US NSA O’Brien hits out at China, compares Xi with Russia’s Stalin
Chinese Communist Party seeks total control over people’s lives. This means economic control, it means political control... thought control ROBERT O’BRIEN ,
US National Security Adviser
NEW DELHI: US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien on Friday launched the Trump administration’s sharpest attack yet on Beijing, comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping to Russia’s brutal dictator Josef Stalin whose policies killed millions, and warning that the Chinese Communist Party was seeking leverage over individual Americans through propaganda and collection of their “most intimate data” via big Chinese companies.
O’Brien, who described the approach of successive US governments towards Beijing as the US’ “biggest miscalculation” since 1930s, said China’s efforts to control the mind of people residing beyond its borders was underway. The communist party, he said, was using trade to coerce compliance with its dictates.
While O’Brien has come out openly about penetration of the Chinese Communist Party in the US, his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval -- as president of the Delhibased think tank Vivekananda International Foundation -wrote a paper on the penetration of PLA intelligence in “enemy countries”. Written a few years back he became NSA, the paper, reviewed by HT, explained the structure of PLA intelligence and its use of propaganda as a tool in democratic nations, evidence of which the world is now recognising in the US, Australia, Canada, and Brazil.
O’Brien said the Trump administration has started taking corrective steps and outlined six steps taken by the administration to curb Chinese influence.
These are: barring Chinese companies such as Huawei from getting access to Americans’ personal data; designating the US operations of none Chinese media outlets as foreign missions; imposing import restrictions on 21 Chinese government arms and 16 Chinese companies; exiting the UNHRC to protest its “cooptation by China” limiting PLA’s use of student visas to send its officers to US universities; and halting investment of US government retirement funds in Chinese firms. But he underlined that this was just the beginning.
In his address to a group of people at Phoenix in Arizona, O’Brien underscored that there really was no difference between mega Chinese firms and the communist party in power in Beijing.
“The Chinese Communist Party seeks total control over the people’s lives. This means economic control, it means political control, it means physical control, and, perhaps most importantly, it means thought control,” he said, according to the transcript released by White House.
O’Brien referred to the analysis by an Australian official that in Classical Chinese statecraft, there were two tools for gaining and maintaining control: the first is ‘wu’, weapons and violence, and the second is ‘wen’, language and culture. Chinese leaders have always believed that power derives from controlling both the physical battlefield and the cultural domain. The US NSA cited several instances when China, in addition to propaganda, used trade to coerce compliance with its dictates.