In December 2013, Hunter Biden flew to Beijing with his father on Air Force Two. Ten days later, a billion-dollar investment deal backed by the Chinese government was finalized. Why did the son of the second-most powerful man in the United States go into business with America’s most savage competitor?
Because Joe Biden, along with countless other American elites (just look at the NBA debacle), doesn’t consider China a threat.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said on the campaign trail in May. “They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. They’re not bad, folks, but guess what? They’re not competition for us.”
In his new book, Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept, Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding explains how China has rocketed to tremendous global influence without the use of force, stealing jobs, investments, and intellectual property, and driving the U.S. to crippling dependence along the way.
The book is a searing exposé of how the Chinese Communist Party continues to conduct its war for influence around the world. It is the result of hundreds of interviews, paired with Spalding’s previous experiences as China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior defense official and defense attache to China.
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, two senior colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army, published a document in 1999 called Unrestricted Warfare. In this work, they outlined strategies to win power and influence for China around the world.
“The first rule of unrestricted warfare,” Liang wrote, “is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”
Stealth War examines how China has followed this strategy of unrestricted warfare to gain tremendous global influence at the expense of, and empowered by, the U.S.
Presented by Chinese President Xi Jinping as a free market, the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian version of capitalism ignores the fundamentals of free trade and rigs the international economic system in its own favor. While China welcomes foreign investments, resulting profits are not allowed out of the country. Since 2001, more than 3.4 million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared and over 70,000 American factories have closed, while China’s manufacturing industry has exploded.
The U.S. military has become cripplingly dependent on Chinese manufacturers. Propellant for American Hellfire missiles is imported from China. Lanthanum, a component for glass in night-vision goggles, comes from China. Phones and computer parts essential for military logistics and communications are manufactured in China. So many components of military supplies are outsourced, Spalding writes, that the U.S. could never fight a ground war with China.
Meanwhile, China has also bought influence in American higher education. About 32.5% of international college students in the U.S. are Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party has installed Confucius Institutes in American universities to monitor and control Chinese students on campus and spread communist narratives.
A gargantuan infrastructure undertaking, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is pitched as an international project to aid developing countries and free trade. In reality, however, the project strategically thrusts Chinese dominance into two-thirds of the world, particularly emerging economies, buying China the opportunity to flood markets with Chinese products and influence.
From economy to military, diplomacy to technology, and education to infrastructure, Chinese power has surreptitiously taken root in the foundations of the free world. China has worked to achieve this influence while remaining invisible. Stealth War outlines a strategy for how the U.S. can stop China’s stealth war and put its unrestricted assault on the free world in check.
The stealth war isn’t over, and Spalding’s work is a rousing call for American elites to wake up.
Vivian E. Jones (@Vivian_E_Jones) is an alumna of Hillsdale College and a graduate student of International Affairs at Middle Tennessee State University.
