To be more precise, the book is about how the Communist Party of China (CCP) took over while America’s elite slept.
Let’s state some facts about the CCP first:
• Fifty to one hundred million people perished under its 70-year rule.
• It claimed to be anti-dictatorship and pro-democracy while fighting for power in the 1940s, but produced the most brutal dictator and ruthless regime soon after it took over China.
• Today, numerous dissidents have been jailed, and more than one million Uighurs are placed in modern concentration camps. People are jailed for reasons as absurd as not supporting watching National Day Parade.
Spalding is the right person to write this book to wake up the civilized world. China watchers can be largely grouped into the following categories:
1. Corporatists/globalist/financiers who have vested financial interests in Mainland China. The concepts of liberty, equality, country are novel to them. They have mansions all over the world and support whatever generating profit for them. They lobby for the CCP all the time.
2. Western scholars in the pockets of CCP. Their careers rely on field trips to China which visa requires self-censorship. The CCP put them in their pockets by providing VIP treatment – free tours, adjunct professorships, gifts, lavish dinners…
3. Principled China experts who know the CCP, Chinese people, Chinese culture deeply (often speak fluent mandarin, and have extensive first-hand interactions and connections with Chinese people) and firmly hold their conviction of freedom, liberty and democracy. The author and people like Perry Link, Yu Ying-shih are in this category. Spalding’s various recent China related positions in two US administrations make him stand out in dissecting the CCP with unique knowledge.
You often get parroting of CCP narratives from the first two categories, but get enlightenment from the third. This book is indeed enlightening. Because of the author’s reputation, I pre-ordered the book 3 months in advance, and red it over the first weekend after its release.
If you are unable to read the entire book but want to get a quick understanding of the issue addressed by this book, please spend a few minutes reading the excellent introduction that is essentially a summary. It clearly points out the mother of all issues: the CCP regards the American core values – rights of free speech and freedom of religion – as the threats to their existence, so they have to fight America, not necessarily with traditional military weapons, for their survival. They have been gaining in all fronts with the help of elites and general complacency.
The book is highly readable. It does not enlist any abstract theories or obscure anecdotes to make the arguments. It uses telling stories out the author’s own experience or investigation to convince people. It starts with a startling story about how a once highly respected American think tank censored its project to align with the CCP’s interests and many other organizations’ fear of antagonizing the funding sources related to the CCP. The CCP’s influencing web covers law firms, NGOs, legislators as high as the senate leader, current and former government officials of both political parties. America’s loss in all fronts can be attributed to something described by two words: Unrestricted Warfare. If you wonder how all of this is related to ordinary people, here you go: “Simply put, 3.4 million US jobs vanished between 2001 and 2017 due to our trade relationship with China”. The book connects frequently discussed d CCP’s regular rule violation, intellectual property theft with tangible things for ordinary people such as $37 billion per year income reduction for impacted American workers. “This book is for and about the men and women of America who yearn for the better life they had before their elites welcomed their enemy into the WTO and into their lives.”.
Chapter 2 is a remarkable succinct history of China and Sino-US relationship as related to this book. This is great for those who are interested in the topic of this book but have had very limited exposure to Chinese history. It shows that America’s complacency with the CCP started from the first high level meeting between the CCP and the US government to normalize the relationship - Kissinger’s trip to China in 1971. I would even trace it back to the 1940s when some US officials were deceived by the CCP disguised as a pro-democracy, anti-dictatorship political party.
The economic front is where the US suffered by far the most damage incurred by the CCP. Chapter three uses solid evidence to show how the CCP uses piracy, espionage, hacking, counterfeit, taking advantage of obsolete treaties to advance on the US. It also paints a clear picture of the giant Ponzi scheme like Mainland economy that scams innocent US investors to help keep it going, and the gigantic real estate (called unreal estate by the book) bubble. “China had three times the amount of money in circulation than the United States did, while generating $4 trillion less in GDP.”
The military gain of China over the US while the US was fighting prolonged counterproductive wars costing trillions of dollars eventually is alarming. As a former Brig General working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the author saw everything, fought his best to fend off the unconventional CCP assault assisted by American elites. The CCP has gutted the US manufacturing so much that some military operations could be paralyzed should the CCP decides to cut the supply.
On the digital front, the CCP is taking full advantage of the US openness while closing Mainland China with its notorious Great Firewall. It employs a two-million strong cyber army (so-called “public opinion analysts”) to troll the internet. PLA Unit 6139 keeps launching sophisticated attacks on all kinds of organizations in the US (government, companies, NGOs…). “a media lab at Beijing’s Tsinghua University receives the entire feed of data from China’s popular Weibo platform—that is, the posts, images, videos, memes, and metadata of its 450 million-plus users—to analyze.” You can imagine what a surveillance police state PRC is.
