By Howard Bloom
Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping made a wonderfully assuring statement on Wednesday September 23rd in a recorded speech to the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly. Xi said “We will never seek hegemony, expansion, or sphere of influence. We have no intention to fight either a Cold War or a hot war with any country.”
What a relief. We all know that China is on its way to becoming the biggest superpower the world has ever seen. Its population is more than four times the population of the United States. Yes, China has four times more people than we do. And the Chinese population is driven by an insane work ethic and an extraordinary appetite for education. Not to mention a talent for innovation. As of 2019,[i] China surpassed the United States and led the world in patents.[ii] It led the world in technological steps forward. As a result, some experts predict that China will have the biggest economy in the world by 2028.[iii]
Meanwhile, China is working aggressively to lead the world in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and green technologies, the technologies of the future. And it may well succeed. To see how, look at solar power. Solar power was pioneered primarily in the United States from 1954 to 2000.[iv] But today the Chinese own the solar power field. The world’s three biggest suppliers of solar panels are Chinese. Jinko Solar is based in Shanghai, JA Solar is located in Beijing, and Trina Solar is in Changzhou.[v]
So it is an enormous relief to discover that unlike 19th century Europeans or 20th century Americans, China has no expansionary goals and seeks only peace. Or, as Xi Jinping put it, not only does he not want expansion or spheres of influence, but if there are differences, he intends to resolve them peacefully. As he said to the UN, “We will continue to narrow differences and resolve disputes with others through dialogue and negotiation.”[vi]
But don’t relax quite yet. Why? Because Xi Jinping is lying. China is the most expansionist nation currently on the face of the planet. And China apparently has no intention of stopping. What in hell do I mean? You and I have been distracted for the last five years by politics. We’ve been fascinated, horrified, or electrified by Donald Trump, the man who more than any other president or politician we have ever seen knows how to hog the spotlight. The Trump saga has been so absorbing that our three cable news channels, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox, have been able to fill hours of programming without mentioning foreign affairs for more than a few minutes. And that inattention to global affairs could be our undoing. Why?
Because we should have a healthy rivalry with China. A rivalry with China is good for our rate of innovation and for the rate at which we offer new empowerments to humanity. But we cannot afford an armed conflict with the Chinese. One reason is simple. The nation with the biggest trade surplus usually wins a war.[vii] And China has a trade surplus of over half a trillion dollars a year.[viii] Half a trillion. Unbelievable! How is our American trade surplus going? We don’t have one. We run a trade deficit of over half a trillion dollars a year. Yes, over half a trillion dollars. To be precise, we ran a deficit of 678.7 billion dollars in 2020 alone.[ix] And most of our American deficit is with guess who? China.
But am I telling you the truth when I claim that Xi Jinping is lying about his aim for peace? Am I telling you the truth when I imply that Xi’s promise that he has no interest in expansionism is phony? Judge for yourself.
You probably know that six nations claim ownership of islands and waterways in the South China Sea. Those countries include Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Vietnam.[x] But in 1992, China laid claims to the whole South China Sea.[xi] Yes, China laid claim to all 1.4 million square miles of it.[xii] Nonetheless, China agreed in 2002 to settle South China Sea disputes in a peaceful manner.[xiii] Then China began to build islands in the South China Sea. Don’t worry about it, said China, those islands are for strictly peaceful purposes.[xiv] Next China built landing strips on the islands. In 2013, it declared the entire South China Sea part of its Air Defense Identification Zone. And it let loose a massive coast guard in the South China Sea, a coast guard that was heavily armed. Meanwhile, China planted military men and military equipment on its newly-built islands. In 2016, China installed surface-to-air missiles on the South China Sea’s Paracel Islands.[xv] In 2018, for the first time, China landed a bomber on one of those islands. Then, in July 2018, China made the armed nature of its coast guard formal. In fact, it put its coast guard under the control of The People’s Armed Police.”[xvi] And in May, 2020, the Chinese drove out a Malaysian drillship looking for oil and gas. In other words, the Chinese took possession of the South China Sea. Lock, stock, and barrel. Despite the fact that In 2016, The Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled that China “has no legal basis for its claims to historic rights to resources in the South China Sea.”[xvii]
Remember something. Six nations claimed that existing islands in the South China Sea were their territories. But in the end, that didn’t matter. China had turned up the heat on the South China Sea so slowly that the frogs who thought they were in possession of that sea didn’t realize it was getting hot until they were already boiled.
But surely that can’t happen any place else. Or can it? From 2013 to 2020, China planted troops on disputed border territory with India in Ladakh. Then China objected to a road the Indians were building on Indian territory and engaged in hand to hand skirmishes that left 20 Indian soldiers and 43 Chinese soldiers dead. Next, China entrenched its soldiers eleven miles into Indian territory and got India to withdraw and accept much of the former Indian land as a demilitarized zone.[xviii] This looks like a step toward annexing that land in the same way that China annexed the South China Sea.
