From chemical warfare to cyber warfare to legal warfare, how does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) use unconventional warfare techniques to systematically target, subvert, and deplete its enemies?
What is the Chinese regime’s greatest strategic vulnerability? And how could the United States exploit it?
And how is the CCP deploying a disguised maritime militia in the Pacific—with little to no resistance?
I sit down with Col. Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marine officer and author of “When China Attacks: A Warning to America.”
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/col-grant-newsham-on-ccp-chemical-warfare-chinas-fishing-militia-and-their-greatest-strategic-weakness_5181108.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Grant Newsham: I’m glad to be here. Thanks very much.
Mr. Jekielek: With your book When China Attacks, the big question I have is attacking who? Who are we talking about here?
Col. Newsham: Ultimately they want to attack the United States. We are the main enemy that prevents them really from getting regional domination, and ultimately, global domination. We’re the target. China is likely to use so-called non-kinetic attacks against us at this point, but they are likely to use a kinetic assault to launch a military invasion of Taiwan. By going after Taiwan, they have the chance to humiliate the United States and really put the Americans on their back foot and make it look as if China is unstoppable.
Mr. Jekielek: You start When China Attacks with this hypothetical scenario of an attack by the Chinese Communist Party on Taiwan. As I was reading, I was charting all these different unconventional methods of warfare that the CCP utilizes to achieve its objective, and I found it to be a very, very troubling scenario. Realistically, will this happen in the near future?
Col. Newsham: It could happen. There are probably a dozen scenarios that different analysts have, but this one, I could see happening. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Mr. Jekielek: Please explain that.
Col. Newsham: What the Chinese want to do is seize Taiwan. They’d like to get it without fighting, but if they have to, they will. They have built up a military that is capable of doing it, but they also need to ensure that the Americans are kept at bay. They’ve got to thread a needle here, because if they go too hard against the United States it may provoke America to respond with everything they have, and that’s not what China wants. They want to humiliate the Americans just enough to make them worry about what happens if they go all in and also to rely on China’s proxies.
Essentially, it’s the front men in the United States telling whatever administration is in office to just hold still. Don’t respond. We can’t risk nuclear war over little Taiwan, and we want to get back to business as usual. What I can see is the Chinese launching an all-out very quick hard assault on Taiwan, but not going all out on the United States, not doing another Pearl Harbor attack or hitting the U.S. mainland, and maybe even leaving the U.S. bases in Japan alone.
They do have ways to make life difficult for us, as you noted, like their fishing fleet, the maritime militia, things that look like civilian weapons or civilian entities, and also the proxies that I mentioned. In just about every country, they’ve got people who put in a good word for them.
That’s how I see it. The Chinese could present the American administration with a fair complaint. They’ve taken Taiwan and they’ve told the Americans, “Stand clear or it’s nuclear war.” You can almost hear a certain type of administration talking itself into doing nothing, saying, “We would really like to, but it’s unfortunate. We can’t intervene on behalf of Taiwan.”
That would be my scenario, and I would note the Chinese would like to get Taiwan without fighting. Who wouldn’t? It’s a lot easier. They have been launching political warfare against Taiwan for decades. The subversion of the country has just been immense with the pressure that is put on Taiwan.
What could happen in the upcoming presidential election in Taiwan in January 2024, if the pro-China candidate wins, Beijing might think that it can work with him and draw him in, and have him draw Taiwan into the mainland’s embrace. Most Taiwanese wouldn’t want that, but if you have a certain type of leader and you play it right, China might increase their odds of winning without fighting.
But if a candidate from the party that wants nothing to do with Chinese domination wins, at that point, the gloves come off and China gets very serious about a so-called kinetic attack on Taiwan. Kinetic is just the popular word these days for a shooting war.
Mr. Jekielek: Why is Taiwan so important to China, and why is Taiwan so important to the U.S.?
Col. Newsham: That’s the question. You hear a lot of people say, “Taiwan isn’t worth it. It’s worth more to China than it is to us. It can’t be defended. Just let it go.” You hear that a lot in the debate these days.
It’s wrong, and there is also an element of maliciousness in it. The idea of letting 23 million free people come under Chinese Communist enslavement is not something that sits well with me. But why is it important? First, look at it from China’s perspective, and if you look at it that way, you can figure out why it’s so important from the U.S. perspective. Surprisingly, it doesn’t have so much to do with the high-end semiconductors that Taiwan manufactures. That gets a lot of attention, and yes, it would be an inconvenience, and probably a big one if Taiwan’s semiconductor production was cut. They produce something like 90 percent of all high-end semiconductors.
But I don’t think that is the main reason. With or without chips, Taiwan is a very juicy target for Beijing and here’s why. Taiwan is strategic terrain, and strategic geography, if there ever was. It’s part of the so-called first island chain that stretches from Japan to Taiwan, down to the Philippines, down to Malaysia. If you look at a map, that will tell you a lot about Chinese thinking, particularly military thinking.
