chinese companies, whether openly state-owned or operating under the fiction of being private companies must support the Communist Party of China’s massive intelligence network to support modernization. Huawei is a critical part of that spy system and has been designated a “national champion” by the Party. That means the company is a key player in the entire national strategy of China to acquire a dominant role in the global telecommunications market.

Huawei is not a private company or even a company. It is a deception operation masquerading as a company that until 2019 successfully fooled thousands of people around the world. The real purpose of Huawei, as with other faux companies, is industrial espionage, intellectual property theft, and human intelligence-gathering operations. That became clear for the first time in January 2019 when the Justice Department announced indictments against Huawei and Meng. Huawei Technologies and two subsidiaries were charged with stealing robotics secrets from T-Mobile and illegally doing business with Iran.

A separate ten-count indictment in Seattle was issued charging Huawei Device Co., Ltd. and Huawei Device USA, Inc., two subsidiaries, with using economic espionage to steal protected information on a T-Mobile phone-testing robot called Tappy. The spying involved breaking in to the company’s facilities to steal trade secrets. The criminality exposed in the indictment included details showing that Huawei executives offered cash bonuses to employees around the world for stealing foreign technology to support the company.

Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese businessman with knowledge of the inner workings of the Chinese system, says Huawei is closely allied to China’s Communist Party and intelligence organs. Huawei is “100 percent” a government-controlled company masquerading as a private business, he said. The company has close ties to both PLA intelligence and the Ministry of State Security. In addition to being founded by Ren, the former PLA officer, several of Ren’s family members, including Meng, hold leadership positions in the company. All are CCP members and thus are required to strictly observe the 2017 intelligence regulation to unquestioningly provide the company’s data to authorities. According to Guo, Huawei is controlled secretly by a faction within the Communist Party of China headed by former Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin and his son, Jiang Mianheng, who is president of ShanghaiTech University. Jiang Mianheng is one of China’s most powerful technology leaders who has links to numerous companies, including Huawei. “Huawei works closely with the [Ministry of State Security] and 2PLA,” Guo said, using the acronym for Chinese military intelligence. However, financially most profits from the company go to Chinese Party officials involved in the technology industry, he added.

Retired Air Force General Robert Spalding, a former White House National Security Council official in the Trump administration, is calling for adoption of a strategic effort to prevent China from dominating 5G development. In a memo leaked to the press in January 2018, Spalding warned that the United States is losing to China in the 5G race, and the information domain will be the key battleground for US-China competition. Spalding, a former military attaché based in China, urged developing a 5G network that reflects American principles: rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and fair and reciprocal markets. Briefing slides produced by the retired one-star general stated bluntly that the United States must build a 5G network securely or China will win politically, economically, and militarily. To thwart China, the United States needs to elevate the importance of the 5G program in ways similar to the national highway system built in the 1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower. A joint US government–private sector effort is needed to build 5G in three years. “America is on the edge of a precipice,” Spalding wrote in the memo. “We can jump into the information age of the future today or continue falling in the spiral of cyberattacks.” Huawei has used market distorting pricing and preferential financing to dominate the global telecom market, with 70 percent of China’s mobile infrastructure market designated for Huawei and ZTE, and with Western vendors competing for what is left. Beijing also extended a $100 billion line of credit to Huawei to finance its expansion. By comparison, American and Western telecommunications manufacturers have all but disappeared. Only a handful remain: Qualcomm, Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, and Ericsson.

In the mid-2010s, Chinese military hackers stole more than 22 million electronic records by hacking the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The records included personal information on nearly every American holding a top secret, secret or confidential security clearance for access to classified information. Chinese intelligence then combined the OPM records with more than 60 million records obtained from health care provider Anthem around the same time.

