Red China’s Economic Warfare Includes Buying Up America
By George Rasley
The Communist Chinese military doctrine of “all-domain operations” recognizes at least seven domains of warfare in which conflict must be waged to achieve their goal of world domination: air, sea, land, space, cyber, information, economic – and to those we could add scientific and education warfare.*
Red China has long been ramping up their military and intelligence operations, such that they have now surpassed the space and cyber warfare efforts of the United States, and the past 18-months have furnished proof-of-concept, if not evidence of a successful biowarfare attack, via the COVID-19 virus.
The Communist Chinese understanding of war posits that successful attacks will cross domains; thus, we see that the greatest impact of the COVID-19 attack was in the economic domain, not in traditional battlefield casualties. One scholar put the estimated cumulative financial costs of the COVID-19 pandemic (so far) at more than $16 trillion, or approximately 90% of the annual gross domestic product of the United States.
The Communist Chinese concept of economic warfare is not confined to obvious assaults on the American economy through biowarfare, it is also conducted in the cyberwarfare domain through theft of intellectual property and crippling attacks on infrastructure, including our banking and financial infrastructure.
These attacks have been known and recognized for many years, although American political leaders have been reluctant to publicly acknowledge them and averse to counterattacking by responding in kind.
But the Communist Chinese have also been waging economic warfare against the United States on other battlefields and, in many cases, they are using our free market economy against us and doing so with the active assistance of some of America’s largest and most sophisticated corporations – and even our own government.
Chinese conglomerates have been buying stakes in U.S. companies and real estate for over a decade, but this is not the same as a conglomerate like Nestlé buying Gerber baby food or Alpo pet foods – in Communist China the state has a controlling interest in everything.
Meaning when the Communist Chinese buy a controlling interest in an American company – as they did with the former IBM computer operations (now Lenovo), Motorola cellphones and General Electric appliances – an enemy state owns and controls the asset.
In two troubling examples, in its waning days the Obama administration approved the sale of the Lexmark printer and tech company to the Chinese. The Obama administration also approved the sale of precision parts manufacturer Henniges Automotive, which was purchased by the Chinese Communist Party’s state-owned Aviation Industry Corp. of China (AVIC) for approximately $800 million in 2015.
As investigative author Peter Schweizer reported in his book “Secret Empires”: “AVIC sits at the heart of the Chinese military industrial complex. In September 2015, when AVIC bought 51% of American precision parts manufacturer Henniges, the other 49% was purchased by the Biden-and-Kerry-linked BHR.”
John Solomon reported, the Henniges deal with AVIC received CFIUS approval from the Obama-Biden administration (including the John Kerry State Department) in 2015.
The Red Chinese have been very strategic in their targets for acquisition. Technology has obviously been high on their list, but so have food production, media, financial services, and energy.
While the dangers of Red Chinese social media app TikTok have been well-publicized, what should frighten every parent is that the popular social media app Snapchat is now Chinese owned, giving the Communists a backdoor into the social lives and personal secrets of millions of Snapchat users. And the Communists just acquired a piece of another social media giant – Reddit.
Most of these highly strategic acquisitions by Red Chinese companies have gone through with little notice and during the Obama years were rushed through cursory government review. However, some American officials finally began to take notice, and in some cases take action, when the Red Chinese started literally buying-up America.
POLITICO reported recently that Chinese firms have expanded their presence in American agriculture over the last decade by snapping up farmland and purchasing major agribusinesses, like pork processing giant Smithfield Foods. By the start of 2020, Chinese owners controlled about 192,000 agricultural acres in the U.S., worth $1.9 billion, including land used for farming, ranching and forestry, according to the Agriculture Department.
USDA reported in 2018 that China’s agricultural investments in other nations had grown more than tenfold since 2009. The Communist Party has actively supported investments in foreign agriculture as part of its “One Belt One Road” economic development plans, aiming to control a greater piece of China’s food supply chain.
In addition to their farmland holdings, China owns more residential real estate than any other foreign country, according to Market Watch, “Chinese buyers accounted for roughly 25 percent of total foreign investment in U.S. residential real estate.”
So, just to be clear – as Communist China seeks to tighten its grip on our supply chain for pharmaceuticals, rare earths, semiconductors and other crucial components of 21st century life, the Red Chinese are attempting to insulate one of their weakest sectors – food production – by buying and controlling American farmland.
In essence, the Red Chinese are using our own free market economy against us – and succeeding.
There are some signs that American policymakers have finally begun to recognize the threat posed by Red Chinese purchases of American assets, particularly farmland and energy.
The New York Post’s Emily Crane reported Texas lawmakers are blocking a Chinese billionaire from setting up a wind farm near a US military base over fears it could be used to hack into the state’s power grid:
Sun Guangxin, 59, spent five years buying up 140,000 acres in southwest Texas’ Val Verde so he could build the Blue Hills Wind Farm.
The cost of the land, which is close to Laughlin Air Force Base, is estimated to be about $110 million, Forbes reports.
Under Sun’s plan, the farm could have fed into the state’s independently run electricity grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
His efforts, however, ignited a political firestorm after it emerged that Sun — who has a net worth of $2.1 billion — had links to the Chinese Communist Party.
The plans were subsequently thwarted in June when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act, which prevents foreigners from “hostile nations” from accessing critical infrastructure like the Texas grid.
The law was a direct response to Sun’s wind farm plan, according to state Sen. Donna Campbell (R-San Antonio).
At the federal level, our friend Rep. Chip Roy (TX-21) has introduced a bill H.R. 3847 to ban members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from buying land in the United States.
“In their quest for global domination, China has been buying up land and strategic infrastructure all over the world and in the United States,” Roy said.
“Direct Chinese investment in the US economy is a major threat to the American way of life and requires that we take serious action to thwart the Chinese Communist party (CCP) from ever seizing control of strategically valuable domestic assets in the US,” he added.
America’s free market economy isn’t a suicide pact, it is time for our policymakers to recognize that we are in an all-domain war with Red China and allowing our enemies to literally buy our country is a dangerous folly that will inevitably lead to our defeat. We urge CHQ readers and friends to call their Senators and Representative through the toll-free Capitol Switchboard at (1-866-220-0044) to demand they stop the Communist Chinese from buying-up America.
*Marxist ideology holds that every human endeavour is a forum for ideological “struggle,” so in some sense any imaginable human activity is a domain of warfare. Dissecting the various potential domains can become an unhelpful semantic exercise – suffice it to say we accept and respect that others may add domains, name the domains differently or see more than one where we see only one, e.g., are psyops information warfare or its own domain? We leave it to the reader to decide how finely to divide the categories of all-domain warfare.
George Rasley is