The age of the Chinese regime’s “benevolence” is long over; war was declared years ago.
Communist China has been at war with its main adversary—the United States of America—for years. Sadly, most Americans have not been paying attention. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) became quiescent, with a general policy promoted by Deng Xiaoping.
No slouches on superstition and luck, the CCP routinely capitalizes on the number three to pursue its goals and objectives.
- Mao’s Three Phase Theory of revolutionary war, which included establishing a secure base of operations, expansion of controlled areas through terror and attacks on isolated enemy units, and destruction of the enemy in large scale battle.
- Mao’s Three Main Rules of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) discipline: 1) obey all orders; 2) take nothing so much as a needle or thread from the masses; and 3) turn in everything captured.
- Mao’s Three Anti-campaign, which “targeted communist cadres who had become too close to China’s capitalists.”
- Mao’s Three Worlds, defined as first world (United States and USSR at the time), second world (Japan, Canada, and Europe), and the third world (everybody else).
- The Three Warfares, which include public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare.
- The Three U.S.-China communiques, which established the flawed “one-China policy” that essentially conceded Taiwan to the PRC.
But the most important “triple three” was Xi’s initiation and/or furtherance of three threes of warfare against the United States in a dramatic departure from the policies of Deng and his successors. Deng’s policies were not overtly belligerent and involved penetrating, coopting, and leveraging international institutions in order to gain access to resources, foreign direct investment, advanced technology, and Western methods in order to restore the Chinese economy and professional class that was destroyed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Xi’s three threes of warfare are directly aimed at elevating China to world leadership while destroying its primary adversary, the United States.
Ideological (or Political) Warfare
The CCP is aggressively attempting to “discredit the tenets of liberal capitalism so that notions like individual freedom and constitutional democracy come to be seen as the relics of an obsolete system,” according to Tablet Magazine. The goal in undermining democratic values and individual liberties of Western democracies is to both safeguard China’s own authoritarian regime and also to assert world leadership.Euphemisms such as “whole process democracy,” “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics”—that are endlessly repeated by Chinese diplomats and Xi himself—mask the CCP’s true intention to fundamentally change the world order and replace Western liberal democracies with the ideological precepts that lead to CCP authoritarian rule over all nations in the future.
Legal Warfare
This is an excellent definition of legal warfare as employed by the CCP: “Legal warfare, at its most basic, involves ‘arguing that one’s own side is obeying the law, criticizing the other side for violating the law [weifa], and making arguments for one’s own side in cases where there are also violations of the law,’” according to The Heritage Foundation.The CCP’s goal in employing legal warfare is to undermine the international system and especially the Western tradition of the “rule of law” by propagating a Chinese legal framework that supersedes international law.
According to Article 38 of the law, it can apply even to offenses committed “outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region.” That means an American penning an editorial for a U.S. newspaper that argues for, say, sanctions against China, could technically fall afoul of the law for “inciting hatred” against Beijing. If its jurisdiction is ever accepted, this will mean the end of national sovereignty of other nations while turning the United Nations into nothing more than a CCP enforcement agency.
Psychological Warfare
While the PLA “Political Work Regulations”—published in 2003 and 2010 that address the employment of psychological warfare—are focused on pre-war activities to “soften up the enemy” for kinetic warfare, the CCP continuously employs the basic concepts to achieve other objectives. For example, to undermine any international coalitions oriented toward stopping PRC aggression and intimidation of its neighbors and others, including forced PLA intrusions into disputed areas, predatory Chinese mercantilist trade practices, rampant continuing economic espionage, and CCP efforts to unilaterally exert Chinese leadership in all spheres of human endeavors.These actions are all aimed at conveying a perception of lack of public support for anti-China public policies in the United States and other countries while marginalizing voices that speak out about Chinese authoritarian practices.