The railgun technology was stolen by China years earlier from a California-based Chinese espionage ring headed by Chi Mak, an electrical engineer for an American defense contractor, who gave PLA intelligence technical details on the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), Navy technology that will be outfitted on the newest aircraft carriers for launching jets. It uses electromagnetic technology in place of steam catapults. The launch technology is similar to railgun technology. Chi was sentenced to more than twenty-four years in prison in 2012 for giving away electromagnetic technology and much more. As I wrote in my 2008 book, Enemies:2 The information about EMALS that Chi gave the Chinese will teach China’s military not only how to build its own high-technology aircraft launch system for an aircraft carrier. It will also show the Chinese military how to produce a “railgun”—a high-tech weapon that uses EMALS technology to fire projectiles at seven times the speed of sound and at a range of up to 300 miles. The United States is considering this high-tech gun for the next-generation destroyer known as the DD(X). Chi had access to information on the DD(X) and is believed to have passed it on to China’s military.

The American military is unprepared to absorb the losses from such a surprise attack as the result of the reduction of forces after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and nearly two decades of an overemphasis on counterterrorism operations with little focus on waging high-technology war against China. Combined with steep spending cutbacks, this scenario has left the United States vulnerable to these new weapons.

For more than forty years, the US government and the American military have never disclosed how US forces would defeat China in a conventional or nuclear war. Further, there have been no leaks of war plans as occurred in the case of North Korea when the several iterations of Operations Plan 5027 outlined how the United States and its allies would conduct a war following a surprise attack by North Korea on South Korea. The reason there has been no mention of war plans for China is the result of presidential orders imposing political constraints on all defense and national security officials, prohibiting any public discussion of waging war against China. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the Obama administration issued a directive against the Pentagon to play down possible confrontation with China. This misguided policy stemmed from the canard put forth in the 1990s by former Pentagon policymaker Joseph Nye. It was Nye who initiated what would become an all-powerful political narrative that argued the United States would create a threatening China through policies and actions that treated Beijing as an enemy state regardless of the Communist regime’s activities. This false narrative was promoted even as China’s Communist Party and its political-military forces under the PLA openly declared that the United States was China’s main enemy to be defeated. And, it persisted until the presidential election of Donald Trump.

Michael Pillsbury who, in 2012, disclosed “sixteen fears” held by Chinese leaders that identified strategic vulnerabilities to be exploited in a future conflict. The National Defense University report by Pillsbury is an unclassified version of a more extensive classified study conducted for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. China’s sixteen fears include:9 1.  Fear of a blockade within the two island chains stretching from Japan through the South China Sea. 2.  Fear of foreign plundering of maritime resources—a driving force behind the PLA naval buildup. 3.  Fear of choking off sea lanes of communications—especially the petroleum lifeline from the Middle East. China has no large oil reserves on its territory and is highly vulnerable to disruption of oil and gas shipments. 4.  Fear of land invasion or territorial dismemberment based on studies showing vulnerabilities in all military regions to an attack by ground forces. 5.  Fear of armored or airborne attack based on vulnerabilities of three military regions along the northern border with Russia including Beijing—armored invasion and airborne assaults. 6.  Fear of internal instability, riots, civil war or terrorism, as seen in the detention of 1 million Uighurs in western China and the continued repression in Tibet. 7.  Fear of attacks on pipelines, as seen in numerous military exercises focusing on pipeline defense. 8.  Fear of aircraft carrier strikes evident in development of DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to sink American carriers. 9.  Fear of major air strikes that, since 2004, have resulted in developing advanced combat aircraft and anti-aircraft defenses. 10.  Fear of Taiwan independence that Beijing believes would cripple communist regime legitimacy, and a major PLA military vulnerability over fears of Taiwan becoming a giant aircraft carrier. 11.  Fear of the PLA’s inability to field forces sufficient to “liberate” Taiwan, as seen in the PLA deployment of amphibious capabilities, electronic warfare, and large numbers of guided-missile patrol boats. 12.  Fear of attacks on strategic missile forces by commandos, jamming, and precision strikes based on exercises that practice defending missile forces from special forces, air strikes, and cyberattacks. 13.  Fear of escalation and loss of control, as revealed in writings by military authors who have voiced worries that a crisis will escalate out of China’s control. 14.  Fear of cyber and information attack based on worries that PLA cyber defenses are weak and the internet can be used to turn the Chinese population against the regime. 15.  Fear of attack on anti-satellite capabilities, which the PLA regards as secret weapons that should never have been revealed, and that, in a conflict, the United States would conduct strikes deep in Chinese territory against ASAT missiles and support systems. 16.  Fear of regional neighbors—India, Japan, Vietnam, and Russia—based on concerns China is encircled with hostile powers.

