China's Real Olympics Over Sport of Hegemony

By Diane Petryk-Bloom

Lifestyle features that are filling the airwaves during lulls in Olympic coverage from Beijing have reported a fascinating fact: Chinese families that fled totalitarian rule and came to the United States are finding their children reversing the trend. Yes, some Chinese-Americans are returning to their homeland. They’re betting this will be the Chinese Century.

In the 19th Century, Britannia ruled the waves, presided over an empire on which the sun never set, and held the world in the grip of an uneasy peace. In the early 20th Century, starting after World War I and unmistakably after WWII, it was America’s turn to spread its influence and police many an international mess. In the words of Time/Life publisher Henry Luce, it was the “American Century.”

It is becoming increasing clear that the scepter is slipping form America’s hands. If we haven’t heard it hit the pavement yet, overextension of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, worldwide opprobrium, and daunting debt hint strongly that the clink is coming.

Which nation, if any, will pick it up? As this is written, Russia is stepping up it militarism against the former Soviet state of Georgia. Islamic people scattered across the globe, and out-reproducing the people of liberal western democracies, believe Allah is top god—and they don’t separate religion and politics. India grows in population and economic clout. China? Well no one is about to tell this nation of 1.3 billion to tear down its wall.

True, the Chinese do not enjoy democracy or personal rights as we know them in the west. But they have the freedom to make money now and that is fueling their enormous growth. If they are still restricted in many ways, their prison is so huge it almost doesn’t matter to them. We can’t expect them to overthrow their government. They are charging ahead as an unprecedented economic force.

Moreover, they may soon be staring down at us from the moon.

In 2006, China unveiled sweeping plans for lofting Earth orbiting satellites for a multitude of duties, expanding its human space flight abilities, and carrying out a multi-step program for lunar exploration

Future historians may have a laugh reporting that the US-Russian space race was won by the Chinese! For those who scorn such exploration for exploration’s sake, there’s the military advantage of the high ground to consider.

In fact, China nominated itself for world leader back in the 1990s. China called for “a new world order,” a new “peace” over which it would presumably preside.

Periods of peace imposed by a single superpower have often produced substantial benefits to nations roped into the sphere of influence of the overlord. Conquered, cowed, or allied countries have been able to take down their fortress walls, open up their societies, and concentrate on productivity instead of defense and warfare.

But there have also been considerable disadvantages for those who are squashed under the thumb of a megapower. The nation running the world gets to influence – or dictate – how its vassals think, govern, eat and speak. It has the privilege of sending troops into lesser lands at the slightest excuse – even a trumped up one if it needs what they have.

Life in those places can be quite cheap. The Athens of ultimate democracy – that of Pericles’ Golden Age – annihilated populations of entire city-states and razed their buildings to the ground when Athens’ leader felt such punishment was necessary to make a point. Cities in the Athenian League were allegedly independent allies, but woe be unto the ally that got out of line.

Rome in the golden days of the Pax Romana crucified 6,000 rebellious slaves alongside one of its greatest highways, the Appian Way. The victims acted as writing, moaning billboards advertising the penalties of civic unrest.

Russia, when it imposed its version of peace on a good part of Europe and Asia in the 20th century, did without Rome’s theatrical flair. It systematically starved the Ukraine into submission, sent tanks into the streets of Prague, invented the Gulag for political dissidents and writers and artists and anyone else inconveniently vocal.

Even the United States, probably one of the most benevolent hegemons of all time, trampled on weaker nations and propped up vile dictators as long as they were against communism. It wreaked havoc in the Philippines, Cuba, and snatched territory from Mexico and Spain. Increasingly it has been hard to deny the adventure in Iraq was for anything other than oil and profiteering.

The lesson of these histories is simple. The tight grip of a monolithic superpower frequently allows average folks to go about their daily business without fear that they will be hauled off to unrevealed prisons for undisclosed treatment without legal representation -- or that any random vehicle or mode of public transport may explode at any time.

Islamic extremists have been trying to put an end to such security, but by and large we still have them in this country.

If we want to keep them, we need the central superpower to be us.

China disagrees.

