China’s economic Cold War

of the Communist Party and neutralize the threat that the Chinese military and its nuclear weaponry represented.

China did open up its closed economy, but few of the economic reforms and none of the democratizing political reforms happened. At home, where President Xi Jinping has acquired an absolute power not seen since Mao, China has clamped down on dissent more completely than at any time since Tiananmen, imprisoning political dissenters along with any lawyers who dare represent them, taking over the NGO sector and, with new tools at hand, surveilling the populace more thoroughly than ever before possible.

Abroad, China’s access to Western industry allowed it to thieve intellectual property on an unprecedented scale; simultaneously, it became increasingly belligerent toward its neighbours. China is now involved in territorial disputes with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Pakistan, Russia, Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Mongolia and North Korea, as well as laying claim to the waters of the East and South China Seas. Although China is not in the Arctic, it this year nevertheless laid claim to Arctic resources as a “near-Arctic” state.

An expansionist China, not Russia, represents the greatest long-term military threat to the West. In past wars, countries bombed their enemies’ factories, steel mills, electricity plants and other infrastructure to compromise their ability to wage a protracted war. In this new de facto Cold War, China is compromising our resiliency by deploying its economic might to take over our industries without needing to fire a single bullet.

Through all this, what’s known as China’s Rise, the West has been its financier and enabler, fecklessly comforting ourselves with the gains gotten from China’s cheaper consumer goods, and putting out of mind the longterm pains that await us.