The reason for the United States’ anger and concern is that Xi Jinping promised President Obama in September 2015 that the newly reclaimed islands in the South China Sea would not be turned into military bases. It was a blatant lie. By 2017, the PLA had built runways on at least two disputed Spratly Islands that were longer than 8,800 feet—enough to handle large troop transports or military cargo planes. The militarization included construction of twenty-four fighter-sized aircraft hangars, fixed-weapons positions, barracks, administration buildings, and communication facilities at three locations: Fiery Cross, Subi, and Mischief Reefs.

Together, the missiles threatened American and allied warships sailing in 90 percent of the South China Sea.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also stepped up the pressure on China by announcing for the first time that the United States would invoke the 1951 US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty in the South China Sea. The United States would respond with force if China attacked the Philippines in their dispute over the Spratlys. “As the South China Sea is part of the Pacific, any armed attack on Philippine forces, aircraft, or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger mutual defense obligations under Article 4 of our Mutual Defense Treaty,” Pompeo said.5 The declaration contrasted sharply with the appeasement of China by the Obama administration in 2012 when China sent warships to Scarborough Shoal and took control of the shoal from the Philippines. Then-President Benigno S. Aquino III asked Washington to invoke the treaty in helping Manila take back the shoal. But Obama refused.

According to knowledgeable sources, the Communist military is confronting two major challenges that ultimately threaten continued rule by the CCP. They include growing instability within the PLA as the result of the major political purge initiated by Xi that ensnared some of the most senior military leadership. A second threat is the growing dissatisfaction within the large and growing body of thousands of retired military personnel who are struggling to survive in retirement because the Chinese government has failed to pay their pensions. Large demonstrations by PLA retirees, beginning in 2018, have broken out in several cities, including in Beijing in front of Communist Party and Central Military Commission headquarters. The ranks of the retired military are estimated to be around 1.3 million veterans who have taken to the streets for protest demonstration. About 10,000 have been arrested. There are major fears among the current PLA leadership that the retired military protesters will trigger mass protests like the pro-democracy protesters who divided the Party in June 1989.

One of the more significant new programs designed to promote Chinese global dominance, and launched by Xi, is the Belt and Road Initiative. Under the program, the PLA has plans to expand throughout the Middle East and North Africa with twelve new military bases. The bases will be built in Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

1. Information: Conduct aggressive competition in the realm of ideas. China was declared a strategic competitor in the National Security Strategy of 2017. Yet little or nothing has been done to compete with China in the realm of ideas. The current system of US information operations—the US Agency for Global Media and its broadcasts—is poorly structured as a government news operation, which is no longer relevant in the highly contested, global information marketplace. A new and robust system similar to the semi-autonomous Cold War–era US Information Agency needs to be created to aggressively counter foreign disinformation and information warfare from the People’s Republic of China and other adversaries. This new agency is Information America (IA), and its primary mission will be to tell the truth about China and to confront Communist Party disinformation and influence operations on a global scale as never before. IA would vastly increase production of information that exposes the Communist system, its corrupt leaders, and its military and intelligence backers. As part of IA, the US government would fund American cultural centers called Hamilton-Jefferson Centers as a direct challenge to Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes.

2. Reciprocity: Restrict access by China to the United States in ways equal to Chinese restrictions. Based on a policy of seeking overall fairness in relations, the United States should initiate a policy of strict reciprocity. Presidential directives can be used in the short term and congressional legislation to codify the changes that would mandate reciprocal relations and interactions across a variety of domains. This is vitally important in the information sphere, such as limiting access to American audiences from all Chinese media with links to the government or Party.

3. Intelligence: Shift the focus and operating methods of American intelligence toward more robust and aggressive operations and more effective analysis. The seventeen intelligence agencies that make up the US intelligence community should be tasked to vastly increase the quantity and quality of intelligence collection and analysis on Communist China. Additionally, American allies must be persuaded to increase intelligence targeting of China.

