Pope Francis blesses the crowd in St. Peters Square on Easter day
The Passover and Easter season hold out hope for peace on earth. “Today we implore fruits of peace,” Pope Francis said to the crowd assembled in St. Peters’ Square for the pontiff’s traditional Urbi et Orbi (“To the City and World”) Easter address. Unfortunately an older Roman adage will need to be the guide in coming years: Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”). This is the compelling message of Steven Mosher’s recent book, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New threat to World Order. China’s totalitarian dictatorship under Chairman Xi aims for world domination.
Mosher makes a compelling case that most of Chinese history for the past three millenia has been a school for war, totalitarian dictatorship, Han Chinese belief in its racial superiority over other races, and a drive to dominate the known world and shape it to Chinese preferences.
Mosher is not the first to realize that Chairman Xi’s wish to propagate his own “Xi Jinping thought,” a.k.a. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a nationalistic socialism, or as it was known in the West in the 1933-1945 period Nationalsozialismus or Nazism for short.
Qin Shihuang had over six thousand terracotta soldiers buried with him to accompany him to the underworld. The tens of thousands of Chinese subjects who built the tomb were not so fortunate; they were executed so that the tomb’s treasures couldn’t be revealed to grave robbers.
While the philosophy that China is best known for in the West is Confucianism, the political philosophy of China’s rulers since the Warring States period (475-221 BC) has been Legalism, exemplified by the first ruler of China (221-206 BC), Qin Shihuang. It is this ruthless despot that China’s subsequent rulers, including its post-1949 Communist rulers, have modeled themselves on. Mosher writes:
Qin Shihuang is a household name throughout the Orient, yet few in the West outside of a handful of Asian experts, have heard of this ancestor of all Oriental despots….[A]ssisted by the ruthless Legalist Li Si, he threw all his energies into the quest for power….Every area of life was regulated. The people were not permitted to bear arms, and all weapons were confiscated and sent to the capital. Aristocratic families were uprooted from their estates and moved en masse to the capital where they could be better kept under control….For major capital crimes, not only the offender but his entire family were annihilated. Those convicted of lesser crimes were sent by the millions to labor on government projects in a forerunner of the twentieth-century gulag….The Qin emperor launched a series of wars to subjugate neighboring peoples and expand the borders of the nation….To concentrate the state power needed to carry out these hegemonic thrusts, the world’s first cult of personality was invented. Clever ministers attributed god-like powers to the Qin emperor…Still, despite the harshness of his laws and the strength of his personality cult, occasional acts of sedition did occur. The only way to achieve perfect control over his subjects, Li Si informed Emperor Qin, was to eradicate thought itself. Qin Shihuang agreed, and issued an imperial edict: “Anyone indulging in political or philosophical discussion will be put to death, and his body exposed in public. Scholars who use examples from antiquity to criticize the present…will be executed, they and their families!”…Pyres of burning books lit up the cities and towns as China’s ancient literature was reduced to ashes. For possessing forbidden texts, three million men had their faces branded…and were deported to the Great Wall. Numerous scholars committed suicide in protest, while others hanged or drowned themselves out of fear.
With the Communist takeover of the Chinese mainland in 1949, the brief flowering of civil society in China under the Republic was suppressed and the traditional pattern of complete subordination of society to the state, the Legalist pattern, was reinstated.
Mao’s dictatorial reign so ruined China — through the twin disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution — that the Chinese Communist party resolved that henceforth China would be ruled by a committee of the party’s leaders rather than one man and the party’s chairman would be “term limited.” But fast forward to 2018. Under Xi Jinpeng, China has reverted to its Qin Shihuang / Mao totalitarian heritage, but with vastly greater economic, technological, demographic, and military power than Qin Shihuang or Mao ever enjoyed. China’s leading Communists have accepted this bargain with the devil in the hope that the Chinese race will conquer world supremacy in the coming decades. They see a decadent, gullible US as the only obstacle to their ambition.
Legalist thought control over the Chinese population is exerted through near-total control of media and internet communications and surveillance cameras through cities, villages, and even rest rooms. Religions are persecuted or suppressed outright. Members of the Falun Gong, a Buddhist sect, have been arrested, tortured, executed, and their organs harvested for transplanting. Chinese schoolchildren are fed a fictitious history of US hatred and crimes against China from the mid-19th century on, the opposite of the truth. Chinese leaders see themselves in a state of war with the US, but official policy is to deceive the US and world as to its actual thoughts and plans.
China’s “Nine Dash Line” claiming most of the South China Sea, despite an International Court ruling to the contrary
But not entirely. Buddhist Tibet and Moslem Xinjiang (in China’s northwest) have become occupied nations under military rule. Hong Kong was promised autonomy when Britain ceded it to China, but the promise was quickly broken. China puts out revised maps at will, erasing borders and claiming ownership of territories and seas to which it has no legal claim, such as the South China Sea. Chinese dam construction on the Mekong River is ruining the livelihood of fishermen and peasants downstream. Chairman Xi has declared that the conquest of Taiwan is one of his life goals. Another is to expel the US from Asia and the Western Pacific.
Such are China’s intentions. What about its capabilities? First of all, there is its proxy nuclear ICBM state, North Korea, with which it has a mutual defense pact and which it covertly arms and supplies. China itself has a robust nuclear first-strike capability against the US. It has a tested anti-satellite capability, negating a key US advantage, and a missile defense system. It has an apparent lead in quantum computing and telecommunications. It is building a navy and submarine force. It is rapidly catching up to the US in Artificial Intelligence. Its Chengdu J-20 fifth generation air superiority fighter may soon be superior to the US F-22 Raptor. It has a massive cyberespionage capability, which enabled it to make rapid progress in technology and defense — by theft.
China is not going to become a normal nation, as many Americans thought until recently. Its population is brainwashed or cowed by a totalitarian police state more thorough than has ever before existed. If the US and its allies let China have its way in any of its imperial projects, this will just encourage its Legalist dictator to mobilize the state for its next desired predation.
The US has its work cut out for it: Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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