Then there’s the East China Sea, the 482,000 square miles of sea between Japan, Taiwan and Korea. Japan claims 82,000 square miles of that East China Sea including the Senkaku Islands.[xix] But China is making the same sort of incursions on the East China Sea that it made on the South China Sea. Including establishing a system of buoys[xx]that mark the territory China is in the process of grabbing. What’s a little buoy, you might say. Anyone with a rowboat can pick up a buoy and make off with it. But the Chinese buoys are 45 feet across and bristling with cameras and detection devices designed to alert the Chinese navy to any so-called “illegal intrusions” in this new territory.
Then there’s the Mekong River. The Mekong river feeds the farms and fishermen of six countries, including China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. But China erected a dam on their portion of the Mekong, the Jinghong hydroelectric dam, and cut down the flow of water for 20 days at the beginning of 2021 “for the maintenance of transmission lines.” That led to a three-foot drop in the river, a river that helps feed 60 million people. Reuters says that this drop could “devastate the fish population.”[xxi] And Reuters adds that, “Beijing has rejected suggestions its Mekong dams harm downstream countries.” [xxii]
Meanwhile, China is bloodying Hong Kong and taking it over ruthlessly. Including arresting every demonstrator and civil rights activist China can get its hands on. Protest against China is punishable by life imprisonment.[xxiii] And China has seized the right to dictate who can run for office and who can’t. China is also making its goal of taking over Taiwan abundantly clear. In addition, China is deliberately exterminating the culture of the Uighurs in its Xinjiang Province with concentration camps and deportations to forced labor in the factories of distant Chinese provinces. And China is continuing its ethnic cleansing of Tibet.
What’s worse, way beyond the bounds of earth, China is planning for the day when America discontinues its 21-year-old International Space Station, a space station that, despite constant upgrades, is getting old, smelly,[xxiv] and leaky. China is putting up its own space station and is prepared to take over as the only nation with a foothold in earth orbit. In fact, China has been busy signing international partners for its station in space, a station it plans to put up starting this year. What’s more, Namrata Goswami, a brilliant international analyst, believes that China is attempting to pull off a South China Sea on the south pole of the moon, a location rich in the gold of space, water. A location that’s in the cross hairs of China’s three moon Rovers.
Is this merely my paranoia, or does this sound like expansionism? The same kind of expansionism Xi Jinping told the UN that China would never practice?
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Howard Bloom’s second book, Global Brain, was the subject of a seminar hosted by the office of the Secretary of Defense that included representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, IBM, and MIT. He is the author of seven books and the co-founder and chair of the Asia Space Technology Summit. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired, and the blogs of Psychology Today and the Scientific American. He has published in peer-reviewed journals or lectured at scholarly conferences in twelve different scientific fields ranging from quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience to economics and biopolitics.
[i] https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/08/17/china-overtakes-us-as-worlds-leading-patent-generator/35240/
[ii] https://www.statista.com/statistics/257152/ranking-of-the-20-countries-with-the-most-patent-grants/
[iii] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55454146#:~:text=China%20will%20overtake%20the%20US,previously%20forecast%2C%20a%20report%20says.
[iv] https://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/pdfs/solar_timeline.pdf
[v] https://news.energysage.com/best-solar-panel-manufacturers-usa/
[vi] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/international/china-will-never-seek-expansion-has-no-intention-to-fight-either-cold-war-or-hot-war-says-xi-jinping
[vii] Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987.
[viii] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3117785/chinas-trade-surplus-hits-record-december-end-year-which-it
[ix] https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-trade-deficit-causes-effects-trade-partners-3306276
[x] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53397673#:~:text=Brunei%2C%20Malaysia%2C%20the%20Philippines%2C,steadily%20increased%20in%20recent%20years.
[xi] https://www.cfr.org/timeline/chinas-maritime-disputes
[xii][xii] https://www.britannica.com/place/South-China-Sea
[xiii] China has stated many times that it is committed to a peaceful process of negotiation over the disputed areas and signed the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea – in which all parties agreed “to resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means, without resorting to the threat or use of force,”- https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/07/23/america-s-security-role-in-south-china-sea-pub-60826
[xiv] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53397673
[xv] https://www.cfr.org/timeline/chinas-maritime-disputes
[xvi] https://chinapower.csis.org/maritime-forces-destabilizing-asia/
[xvii] https://www.cfr.org/timeline/chinas-maritime-disputes
[xviii] https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/india-china-clash-demilitarised-buffer-zone-in-eastern-ladakh-rattles-veterans/cid/1806561
[xix] https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/the-sino-japanese-maritime-dispute-in-the-east-china-sea
[xx] https://japan-forward.com/beijing-redefines-boundaries-in-east-china-sea-via-expanded-surveillance-buoys-network/
[xxi] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mekong-river/china-notifies-mekong-river-neighbours-it-is-holding-back-waters-idUSKBN29B17C
[xxii] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mekong-river/china-notifies-mekong-river-neighbours-it-is-holding-back-waters-idUSKBN29B17C
[xxiii] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53238004
[xxiv] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ten-ways-astronaut-christina-koch-will-need-to-readjust-to-earth-after-328-days-in-space/