Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, and Part IX of this multi-part series discussed the first four increments of the second tier geopolitical and economic goals and objectives of the Chinese Communist Party. This part summarizes a fifth portion of those goals and objectives.
Introduction
The Chinese Communists (ChiComs) are pursuing strategic initiatives aimed at achieve world economic domination: Belt-Road Initiative (and its related “Roads”) and Made in China 2025. Parts III, IV, and V of this series summarized those initiatives. To further the objectives in those initiatives, a number of intertwined secondary goals have been set by the Chinese Communist Party that are aimed at all spheres of human economic endeavors: trade, policy, regulations, legal, technology, etc. For it is economic dominance that undergirds geopolitical and military dominance, and that ultimately leads to the ChiComs’ real goal: world leadership in all things.
Secondary Goals of the Spider Dragon
Parts VII – IX of this series have covered the following synergistic secondary goals set by the CCP. These include (in no particular order):
- Keep the Western money flowing into China.
- Make Shanghai the world’s top global financial center.
- Become a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse.
- Assert Chinese leadership on the world scene.
- Reshape global governance.
- Prepare the rest of the world for fangkong (prevent and control).
- Leverage the virus/pandemic to expand Chinese influence and economic growth.
- Make major Chinese cities “smarter”.
- Dominate the world’s oceans.
- Lead the world in next-generation advanced technologies.
- Control international technology standards.
- Implement the Double First-Class University Plan.
- Promote military-civil fusion to enhance PLA capabilities.
- Erase the undersea warfare technology deficit.
- Promote global use of the yuan.
- Lead the world in digital currency implementation.
- Implement the Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN).
- Fully implement the ChiCom social credit system.
- Extend the jurisdiction of the National Security Law.
- Exploit access to China’s economy to achieve geopolitical goals.
- Move toward a Chinese “New World Order”.
- Implement a new “Health Silk Road”.
- Be opportunistic in advancing ChiCom interests.
- Pursue The Three Prongs.
- Turn Chinese diplomats into “Wolf Warriors”.
- Establish regional hegemony along Communist China’s periphery.
- Control all overseas Chinese.
- Take the Chinese civil code worldwide.
- Conquer space.
Several more are discussed below in this part of the series. It is important to understand that all of these goals are synergistic and intended to reinforce each other. A veritable “spider’s web” of interlocking goals and objectives all working in concert.
Win without fighting. This secondary objective is perhaps the most important of all, as it provides the glue that underlies all of the other objectives. The ChiComs seek to achieve all of their objectives, ultimately leading to economic and military global dominance, without the need for kinetic warfare. Rather, they exploit political warfare to achieve a fait accompli in the minds of their adversaries, principally the US and its allies. The ChiComs employ a full spectrum of political warfare techniques, as described in this outstanding treatise on ChiCom political warfare techniques by Professor Kerry Gershaneck, a former US Marine senior planner and a visiting scholar at the Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies, National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
Summarizing the extent of the PRC’s political warfare enterprise and threat to the US and the world, he quotes President Trump:
“China’s party-state controls the world’s most heavily resourced set of propaganda tools. Beijing communicates its narrative through state-run television, print, radio, and online organizations whose presence is proliferating in the United States and around the world. . . . Beyond the media, the CCP uses a range of actors to advance its interests in the United States and other open democracies. CCP United Front organizations and agents target businesses, universities, think tanks, scholars, journalists, and local, state, and Federal officials in the United States and around the world, attempting to influence discourse and restrict external influence inside the PRC.”
Here are a couple of other pertinent excerpts from his article:
Weapons in the PRC’s political warfare arsenal of influence include actions such as co-opting institutions, organizations, and people through so-called “united fronts”; the use of law to undermine countries and institutions; and psychological operations. They also incorporate propaganda, diplomatic coercion, disinformation such as rumors and fake news, overt and covert media manipulation, active measures, hybrid warfare, espionage, and such soft power functions as public diplomacy, public affairs, public relations, and cultural affairs activities.
