The Crux: Risk-Aversion & Today’s Chinese Crisis
After Mao’s death, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, Western capital investment has flowed into China. The People’s Republic of China has seemingly been transformed, at least in the few coastal showcase cities. Yet, while the CCP encouraged foreign business to build factories that would take advantage of China’s cheap labor and non-existent safety, labor, and environmental regulations, the CCP has never relinquished any control.
For decades, the United States and the West invested in Communist China for profit, as well as in a vain hope that free markets might lead to political liberalization of some kind. This policy has failed, at least thus far. Instead, the CCP now possesses a Western-financed industrial economy fit for them to wage total war. Meanwhile, the U. S. has deindustrialized, and in doing so has made itself dependent upon China.
For decades, China’s “one couple, one child” policy has produced an excess of young men; a demographic that is seemingly perfectly suited for warfare. While the West devolves into bizarre fantasies of Wokeness, China’s people are being psychologically, physically, and institutionally prepared for the rigors of combat. China’s COVID lockdowns were practice for the CCP to maintain control over a functioning society under wartime conditions.
Overseas, the CCP has bought Quislings in most nations, a paid-for Fifth Column to serve China’s interests over their own nation’s interests. This definitely includes the President of the Solomon Islands, and may possibly include the current President of the United States.
They have developed alliances and supply chains that might plausibly withstand the stresses of global conflict. Most of sub-Saharan Africa has become indebted to the CCP. Much of South Asia and the Middle East has come to host a network of new Chinese military bases, intended to match the global reach of US forces. Even in Europe and the Americas, governments like that of Justin Trudeau’s Canada are modifying their policies to be more acceptable to Peking.
None of these preparations make China invincible. Far from it, they have serious weaknesses. The average Chinese person resents Communist control and yearns for peace, freedom, and prosperity. They dream of a day when they can resume control over their lives, without reference to the whims of petty tyrants.
“One couple, one child” has created a population that is rapidly aging out of all functionality, inviting economic and social collapse within decades. Also, each one of these only-child princelings carries the hopes of an entire extended family. As a group, these only sons have been spoiled, and their families’ futures would be destroyed with their death in battle.
China’s “Wolf-Warrior” diplomacy has alienated every single one of its neighbors. Its industrial products are shoddy and bear all the marks of misaligned central planning.
The CCP has wrecked China’s ecology, society, and even its vaunted economy. It has set the stage for its own inevitable collapse.
Only the successful conquest of Taiwan, coupled with a mind-shattering defeat of American power, can avert this collapse. Unfortunately, unlike the USSR’s Khrushchev and Brezhnev, today’s CCP leadership has no real-world experience beyond ruling their own people and waging inter-party rivalries. Those Soviet leaders, for all of their grasping hunger for power, could not forget the price that the USSR paid for its survival in World War II. They knew, bone-deep, that they did not want another total war.
Today’s CCP leadership lacks any such sobriety. They are quite aware that they have a limited window of opportunity before the invasion of Taiwan becomes impractical. Though they would never admit it, they are also quite keenly aware of their existential weakness. This makes them desperate, which makes them likely to miscalculate American resolve, much as Hitler miscalculated British resolve when he invaded Poland.
Neither the Earth’s ecology, nor the current worldwide population, nor the global trade network, nor any large-scale human civilization could survive a new General War. Such a calamity would make the Bronze Age Collapse and the Fall of the Roman Empire each seem trifling. The effects of the failure of the world’s electrical power grids alone would exceed the Black Death’s lethality, likely killing at least over two-thirds of the current worldwide human population.
No innocence would survive such Armageddon. Humanity would either be exterminated outright or reduced to an animalistic savagery struggling to eke out an existence on a blasted, poisoned planet. Only God’s intervention could save us, or any remnant of us. We would be lost. This hellscape is what we risk if we fight China.
Prudence and logic would argue for us to avoid any possible risk of such a doom. However, appeasement could result in something even worse.
America’s allies would abandon us to join with China if we proved useless in helping them to remain independent. Our failure to vigorously defend Taiwan would force even the Japanese to lurch away from us in a desperate attempt at rapprochement with the CCP. Potential US allies in Australia, New Zealand, Viet-Nam, the Philippines, and India would do the same.
CCP pawns in Pakistan, Iran, and Russia would each launch wars to conquer “their” regions. Europe and the Middle East would become part of a new Sino-centric world order, as would the poverty-stricken regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. With even Canada and Mexico realigning themselves to suit Peking, how long could any American Republic retain anything like freedom?
Given how the CCP has treated its own civilian population, we could expect to be implanted with silicon chips like pets and managed like livestock. Ubiquitous surveillance technology would track our every word and action. Every choice we make would be calculated into a Social Credit Score that determines everything about our lives, from what we eat to the health care we receive. Our organs would be liable for harvesting to prolong the lives of our betters. Our languages, faith, and culture would all be extinguished.
None of this is hypothetical. The CCP has actually done all of these things. Why would we expect to be treated better by the CCP than the Chinese people, themselves? Only our traitorous Quislings would have any material quality of life, but paid for at the cost of their souls.
We are faced with two terrifying choices. Either we risk the possibility of a man-made Apocalypse by fighting the Chinese Communist party over Taiwan. Or, we invite the likely enslavement of planetary humanity by appeasing the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions to conquer Taiwan.
At moments like this, there are no easy answers. We cannot evade our responsibility as free citizens of the United States. We should face our fears and purposefully decide what we ought to do.
We must abandon Nixon-era ambiguity and make crystal clear America’s commitment to defend Taiwan at all costs. Only by demonstrating with unmistakable clarity an unbreakable American commitment to fight for Taiwan might we plausibly deter such an attack.
Further, we must aggressively decouple our economy from Red China, and reindustrialize enough to rebuild our aging infrastructure and maintain our Republic in the event of war. We must expand NATO to include South and East Asia and the Pacific. We should make clear that peaceable Chinese action will be welcomed, but CCP warmongering will be met with nothing less than deadly force.
If we are to truly strive to build a future world worth living in, we must be brave. We must be willing to risk everything. The alternative to such risk is slavery. Never have Patrick Henry’s famous words resonated with greater significance. “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