4. Foreign Policy/Diplomacy: Restructure and reform the diplomatic system. American diplomats and foreign service personnel should be retrained in the use of new and innovative diplomatic methods and techniques for the information age that emphasize successfully implementing new strategic objectives toward China that reject the failed diplomacy of the past. The new diplomacy will be rooted in honest assessments and understandings of the true nature and characteristics of Communist China. A new objective will be to report on and take steps to force an end to the systematic abuse of human rights in China as a high priority. The United States should seek to create a new alliance of nations that will seek to isolate China and spur internal democratic political reforms and the promotion of freedom and free-market systems regionally.

5. Alliances: Create a pro-freedom, pro-prosperity, and pro-rule of law network in Asia. This should be done through the use of greater information operations designed to educate and enlist overseas Chinese and other pro-democracy elements to proactively work for peaceful democratic change and to confront and counter the communist-socialist march of the People’s Republic of China around the world. Central Asia will be a key region for this program, along with efforts throughout the developing world.

6. Cultural/Educational: Severely restrict activities by Chinese nationals in the United States who are abusing the American system. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals have been allowed to study and conduct research in the United States. Most have used the access to support the Communist China’s civilian and military development. Access should be restricted for these nationals on a reciprocal basis. Unless equal numbers of Americans are granted access to the same types of Chinese institutes and universities, the access should be closed off. Chinese Confucius Institutes on American campuses should be closed because they are used for United Front Work Department and other Chinese government and party entities for operations against US interest.

7. Counterintelligence: Major strategic counterintelligence operations and analyses should be implemented that focus on aggressively targeting Chinese intelligence and security services. The major intelligence failure in 2010 that resulted in the loss of an estimated thirty recruited intelligence agents in China must be prevented from recurring. More resources and better quality personnel should be trained and directed to conduct penetration and recruitment operations against the civilian Ministry of State Security, the PLA and its Strategic Support Force, the United Front Work Department and other PRC entities.

8. Economic: The United States should begin a gradual policy of disengagement from Communist China economically. Until Beijing agrees to adopt fair and verifiable trade commitments and halt massive technology theft, the United States should begin withdrawing economically from China in all areas. China’s economic commitments to better trade should include allowing greater market access and fair trade while abandoning unfair practices such as forced technology transfers.

9. Financial: Plan and carry out covert financial warfare operations against China. The United States should pursue policies similar to those used during the Reagan administration that weakened and ultimately defeated the Soviet Union. Currently, there exist no US government national security controls on Chinese activities in US capital markets. As a result, China is bankrolling its military and other expansionist activities through access to investment vehicles in the United States and elsewhere.

10. Military Exchanges: The Pentagon and US military must adopt a new policy that recognizes the Communist Party of China and People’s Liberation Army as the main enemy. China should not be identified officially as merely a strategic competitor. The president should direct the Pentagon and the US military to adopt a new policy toward Communist China that abandons the outdated idea that the Party and the PLA can be persuaded to become less threatening through military exchanges, visits and meetings, and other engagement designed to build trust. Until military exchanges can be shown to produce real, measurable results, they should be halted.

11. Military Missile Defense: Expand American regional missile defenses. Communist China inflicted several billion dollars in damage on South Korea through economic warfare in response to Seoul’s agreement to deploy the US Army Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) weapon system in South Korea. Beijing claimed—falsely—the defensive system threatened China’s missile forces. Based on Chinese reaction to the THAAD deployment, the United States should offer THAAD for sale to friendly nations surrounding China—India, Japan, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, and others—to negate the massive and growing Chinese missile threat.

12. Military Gray-Zone Warfare: Develop asymmetric warfare capabilities designed to negate Chinese military, cyber, electronic, and psychological warfare capabilities. Electronic warfare is a key advantage for the United States that should be leveraged in military asymmetry as a high priority.

13. Political: Create a parliament in exile. A plan first presented by national security specialist Constantine Menges in 2005 to create a Chinese parliament in exile should be implemented.

14. Russia: Play the Russia card. The United States should initiate a strategic program with the goal of creating a pro-American government in Moscow. Russia could then be enlisted to support an international campaign to mitigate the threat from China.