The Chinese are calling for an end to “hegemonism” –the Chinese and Soviet codeword for domination of the world by a single power. Yet all the signs are that China is positioning itself to be the next great hegemon. China has been recruiting nations in South America, the Middle East, and Asia for what it has specifically told each of them will be the “new world order,” one that will put an end to the “gunboat diplomacy,” neo-colonialism,” and the “hegemonism” of an unnamed rival power.

That unnamed power is the United States.

What the nature of a Chinese-run global peace would be, we will have to see. Odds are it won’t involve peace and freedom for Tibet or Taiwan. It probably won’t make Japan or South Korea feel comfortable to be in the neighborhood. It won’t allow a parent to protest the construction quality of a death-tap school or a monk to worship freely.

Here’s what China is laboring on:

They have put big bucks into more than Olympic venues and displays. According to Jane’s Information Group, the world’s top gatherer of military hardware data, they are funding “leapfrog” military technologies.

The Chinese have long had a large nuclear arsenal mounted on some of the world’s most powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and packaged in sophisticated MIRVed warheads (MIRV stands for “multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicle” – a device that allows one rocket to carry a cluster of nuclear bombs, each aimed at a different city). But the Chinese count on this nuclear arsenal as a deterrent – a way of keeping the U.S.’s nuclear forces a bay.

In other words, they can afford to smile and nod while President Bush scolds them about human rights.

In reality, the Chinese know that America’s military ability to operate overseas is totally dependent on just about a dozen aircraft carriers: The Kitty Hawk retires this year. That leaves the Dwight D. Enterprise, Nimitz, Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman and the Ronald Reagan. The George H.W. Bush is to be commissioned in 2009; the Gerald Ford is planned for 2012, as are two unnamed carriers, for 2019 and 2023 respectively.

But they could all be dust at China’s whim.

China’s ace is a missile designed to destroy every single one of these floating flight decks.

An expert at Jane’s Information Group says China’s ship obliterating cruise missile –code named SS-N-22, “the “Sunburn” – wa a dangerous aircraft killer in its Soviet version, capable of flying at supersonic speed just over the water’s surface and evading detection by following an unpredictable zigzag course while carrying a nuclear warhead.
With modifications made by the Chinese – whose experience in manufacturing consumer semiconductor devices has put them far ahead of the Russians in microelectronics –the missile goes into what the Jane’s experts call a “gray” category, That means it’s nearly impossible to detect and destroy.

China originally purchased at least 16 of the missiles from cash-hungry Russian sellers. Each is capable of delivering an explosive punch six times more powerful than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.

We do not know how many additional Sunburns the Chinese have manufactured, and we do not know what sort of upgrades the Chinese have made. We do know, however, that the Chinese started their own cruise missile program in 1977, reverse engineered the US Tomahawk missile in the 1990s, and had nuclear-tipped cruise missiles by 1995.

We also know the Chinese created one of the most advanced anti-ship missiles of the late 20th Century, the Silkworm (referred to by China as the Hai Ying-2), were working on a cruise missile with an astonishing 1,500-mile range in the year 2000, and at that point had long since perfected mass production of the devices, cranking them out in sufficient abundance to allow for high-quality exports to other nations.

No wonder Chinese military documents proudly announce that “the strategic superiority which can be claimed by the US is close to zero. It does not even enjoy a sure advantage in terms of foreseeable scale of war and the high-tech content which can be applied to combat.”

The Chinese initially installed their Sunburn strike weapons on two new Russian-built, Sovremenny-class guided-missile destroyers. Their next plan was rumored to be one of greater simplicity –building vessels roughly the size of a PT boat capable of carrying one Sunburn missile each.

Here’s where the Tom Clancy stuff comes in. By skimming the water and using violent end maneuvers that throw off defenses, Sunburn missiles have the capacity to put the U.S. military totally out of business in the western pacific. AT it’s current detection capability, the Navy would have to plot a response in 2.5 seconds. Impossible.

If it’s on which swimmer’s fingers touch the pool wall a fraction of a second before another’s, the eyes of the world are watching the wrong clock.

In other words, in 2001 China was capable of turning any soldiers, sailors, or pilots sent to Japan, Korea, the Philippines, or Taiwan into grounds meat. Chinese political and military leaders are not he least bit afraid that nuclear war would follow. They’ve leaked the word to Reuters that, to quote an unnamed “source close to China’s military”: “Americans can’t tolerate death.”