Chapter 5 on 5G is most fascinating. As the author of a proposal for the National Security Council on the nation’s strategy for 5G, Spalding can speak authoritatively on this topic. This chapter can be used as a reference for a quick understanding of 5G and its potential ubiquitous impact on the society. Ironically, the author was forced out of the White House due to this proposal opposed by powerful telecom industry lobbyists. This is where the grace of the author shines. Many people in his situation would hold grudges against superiors and/or colleagues, and badmouth them in talks, books. He does not. On the contrary, he tries to shine a light on the bright side. I believe it is a blessing for him to be forced out because otherwise we would not have this great book and author’s tireless eloquent talks in front of different cameras to wake up American people.
As a former member of two administrations, the author reveals how the CCP has managed to change the diplomatic behavior of the US: “the instructions from the Obama administration were loud and clear: we are not going to do anything in public to antagonize China, as the relationship is too significant financially.” The book details a case of self-censorship for the CCP by American taxpayer funded Voice of America. The CCP’s influence and infiltration are holistic and multipronged. Politicians and their families, academics, government officials are all their targets.
Though the author is apparently not recommending doing business in China, the book’s chapter 8 would be highly valuable for anyone who chooses to do so. It uses specific cases to advise you on how to protect your interests in a very uncertain environment where everything is under the control of the CCP.
One cannot leave the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) out when talking about the influence of the CCP. The book has an incisive dissection of this CCP’s grand scheme with the help of Nadège Rolland, a veteran French defense analyst.
The gem of the book is the action plan for us – the last two chapters. If you cannot find the time to read the whole book to understand the author’s systematic reasoning, but are willing to take his words at face value, read the last two chapters and take any actions you can to combat the massive international cancer CCP.
It starts with revealing stories about how the US brought down the USSR of which I had never heard. Since the CCP survives and grows by getting around rules, cheating, stealing, bribery. Enforcing laws and rules forcefully is a common sense based effective approach to combat them. The book lists different areas for such actions largely for the government to take. However, ordinary people can urge government officials, their representatives, their fund managers to do the right thing. The book concludes with 4 basic concepts: 1. Lead with principles based on the 4 freedoms. 2. Strengthen America by rebuilding the national infrastructure. 3. Organize to compete by helping and protecting our own innovation. 4. Rebuild the international order.
This book’s timing couldn’t better. We are at a historic juncture where people will determine whether the world will allow the CCP to cause disasters like that created by Nazi Germany last century.
The book is quite thorough about the threats from the CCP. However, I wish the author could take this opportunity to explain a highly relevant truth often forgotten by people – a totalitarian system is bound to have conflicts with democracies regardless of who are in the system. This will help dispel the common illusion of a benign totalitarian regime peacefully coexisting with democracies with the help of some internal reforming forces as advocated by the infamous open letter China is not an enemy.
I can understand that it is better to overestimate the strength of an enemy than to underestimate it when devising a plan to combating it. I would like to point out that totalitarian regimes often grossly exaggerate its power and achievements at all levels. Let me use the Korean War as an example. The PLA troops were mostly battle-hardened veterans fresh from the civil war ended a year earlier. Equipped by the USSR with their guns, tanks, fighters, they were not nearly as outgunned by Americans as many people believe. Most American troops were young kids who had never been to a battlefield. The result is a casualty ratio of 9:1 (China:US). The CCP troops often had whole divisions collapsing rapidly. The CCP troops are the best in parades with goose-stepping.
Considering the author has spent most of his career in the US military, a model of meritocracy, I suspect it is hard for him to imagine the ubiquitous nepotism or anti-meritocracy of the CCP’s regime. Xi, a middle school dropout, being at the top of the hierarchy is the norm. There is an estimated implicit price list for military ranks.
I disagree with the widely accepted notion echoed by the book: the CCP achieved “the most mind-boggling growth in the history of the world.” Many use “miracle” to describe it. The Mainland living standard has just reached that of Taiwan and S. Korea in the 1980s based on GDP per capita adjusted for inflation, so the PRC took twice as much time to achieve the same as some other counties. It is true that the CCP is producing billionaires faster than other countries, but 400 million or so Mainlanders live under $5.5 per day, the poverty line for upper-middle-income ($3,956 and $12,235 GDP per capita) to which the PRC belongs now. To me, the disparity is mind-boggling, not the growth.
I noticed two minor errors:
• P.26 Zhou Enlai was the premier, not the foreign minister when he met Kissinger.
• P.26 “ba” is usually translated to hegemony, not tyrant.
This is a superb book. I will recommend it to anyone with potential interest in this topic. I have recommended it to our local library and will send it as holiday gifts.
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