The PRC’s three warfares consist of strategic psychological warfare; public opinion and media warfare; and legal warfare, also known as lawfare
Beijing’s psychological warfare includes diplomatic pressure, rumors, false narratives, and harassment to express displeasure, assert hegemony, and convey threats.
Public opinion and media warfare refers to overt and covert media manipulation to influence perceptions and attitudes.
Lawfare, or legal warfare, exploits “all aspects of the law, including national law, international law, and the laws of war, in order to secure seizing ‘legal principle superiority’ and delegitimize an adversary.”
Failure to understand PRC political warfare and how to fight it may well lead to America’s strategic defeat before initiation of armed conflict and to operational defeat of U.S. military forces on the battlefield.
Gershaneck points out that the US is losing the political warfare fight because America has let its political warfare capabilities atrophy after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is a strategic mistake, and those capability must be reborn in order to thwart Communist China’s world dominance goals.
Exploit the United Front Work Department to win overseas friends. While the United Front Work Department is a key component of the previous objective, its size and scope warrants addressing in a separate objective. Mao Zedong labeled the “united front” as one of the “three magic weapons” in the ChiComs’ arsenal, with the other two being party-building and armed struggle. The United Front Work Department has these responsibilities:
The United Front Work Department and the surrounding policy system exist to rally social groups and individuals to support the Chinese Communist Party and its objectives. From the party’s Politburo Standing Committee down to its grassroots committees, united front work involves thousands of members, social organizations, and fronts. Wherever the party is found, be it a government ministry or a party committee in a joint venture, the united front system is likely to be operating.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has expanded its activities greatly since 2015 to include clandestine foreign objectives:
The CCP’s United Front activities incorporate the co-optation of elites, information management, persuasion, and accessing strategic information and resources. It has also frequently been a means of facilitating espionage. One of the main tasks of United Front work is to influence the decision-making of foreign governments and societies in China’s favor.
In executing its foreign mission in direct support of the “Win without fighting” objective, the United Front Work Department (UFWD):
… operates inside foreign political parties, diaspora communities, colleges and corporations, all with the goal of promoting the party’s interests. The express goals of the United Front system include undermining social cohesion, exacerbating racial tension, and using of psychological warfare (psyops), media warfare (propaganda and fake news), and legal warfare (lawfare).
The UFWD uses the ChiCom version of Dale Carnegie’s classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” including corruption, bribery, spying, and coercion. The UFWD provides cover for intelligence agents (spies) operating under the Ministry of State Security. UFWD tentacles reach into the Confucius Institutes, Thousand Talents program, Chinese news services, Overseas Chinese Affairs Offices, and the Cyberspace Administration of China. All of these are tightly controlled operations aimed at influencing foreign opinion and winning friends for ChiCom policies.
Oust the US from the Middle East. Communist China is energy-poor, and the oil- and gas-producing Middle East is of vital importance to the Chinese economy and presents a mixture of opportunities and risks, as noted here:
[T]he Middle East presents Beijing with a unique mix of threats and opportunities. On the threat side of the ledger is the fact that around half of China’s oil imports either originate in the Persian Gulf or flow through the Suez Canal. In addition to oil and gas, many of the other resources that feed China’s economy wind their way to ports such as Shanghai or Guangzhou only after passing through Middle Eastern choke points, where they are vulnerable to interdiction by the United States.
On the opportunity side for China, the Middle East is not only the source of much-needed oil, it is also home to the Jewish state. In terms of population, Israel is miniscule, but it is a cyber superpower, a global leader in artificial intelligence, and a spectacular innovator of next-generation weaponry. What China’s heavily bureaucratized one-party state lacks in the capacity to innovate and solve real-world technical challenges quickly, Israel has in spades—along with a unique ability to see inside and understand the capacities of the American techno-military complex. Jerusalem could play an indispensable role in helping Beijing achieve both its “China 2025” goals and its military modernization efforts—if it were not sheltering under the protective umbrella of the United States military.
The major impediment to the ChiComs’ goals in the Middle East is the US, which has long backed Saudi Arabia (Aramco), the leading oil producer among OPEC nations, as well as other oil producers among the Gulf Cooperation Council states in the region.