Says this Asian Deep Throat: China’s generals “look at your yellow ribbons for these servicemen and your casualty-free Kosovo and they think you don’t have the will.”

A 1999 document from China’s office of the Central Military Commission backs this up. “Our principle,” it states, “is (one of being) ‘willing to sustain major losses of our armed forces to defend even just one square inch of land.’ If the U.S. forces lose thousands or hundreds of men under our powerful strikes, the anti-war sentiment within their country will force the U.S. government to take the same path as they did in Vietnam.”

All through the 1990s and the first years of the 21st Century, the Chinese slowly and patiently intensified demands that Taiwan be returned to their control. China has also declared sovereignty over virtually everything in the South China Sea, an area rich in natural gas and oil…and an area dotted with landmasses six other countries call their own. The Chinese have bragged in their military documents that they have “conquering-all operational capacity.” With the Sunburn missile, they have the magic bullet with which to take what they want. But that is not the Chinese way. They are likely to advance on their prey with the same patience they showed in swallowing Hong Kong back in 1997 and Macau in 1999.

Weaponry is just one sign that China is increasing its potential for hegemony – its readiness for a global sway that sidelines the United States. China is eating America’s socks economically, too. According to some analysts—like those at the Japan Times—China’s economy is already the second largest in the world…and it’ sprinting fast to catch up with the U.S.’s China’s officially-reported Gross Domestic Product is almost twice that of the third-place runner-up, Japan. While the U.S> ran a trade deficit of more than $360 billion in the year 2000 alone, China pocketed an annual $84 billion surplus with the U.S> and another $24.9 billion surplus with Japan.

In other words, China has become an economic vacuum cleaner emptying the wallets of America and its allies. We’ve known for a long time that you could pick any shopping mall, discount store or local chain store in America and find evidence of our major dependency on Chinese goods. A staggering percentage of clothing, toys, and electronic devices on sale originate in China. Take away all items that say “made in China,” and the average America would be helpless.

But that’ just the beginning. China has made huge profits on export goods by doing what social theorists Jane Jacobs calls “import replacement” – cranking out items once made by Americans, Japanese, Korean, or Thai workers at a price no American, Japanese, Korean, or Thai can meat. The next step, as the People’s Daily says, is to “intensify the content of high-technology.”

Which means the Chinese want to out-sprint the U.S. in the race toward 22nd Century innovations.

The nation that holds the innovative high ground is usually the one that rules the world.

But what are China’s chances of actually outpacing Bill Gates and America’s other techno-leaders in the race toward next-generation wonders? Very good, indeed.

Green parties stoking fears of “Frankenfoods” and other new agricultural technologies are trying to drag Europe and the U.S. into the agro-past. Meanwhile, China has jumped enthusiastically into genetically modified seed use. A million Chinese farmers now grow genetically-modified cotton, saving $100 billion on pesticides and losses to insects and rodents, and giving china –th former land of famine—an increasingly potent agricultu5al export industry…one capable, in the words of Japan’s Agricultural Ministry, of “flooding” Japan with cheap vegetable imports.

The there’s optoelectronics—a $10-bilion business for the Chinese as of 2001, and growing at the rate of 50percent a year. And computer education—a million Chinese a year are learning to use Microsoft software and consumer software creation. Microsoft, which very seldom plants research and development operations on foreign soil, established a software R&D center in Beijing way back in 1998. Not to mention artificial intelligence—where one investor feels Guangzhou’s Hua Ling Group “is a step ahead of foreign scientists.”

Beginning in 2003 China began to capture the world’s semiconductor business. This allowed it to suck up foreign expertise in military and civilian semiconductor development and fabrication, then imitate, borrow and outpace it. Once the bait was laid out, the number of those who happily stumbled into the trap was remarkable. Motorola, which as of November 2000 had already seeded China with eight semiconductor design houses and at least one mobile-handset plant, announced that it would spend close to $2 billion on a new Chinese chip production complex. Japan’s NEC, the world’s fourth- largest chipmaker, built a $1.2 million chip plant in China’s Zhangjiang High-Tech Industrial Park. Meantime, investors from Taiwan and a variety of other international locations were building a $1.6 billion chip foundry in the same park.

