https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/05/chinas-dream-americas-nightmare/
Talk of a future war between Beijing and Washington is obsolete. Communist China is already at war with the United States even if, to quote Churchill, “all the great responsible authorities” have stood “gazing” at this disturbing truth “with vacant eyes”. So writes Peter Schweizer in Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye while China Kills Americans. Supported by an extensive research team, Schweizer chronicles the key methods the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs to pursue “disintegration warfare” against the United States, from fuelling the fentanyl crisis and arming criminal gangs to commandeering Hollywood and maximising the deleterious effects of COVID-19 on the American population: “It is often said that China is in a cold war with America. The reality is far worse: the war is hot, and the body count is one-sided.”
Disintegration warfare, writes Schweizer, is a modern-day adaptation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, holy writ for every leader of the People’s Republic of China from Mao to Xi, and since 2006 required reading for members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese strategist, suggested that “all warfare is based on deception” and “the supreme act of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. The strength of Blood Money is that it comprehensively outlines how Xi Jinping and his coterie are going about the business of stealthily disintegrating the one power standing in the way of the Middle Kingdom resuming its place as the dominant force in the world. The mighty United States must, too, become a tributary state of China, but for that to occur America must be broken and defeated, preferably “without fighting” back or in any way defending itself.
Blood Money is mostly about how the CCP aims to defeat America (and the West) though there are moments when the discussion turns to why. For instance, Schweizer provides a
telling quotation from the Supreme Leader contained in a textbook given to all PLA officers. China and the West, according to Xi, are essentially incompatible because of differing ideologies and social systems: “This [incompatibility] decides it. Our struggle and contest of power with the West cannot be moderated. It will inevitably be long, complex, and at times extremely sharp.” The history of the CCP, after all, is a case study of destroying the independent integrity of everything that comes into its purview, from Tibet to the World Health Organisation. The only question is whether the politburo ever believed the Tibetan Autonomous Region would be, in any sense, self-directed. The belligerent paranoia of the CCP is a function of its Leninist nature and millennial fancies. Today the utopian vision is not Mao’s Great Leap Forward but Xi’s China Dream, though the same Leninist impulse prevails: the enemy must be “disintegrated”.
