United States Strategic Approach to the Peoples’ Republic of China. As of 20 May 2020, the US Government is adjusting its strategic approach to China as reflected in this White House document (click here).
After forty years, this represents a step toward contesting PRC’s Strategic Enablers. Understanding these building blocks is fundamental to all Americans doing their part in contesting and countering these CCP enablers, now and in the future.
The Microchip. China manages and manipulates an intricate process that eventually delivers a microchip to the USA. Destination? The cockpit of US military aircraft, a vital computer server on Wall Street, the computer-controlled US electrical power grid, and your local hospital, bank, supermarket, telecommunications infrastructure, and high-tech retailer. Origin? A mound of dirt somewhere in The Democratic Republic of Congo, owned or leased for the next 99 years by China.
Whether we are talking about vital micro components to critical US national security and prosperity systems, or things more personal, the strategic issue is America’s dependency on critical lands, natural resources, infrastructure, economic systems, manufacturing, products, components, sub-components, banking and services, that are all ultimately controlled, influenced, and/or manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Question. How has the Peoples’ Republic of China managed to steadily attain such extraordinary advantage over America without this being effectively contested?
The Bottom Line: Chinese communist advantage over America rests in centralized, integrated, totalitarian efficiency, effectiveness, unity of effort, and forced obedience. Independent-thinking and acting Americans generally lack this holistic capacity. On top of this, election-year partisan politics is killing us. By this, we are scattered, disadvantaged, and fighting ourselves. The Peoples’ Republic of China wins.
The Delivery System
The process for Chinese unified action and impacts is built on eight building blocks:
- Control of strategic terrain
- Monopolized natural resources
- Interconnected infrastructure to secure, extract, and move raw materials to production
- Production with products channeled through strategic locations and routes for global delivery
- Onward delivery to pinpoint distribution centers and retailers
- Disrupting businesses and consumers manipulated by disinformation, marketing and propaganda
- Profit ultimately accruing to Chinese communist leaders
- Corruption of national decision makers in public and private sectors funded by these profits
Key Points
- Strategic Terrain. “Turf” to be dominated and controlled falls into many categories. China’s control of rare earth mineral sites in Africa, that is vital for high-tech production, is no less important than control of cyber terrain, data aggregation and warehouses, satellite space, oil-rich lands, agricultural regions, and Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The combination of these types of terrain, sets conditions for China’s leadership to fully exploit America’s enduring disadvantage. Read further here…
- Strategic Resources. Natural resources, human resources, intellectual resources, and man-made resources provide the basis for China’s “national wherewithal” – the primary ingredients to “make things” and “make things happen”. The microchip “delivered” comes by the contrived and controlled combination of “ore dug”, “labor controlled”, “technical expertise applied” and “technological production managed”. No one is better at this than China. Read further here…
- Strategic Capacities. The 3 C’s. Competency (Knowledge) plus Capability (Applied Knowledge) can lead to Capacity (Massed / Massive Applied Knowledge) for decisive advantage, but only if one strategically integrates these capacities. US has spent trillions of dollars in the Middle East for decades with what strategic gains to date? How do these stack up against China’s strategic gains in terms of world-wide capacities to dominate USA? Read further here…
- Strategic Nodes. Purpose-driven control of Decision Makers, Research and Development, Infrastructure, Production, Ports, Retailers, and Marketing result in what might be called “Critical Enabler”. This brings unity of effort, coherence and synergies to China’s strategy implementation. Read further here…
- Strategic Target Audiences. In viewing things strategically, China has looked at the world through a unified “Economic Dominance” filter; while USA has used a less than coupled “Geo-Diplomatic-Commerce-Military” filter. Resulting aims, priorities, methods, and results for both USA and China correspond to this distinction. The linkage between target audiences, ultimate payoffs and enduring advantages is more readily apparent and assured by China’s comprehensive approach. Read further here…
- Strategic Impacts. China’s strategic efforts impacting America are best summed up by this basic profile:
- American public and private sector decision makers “in bed” with Chinese leadership and or their interests and enticements.
- China’s expanding control of vital natural resources.
- China’s expanding control and manipulation of pharmaceuticals and food supplies
- China’s use of “debt burdens” to take control of targeted countries around the world
- America’s lopsided dependency on Chinese products from ping pong balls to hi-tech systems
- China’s bid to dominate the Info Sphere: Cyberspace, data processing and warehousing, Telecommunications and 5G global monopoly, and mainstream media to Hollywood
The sum of these impacts delivers assured advantage over USA by controlling what amounts to “Modern Key Terrain” in all competitive spaces in this century. Read further here…
Implications
- Mental Mismatch. USA today faces the reality that Chinese communist leadership has expertly studied us in detail for decades. They then turned analysis into action. USA, by contrast, turned analysis into paralysis in terms of not contesting China’s various Soft Power innovations and aggressions.
- Super Power Stupor. In some respects, America has been basking in the spotlight of Super Power stature imagined to be unassailable. This has happened all the while (1) we have been giving away technology to a near-peer interested in defeating us, and (2) “White Hatted” China has been carefully assailing us on a thousand fronts. This has been going on for too long to be accidental or quickly reversible. Americans’ personal comfort, convenience, profit-seeking, and arrogance abound; while China has had its nose to the grindstone toiling away at a global scale. The results show: They are hungry. We are not.
- Strategic Subversion. Supplementing this effort is China’s deft undermining of American values, traditions, institutions, and national interests. The top-level strategic corruption of American Presidents by Chinese incentives, works in tandem with the destruction of American society at the grassroots by the strategic push of deadly synthetic narcotics “Made in China”. Death by a thousand cuts of all sorts across the land is ongoing “Chinese business as usual” right in America’s face. So far it is that we have indeed drifted from where and what we once were at the end of World War II.
- Casualties of War. Between mental mismatch, stupor, and subversion, we find ourselves to be casualties in our own homeland – The Land of the Free. There is no Left, Right or Center to this. Casualties of War are just “casualties” one and all.
Somehow, in the face of an abundance of evidence that America and Americans have been at high risk of losing much, for over four decades we have done amazingly little to counter this. It took a pandemic aimed at us, to stir Americans’ thought. US Government’s current shift in its strategic approach to the Peoples’ Republic of China does not necessarily assure what the American people will do in terms of their attitudes and economic behavior toward the PRC.
Enter the 3rd Dragon, which may be the worst of all: Americans’ lack of resolve in facing the 1st and 2nd Dragons (PRC and PRC’s Appeasers and Surrogates). This sets the stage for open-ended Chinese Communist Party coercion and aggression.
Sincerely,
The China Factor Network
p.s. Along with all of our reports, we invite counter-point arguments and inputs. Contact us directly by clicking here.