In the early 1990s, 70 percent of foreign direct investment in the Asian nations went to Southeast Asian tigers and only 30 percent to China. By 2001, the tigers had been declawed and defanged by their Chinese neighbor, which swallowed 70 percent of foreign investment funds. Further dollars and high-tech investment will continue to flow in. One reason –the Chinese are graduating more students with information technology training than any other low-cost-labor nation.

“Their mathematics background is excellent. It’s disciplined and thorough in a way that you often can’t find in the west,” says Microsoft’s head of research in China, American-born Kai-fu Lee (one of many highly skilled Asians the Chinese have lured back to fuel the high tech climb of their homeland). But education and intelligence are not the only Chinese edge. By 2000, Intel had a $400-million flash memory assembly plant up and running in Shanghai and a research and development center near Beijing. Then when the world economy crashed in 2001, Intel defied logic and invested an additional $302 million. The money was used to expand a Shanghai-based Intel plant dedicated to the manufacture of Intel 845 chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor. The move was not so daft as it may have seemed.

While consumers in the rest of the world were up to their ears in computers and were snapping their purses shut, China’s then 1.2 billion buyers were expected to increase their purchase of PCs by 20 percent a year. In the long run, Intel, NEC, Microsoft, and the others rushing to build plants and other facilities in China may regret their eagerness. China steals the technologies of outsiders, and then becomes the outside-firm’s most ferocious competitor. The U.S. did this in the 19th Century when it sent industrial spies to England to ferret out the secrets of Britain’s top-secret industrial devices—mechanized weaving machines. Though it was illegal to take drawings or plans of these machines out of the U.K., Americans smuggled sketches and blueprints to New England and built their own mass-production textile mills. From the 1950s to the 1980s the Japanese did the same to the U.S.—gutting the consumer electronics industry and pummeling auto companies into a sorry state.

Now it’s China’s turn. The Chinese already show signs of turning the tables on America in forward-looking fields. Take robotics, for instance. In 1988, the Shenyang Institute of Automation paid a firm called Perry Tritech in Florida a million dollars for an unusual package deal: a deep-sea robot, spare parts, and training in robot technology. By 1991, the Chinese had upgraded the undersea rover—a device that comes in handy for inspections of floating oilrigs and dams. In fact, they’d improved its qualities and lowered its price so much that they were able to sell their new version of the ROV (remote-operated vehicle) to several American companies. Intel China President Wee Theng Tan was extremely open about this form of techno-theft when he said proudly: “We (Intel) will continue to bring our leading edge technical and manufacturing expertise to China to help the country develop a leadership role in high-end value-added manufacturing technologies.”

But the real crunch will come when China takes advantage of its people’s ingenuity and respect for education by out-innovating the U.S. China—the nation that created the word’s first modern paper, first encyclopedias, first magnetic compass, first gun powder, and first cannon—held the high ground in technology from roughly 200 BC until 1600 AD. Now the Chinese are working hard to get back to the leading edge and beyond, moving into such fields as nanotechnology. A team of four scientists at Jiaotong University in Shanghai announced in 2001 that they’d created a micro-motor a quarter the size of a sesame seed. The device, they said, was smaller and lighter than any developed in the U.S., Europe, or Japan. It was exactly the sort of thing the medical equipment industry was looking for. In another area, telecommunications, Dr. Wei Chen—an American-born Chinese—started a company in china to manufacture and sell his pioneering wireless local-loop equipment. And the institute of Developmental Biology in Beijing is working on beyond-the-envelope genetic engineering.

Boast the writer of one 1999 Chinese document from the Office of the Central Military commission: “In the five thousand years of outstanding civilization, our country has commanded a predominant position in the whole world.” And they’re right. To the Chinese, dominance of the world’s economy would simply mean a return to the way things used to be. Balance of payments deficits between China and the West go back at least 2,000 years, to the days when the Romans nearly depleted the product of their Laurium and Pangaeum silver mines to pay for Chinese silk. Eighteen hundred years later, the Chinese delusion began—the notion that one could make vast sums of money by selling goods to China’s masses. This was a dream, a fantasy. China sold goods the world wanted—silk, porcelain (called “China” because it became a necessity in Western homes), and tea) another daily necessity in the British lifestyle). But the West had nothing the Chinese needed.

