The Real Manchurian Candidate: Fifty Years of China’s Quiet Conquest For over half a century, Washington’s political class—led by Kissinger’s secret diplomacy—has cloaked China’s rise in promises of peace, betraying America from within. By Lee Smith
The following is an excerpt from The China Matrix: The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact.
The story of betrayal related here begins nearly a decade later, in 1971, and it’s notable how many themes it shares with the fictional Hollywood account. Hailed as a Cold War classic that captures the period’s paranoid sensibility, The Manchurian Candidate’s representation of propaganda and brainwashing might have prepared the American public for the messaging that accompanied the strengthening of ties between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. As false as the stock praise for Raymond Shaw’s character is the broad assertion, relayed by every US president since Richard Nixon—except for Donald Trump—that the rise of China’s communist party is good for America and conducive to world peace.
Here’s how Nixon put it: “What brings us together is a recognition of a new situation in the world and a recognition on our part that what is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy,” he told Mao during their historic meeting. “Therefore, we can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own ways on our own roads.”
With Mao’s death, Gerald Ford said, “I am confident that the trend of improved relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, which Chairman Mao helped to create, will continue to contribute to world peace and stability.”
Jimmy Carter said, “The United States and China need to build their futures together.”
In Ronald Reagan’s words, “We can work together as equals in a spirit of mutual respect and mutual benefit… America and China are both great nations. And we have a special responsibility to preserve world peace.”
According to George H.W. Bush, “One of my dreams for our world is that these two powerful giants will continue working toward a full partnership and friendship that will help bring peace and prosperity to people everywhere.”
Bill Clinton wasn’t worried about the rising communist juggernaut: “Our objective is not containment and conflict; it is cooperation. We will far better serve our interests and our principles if we work with a China that shares that objective with us.”
George W. Bush agreed: “China is on a rising path, and America welcomes the emergence of a strong, peaceful, and prosperous China.”
So did Barack Obama: “Our goal is not to counter China. Our goal is not to contain China,” he said. “We want China to succeed.”
And in the words of Joe Biden: “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”
US presidents should always seek to avoid conflict with foreign powers and hence allay the electorate’s fears, lest the country be swept up in a wave of mass panic. But the ongoing efforts, for more than half a century, to obscure the threat that China poses to our national security, economy, and way of life suggest that Washington was propagandizing Americans to distract us from the all-too-apparent fact—highlighted by the transparently mendacious denials at the highest levels of government—that China is indeed a threat.
Why did our elected officials mislead the American public for so long? It seems at first they believed that relations with communist China would lead to stability and even peace. Later, more cynically, the political class protected China to satisfy corporate campaign donors who drew their wealth from doing business with the PRC. And eventually, it became impossible to imagine any other way to relate to China but appeasement. As The Manchurian Candidate dramatized, the real threat to our constitutional republic isn’t the communists from across the ocean but the Americans working with them to advance their own causes. The threat to America is coming from inside the house.
And so, like The Manchurian Candidate, our story begins in secret: The president of the United States has opened a secret channel to initiate relations with the People’s Republic of China and set in motion a chain of events that has led to our present circumstances.
But this story is not about a lone sleeper agent, or a spy ring that infiltrated the State Department or the Pentagon, or the CIA. Rather, it is the history of an entire ruling class that, over a fifty-year span, was guided and then inspired by the policies and preferences, the actions and opinions, of America’s most famous statesman—one of the rare Washington bureaucrats who rode reputation all the way to fortune and celebrity, dining in New York’s most exclusive restaurants, with gorgeous women hanging on his arm and the political, corporate, and media establishment hanging on his every utterance. Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China is the opening scene in an epic account of American corruption and Chinese subterfuge that shows how the corporate establishment—industry and finance—as well as the worlds of media, entertainment, sports, and academia, joined forces with the political class to betray America and make it poorer, divided, and prey to a totalitarian regime.
Kissinger was thinking about the time in 1954 when then-US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake Zhou Enlai’s hand.
Kissinger imagined the snub was still on the mind of the Chinese prime minister decades later, so when they first met in the Chinese capital on July 9, 1971, the American envoy made a broad show of extending his hand. Kissinger was right: Zhou still felt the slight from decades past. Kissinger later remarked that “it was the first step in putting the legacy of the past behind us.”
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