The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently celebrated its 100th anniversary with great pomp and show. The event was marked by spectacular performances. In a rousing opening, the performers chanted slogans; celebrating the party’s leadership as Mr Xi and other leaders watched the occasion.
“Listen to the party, be grateful to the party, and follow the party,” they shouted, “Let the party rest assured, I’m with the strong country!”
For Chinese people, the CCP is an avatar of hope and prosperity. It is an organisation working arduously for the betterment and development of the Chinese nation. However, for its detractors, not so much. It works on the canons of facism,totalitarianism and bonapartism. In such a regimented milliue, dissension is no longer let to evolve and hence, nipped in the bud. Those who do not align with the dispensation as practised by CCP, suddenly vanish; never to be seen again CCP believes in “whatever is yours is mine and whatever is mine is not yours.”
Inter alia, political cognoscenti have strong apprehensions about rising China under the umbrella of CCP. They believe that China is gradually moving towards global dominance and thereby replacing America as a global policeman. They contend that the Sino-world order is in the offing.
How much of it is true? Has China really embarked on a plan to rule over the world? If yes, then how would that happen? In this very piece, I am going to pinpoint some of the key features of China’s grand strategy to subject the world to its sway.
For Chinese people, the CCP is an avatar of hope and prosperity; an organisation working arduously for their development
Propaganda warfare is one of the key features of China’s grand strategy to bring the world under its yoke of domination. China is found to be exploiting the freedom of speech, as propagated by the western world. It enjoys free access to western media but denies the same in its own country. This very strategy enables China to successfully launch its propaganda warfare abroad and at the same, inhibit its tentacles inside its frontiers. To this end, in 2009, the CCP launched a six-billion-dollars “Grand External Propaganda Campaign” to spread the reach of official mouthpieces like Xinhua. They simply decided to use their money to exploit the freedom of speech in the West to spread their propaganda and thus, drown out Western media voices. For instance, they put huge paid inserts in Western newspapers that were indistinguishable from real news. These paid stories talked about how good life was in China and how freedom flourished there!
Another way in which the CCP controls what is said about China is by clamping down on all foreign media reporting in the country. China’s restricted media policy, for sure, has done great damage to the ongoing campaign against Covid-19. The CCP has foxily manipulated international media in its favour. Resultantly, the press started lauding its efforts for keeping the deadly pathogen under control.
China’s debt policy is, in fact, a debt peonage that it uses to exert its influence around the world. While doling out to any state, China keeps three things in account. Firstly, the target country must possess the land that’s of strategic interest to China. Basically, it should fit in China’s trillion-dollar Belt & Road Initiative to build infrastructure around the world. The BRI’s objective is to earn lucre, transport goods and gain strategic influence for the Chinese while grabbing strategic land. Secondly, the target country must be indigent, welcome funds for massive projects and have officials that are dying to accept bribes. Thirdly, the project shouldn’t be feasible from a financial angle. It must have no chance of generating income to help the target nation pay off its loan. If all these factors are in place, China will go ahead with its biggest financial con.
The Sri Lankan port in Hambantota is a good example. The Chinese were interested in getting this port as it was strategically close to their rival, India, and also helped contribute to BRI. Chinese offered not just a port, but even give Lankans an eight-billion-dollar loan at six per cent interest to finance its construction. Once the port was built, the Lankans realised it wasn’t near any international shipping lanes and would not generate any business. Of course, the CCP already knew this and presented a readymade solution: a deal in which the Chinese received a debt-for-equity swap along with a 99-year lease.
Additionally, China’s ingress into Africa is also not bona fide. It does not intend to help the impoverished nations of Africa but just wants to control its resources, people and potential.
Further, Chinese projects don’t create jobs for the impoverished locals. The Chinese firms bring in their own drivers, construction workers, and support staff who live apart from the African societies in which they reside.
In short, China is colonising the world of its choice through its diabolic policy of debt trap. It is startlingly reminiscent of how the British colonised India for 200 years.
Intellectual property theft is yet another tool used to dampen its rivals financially. Surprisingly, if a Chinese company steals your product idea or branding, there’s no Chinese court of law that you can knock at for justice.
Take Google and Amazon. China has casually cloned them with their own versions. Google was replaced by Baidu and Amazon by Alibaba. Both of them are now huge brands in China, and neither has paid a cent to the originals.
Likewise, you can find ripoffs of all major brands. Be it any major brand in the world, you will find a fake equivalent in the Chinese markets.
What’s worse, if a company wants to do business in China, they must give China the right to steal their technology. That’s legalised theft! Courts do exist in China but are only to be used by the CCP against its detractors. One such example is hacking. Though unethical, it is the CCP’s favourite weapon of war. It employs an army of hackers, who are at its disposal from dawn to dusk; looking for vulnerabilities in every institution in the free world. When they find one, they exploit it ruthlessly.
One of the most notorious of these hacks happened in 2007, when the aeroplane major, Lockheed Martin, was targeted by a cyber attack. Chinese hackers stole technical documents related to the F-35: the world’s most advanced fighter aircraft. Experts have argued that the design of China’s stealth fighter, the J-31, as well as the Chengdu J-20 fighter jet, is in part influenced by the F-35 designs.
Foreigners visiting China need to be very cautious as the CCP is always setting honeypot traps. Seeing how well the surveillance program was working inside China, the CCP decided to export it to the world via Huawei, whose hardware is omnipresent in the networks all around the globe. Once the West realised what was going on, the crap hit the fan. The US banned Huawei from its 5G networks over concerns of security, and the UK followed suit a couple of days ago.
The writer is an advocate and columnist based in Quetta.