The balance of trade deficits threatened to drain the coffers of Britain and America until the puritanical Empire of Queen Victoria began an official policy of breaking Chinese law by selling and promoting opium from England’s Indian territories. Leading American families—from the Forbes to the Delanos—made millions smuggling illicit drugs into the Chinese market. When the Chinese, under Lin Tse-hsu, Yeh Ming-ch’en, and Hsu Kuang-chin, mounted several potentially successful internal wars on the drug trade, the West responded with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856. To be specific, Europeans and Americans used steam-powered gunboats to shove opiates down China’s throat.

To get an idea of how this felt to the Chinese, imagine what would happen if Colombia, impatient with America’s resistance to its export trade in cocaine and heroin, mounted a war against he U.S., won, forced America to legalize narcotics, then went on a mass-marketing campaign to put an addict in every home, a line of coke up every nostril, and a needle in every American teenager’s arm.

Despite this experience, the delusion that one could make millions selling legitimate goods and services to the Chinese continued. Douglas MacArthur’s father was dazzled by it in the 19th Century. MacArthur himself continued with it. What American automakers and other who made huge investments in Chinese joint ventures failed to realize was China’s new economic strategy fort he 20th and 21st centuries: Let the foreign barbarians build their plants; make sure those factories are under the control of Chinese co-owners; study the manufacturing machinery, organizational techniques, and patented technologies the Western investors so graciously provide; imitate them, improve on them, steal those under patent or licensing protection; then undercut the American and U.S. industries that had been foolish enough to offer themselves on the altar of sacrifice to the new China.

A lucrative practice. But the more significant payoff will come on the geopolitical side of the equation.

Chinas former President Jiang Zemin took a six-nation trip to the strategic backyard of the United States—Latin America—in April 2001,calling on Latin Americans to work with China toward building, to use his catchphrase, a “new international order” (the six nations were Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, and Venezuela). Jiang found enormous eagerness in anti-American Venezuela (where Chinese have invested $530 million and have interests in two oil fields), in Chile, in Argentina, and in Cuba, to which the Chinese are lending $400 million.

Meanwhile, Chinese power showed itself in many another international nuance. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi put improving relations with China at the top of his international agenda when he rose to power in May 2001. Mexican President Vicente Fox visited Jiang in China that June. Fox was wary of the impact of cheap Chinese imports on Mexican industry. (In just two months –January and February 2001—China sold $465 million in products to Mexico but bought only $32 million worth of Mexican products.) Yet Fox felt it necessary to make a pilgrimage to Beijing.

By July 2008, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, would conclude that the United States lost 2.3 million jobs to China between 2001 and 2007. Moreover, the report concluded that it’s almost impossible for American manufacturers to compete because of China’s “unfair trade practices.”

These include inadequate health and safety regulations for production workers, manufacturing subsidies from the Chinese government, child labor, an artificially low value for the Chinese currency, the yuan, and lax environmental rules that permit pollution far beyond what the United States demands of industrial companies.

Now you know why the Olympic cyclists found particulate matter in the air so severe some had to drop out of competition. Others donned face masks. Everyone’s lungs were being sacrificed for Chinese export profits. It’s just cheaper to pollute.

Now the Chinese are exploiting Africa as a market. The Chinese have built Africa’s biggest supermarket in Johannesburg, a power-generating equipment plant in Nigeria, and methane tanks in Uganda before moving on to solar and hydro power projects.

Cambodia’s Hun Sen has urged other nations to follow an anti-Taiwan, one-China policy to keep Beijing happy and deliver Taiwan into China’s hands. Only July 15, 2001, Jiang Zemin headed for Moscow, where he signed a friendship treaty. The Bush administration said it was not afraid of this agreement because China still needs the U.S. for investment and technology—meaning George W. Bush doesn’t see how this is letting China such America dry.

Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese entered a new era of energy cooperation in 2006 when they signed the Sino-Russian Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. In 2006.