The Chinese are investing billions under their Belt Road Initiative to develop the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor consisting of highways, rail lines, and pipelines from the port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean to Xinjiang. This Corridor will be the transmission belt to China for Middle East oil, including oil from Iran, as noted here.
The ChiComs have also established a strategic relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regional hegemon in terms of manpower and military might in the region. As reported here, China and Iran have recently signed an agreement this involves “Chinese investment of $400 billon in Iran over a 25-year period in return for lower Iranian petroleum export prices.” Some have argued that, due to stunning concessions in the deal to the Chinese, Iran is becoming a de facto Chinese colony:
The 25-year secret deal, which looks like a colonial agreement, grants China significant rights over the nation’s resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and it can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%.
Another secret element of the agreement has a military dimension: China will deploy 5,000 members of its security forces on the ground in Iran.
Increased ChiCom influence in Iran could have a major impact on Iranian operations throughout the Middle East. Iran is already heavily engaged in funding Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, as well as providing Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps military resources to its allies and proxies as a means of undermining and dominating the smaller Arab nations in the Middle East over time. Chinese purchase of Iranian oil funds all of these activities and the increasing ChiCom political influence being exerted in Tehran may tilt the balance of power in the Middle East away from the US to Communist China. This would be a major strategic victory for the ChiComs and a major strategic defeat for the US.
Exploit merchant seamen to control the world’s shipping. The goal here is to dramatically expand the number of qualified and experienced merchant seamen and subsidize their employment by other nations’ shipping industries in order to monitor, surveil and influence shipping operations around the world. Having Chinese nationals deployed as merchant seamen on foreign-flagged ships provides an opportunity to directly impact maritime trade along the Maritime Silk Road. The ChiComs are openly advertising to convert PLA-Navy veterans to merchant seamen, as noted in this Chinamil article:
The Maritime Safety Administration under China’s Ministry of Transport and the Department of Employment and Entrepreneurship under China’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs have recently signed an agreement to strengthen cooperation in encouraging veterans to acquire professional qualifications as seamen in accordance with the law. This move aims to provide the necessary support for the development and growth of the local seaman team and the employment of veterans.
According to the agreement, the two parties will jointly facilitate the veterans to participate in nautical education and crew professional skills training, encourage crew training institutions to recruit veterans, and promote local shipping enterprises to preferentially hire veterans who have acquired professional qualifications as seamen.
Implement global ocean governance. As noted here, Communist China has rejected the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS provides international standards and consensus on nautical laws. The CCP objective here is to substitute ChiCom standards, technology, and protocols for the international conventions such as UNCLOS that presently determine conduct, responsibilities, and maritime law on the seas of the world. The effort also involves developing a network of surveillance satellites capable of monitoring sea-going traffic around the world, as well convincing other nations to use Beidou Navigation Satellite System in lieu of other commercial satnav systems.
The incrementalism that is masked by “Chinese altruism” that is typically used by the ChiComs to gain control in any sphere of human endeavor is hard at work in this objective. For example, fisheries controls are a key target of ocean governance, with a glimpse provided here:
China recently started a three-month fishing moratorium on parts of the high seas in the southwest Atlantic and east Pacific. For fishery activities on the high seas without governance of international organizations, it was an innovative measure and the first state action to implement a fishing moratorium and promote protection of fish stocks.
The move is of great significance to the promotion of scientific conservation and long-term sustainable use of fishery resources in open waters. It also highlights China’s image as a responsible fishing power and is a milestone for China’s participation in international maritime management.
Conclusion. Chinese Communist leadership in – and control of – all human endeavors is considered a natural and historical goal by Beijing that will be achieved through the execution of a complex web of intertwined secondary objectives in the years to come. Some of these have been described in this series.
There is a clash of civilizations that has been ongoing for decades: the post-World War II free market capitalist world established by the US and its allies versus the upstart authoritarian mercantilist system of Communist China. Individual and economic freedoms versus an oppressive system of social controls. Which system will win out in the end? Freedom or totalitarianism?
The end.
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