Zemin also took his message of a new world order and “peace” led by China to the ASEAN states: Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, repeating that this was to counter the politics of some big world powers.

China has frequently railed against what it calls “encirclement,” but its diplomatic maneuverings seem carefully designed to encircle Europe and the U.S. Take China’s Islamic connection.

In 1999, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Zemin signed an agreement establishing strategic cooperation. Reported China’s government mouthpiece People’s Daily, the Egyptian ambassador to China said Egypt “opposes certain countries which use the human rights issue to interfere in the internal affairs of China and other countries” and “supports China’s just struggle against power politics and hegemonism.” Meanwhile, the Chinese and Egyptian news media—both noted for their lack of free expression--engaged in active exchanges.

China is building “a special economic zone” in the northwest Suez. And China has close ties with the Palestinians. Far more important, China makes a considerable amount of money selling high-tech weapons—including nuclear and missile parts and instructions—to “rogue nations” like Iran and Iraq. China also had a hand in helping Pakistan build “the Islamic bomb.”

In one sense, this is reassuring. It shows that the Chinese can be as shortsighted as the U.S. From 1980 onward, the CIA and the People’s Liberation Army backed the Taliban in Afghanistan. China cooperated with the U.S> and Saudi Arabia in arming and training 50,000 militant Muslims from 30 countries for this “freedom-fighting” Jihad.

The Chinese joined America in giving Osama Bin Laden his troops, and sent 300 officers to train the mujahideen in the use of sophisticated weapons—like Chinese-made anti0tank missiles.

When the Taliban took over in 1995, support for it had been a bipartisan affair in the U.S., beginning in the carter Administration and continuing under Reagan and Bush. The U.S. helped build the very force that would come back to strike it on September 11, 2001. The resulting worldwide war of the U.S. and its allied against “terrorism” could theoretically weaken both the West and the Islamic militants and help hand world domination over to the Chinese.

Once the smoke of battle between Islamic wackos and the West has cleared, however, a bin Laden-style blowback could prove equally dangerous to Beijing. There is an extremely active jihad—Islamic holy war—taking place in China’s “wild west” province, Xinjiang. It is part of a widespread military and ideological campaign to take all Central Asia—including Xinjiang, Chechnya, Dagestan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kashmir, and Uzbekistan—thus “liberating” this enormous sweep of territory to be part of dar el Islam –the Islamic world.

The holy warriors’ fervor to make the entire world Islamic could easily go further than China’s border provinces and strike at the Chinese heart. China, with one fifth of the world’s population as a whole, also has the second-largest Islamic population in the world. The Islamic mujahideen that the U.S. and China trained and armed are idealists of the highest degree. They cannot rest until (their view of) justice and purity have been given as a gift to all the citizens of this world and that can only be done by imposing Islamic law—sharia.

Purity and propriety are only possible, they say, when a people has been freed from false idols and taught to worship the one and only god (Allah) and his one and only prophet (Mohammed). China, too, should be ruled by the laws of the Koran, they feel.

The jostling for position between China, Islam, and the U.S. is part of a standard hierarchical game that dates back to the dawn of life 3.5 billion years ago. It has involved in all forms of beings, from microbes to mammals. If an animal or social group doesn’t see an opportunity to move up, it lets the top dog rule without challenge. But if things change, if the alpha male begins to slip, weakened by age or battle, or if the underdog goes form puny adolescent to a muscular adult, or grows stronger by discovering a new source of energy or food, the inferior seizes the opportunity to knock the head honcho out of his number one slot.

The most overly belligerent underdog in today’s world is fundamentalist Islam. But China is working stealthily on the sidelines, perhaps waiting for its chance when Islam and the U.S. and its allies exhaust themselves in the battle.

Zemin summed up China’s goals this way: “The world is far from being tranquil. Hegemonism and power politics still exist and have even developed in the international political, economic, and security fields. The new “gunboat policy” and the economic neo-colonialism pursued by some big powers has severely undermined the sovereign independence and development interest of small and medium-sized countries and has threatened world peace and international security. China firmly opposes hegemonism and power politics and will never seek hegemony—that is a solemn commitment that the Chinese government and the people have made to the whole world.”

Any nation that buys that line is at risk.

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