That first island chain actually hems in the people’s liberation army. It makes it very hard for them to get into the Pacific to go east. But if China takes Taiwan, they have seized a lodgement right in the middle of the first island chain. Think of a castle wall being breached and suddenly the attackers just pour in and keep going. That’s what would happen.
If the People’s Liberation Army launches from Taiwan and goes up north, they can surround and isolate Japan. If they go down south, they can isolate Australia, cut it off from the U.S., and cut it off from the rest of Asia. Militarily, it’s very nice to have that as a platform. It makes operations farther east into the Pacific much easier to accomplish. The Chinese objective is not to just stop at the first island chain.
Rather, it’s to go all the way to the west coast of Latin America where they are setting up the infrastructure, the ports, the airfields, the political influence, and the economic influence that they will need to deploy Chinese forces sometime in the future, if not tomorrow. It’s part of the plan.
From a military perspective, it’s very important. You ask yourself, “If I were the Americans, my first defense line has been breached.” Obviously, that is serious, but there’s more to it than just the military operational issue. I would call it the political/psychological aspect of Taiwan and its importance. Suppose Taiwan comes under Beijing’s rule. Look at the message that would be sent and what Beijing would have demonstrated.
It’s that the U.S. military could not prevent the Americans from keeping 23 million Taiwanese free. U.S. economic and financial power couldn’t do it and U.S. nuclear weapons couldn’t do it either. In short order, you’re going to find Asia turning red as most countries there realize that an American promise is not what it used to be, and you’re going to see that worldwide as well.
It would be a huge psychological political blow against the Americans and for Beijing. How would one argue if that happens? You say, “Taiwan wasn’t all that important, but if it’s somewhere else more important, then we’ll go all in.” I don’t think anyone’s really going to buy that, and we don’t have a particularly good track record in recent times of taking care of our friends. Rather, we tend to leave them high and dry, and there’s a point at which a lot of people notice. Those are some of the reasons why Taiwan is so important.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re American. You talk about the Americans as if you’re looking a little bit from the outside, which in fact you are. Please tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be studying Chinese military capability and intentions.
Col. Newsham: Sure. I first started looking at Taiwan and China around 1981, so it’s been 40 years or so. I first started looking at business with China. I used to be a lawyer, so that was one area I focused on. I was with the Marines for 30 years and active in reserve time. During that time, much of it was in the Asia-Pacific. Also, I was a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for eight years, and a lot of that was in Pacific East Asia. I also worked in the business community, working for an investment bank in Japan for a decade-plus, and also working for Motorola in Japan and Korea. That’s a familiar name to some people, but it committed suicide in China.
I’ve had decades of experience looking at China and looking at Asia from different perspectives, not just the military, but also from the diplomatic, the financial, and that of high-tech industry.
Mr. Jekielek: A lot of the unconventional warfare that the Chinese Communist Party wages does involve all these different sectors. It doesn’t actually involve the conventional, traditional, war-fighting apparatus as much.
Col. Newsham: Yes. It’s a very different concept of war and of bringing your enemy under your control. We tend to look at warfare like a 100-yard dash where the participants get up to the starting line, they shake loose and get down in the crouch, and then the starter says go. That’s when the race starts, the war starts, and the shooting starts.
But to the Chinese, the shooting is the last thing, if it’s even necessary. Ideally, you’ve weakened your enemy and enemies to the point that they can’t respond effectively, or can’t respond at all. You do this with methods that don’t involve shooting people, although they are willing to do that, or they have other people do the shooting for them.
These are things that to an American or Westerner look unobjectionable, and that just looks like business competition. The Chinese look at this as economic warfare. The idea is to drive your opponents or your competitors out of business, to get their technology, suck their know-how out of them, and rig the system in China so that you can build up Chinese companies.
The idea is to dominate the main sectors and just about anything that’s on the Chinese list of things to dominate. You can look at how that has actually worked in the U.S. Once China was let into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, despite not meeting any of the requirements that every other country would need, things went wild and American businesses started flocking to China. China turned into this manufacturing juggernaut.
America’s manufacturing capability, and more importantly the jobs and the livelihoods that came with it disappeared. One figure from an MIT analyst states that about three-and-a-half million manufacturing jobs were lost as a result of letting China into the World Trade Organization, and that’s just jobs lost. You would think that every one of those jobs supported several people at least. That has actually worked very well to China’s advantage.
It’s weakened us and it’s strengthened China, because the Chinese economy has grown, with many countries growing dependent on it, America not the least. This helps China develop its military as well. It’s very much a net gain for the Chinese and a net loss for us. Once again, there’s a psychological aspect to it. I would encourage anybody to go to some big, or even not so big, American city, and if you dare, go to the neighborhoods where working class people used to live and have a look around.
It’s as if a war took place. It’s horrific, and I describe part of that in my book. That is one example of what the Chinese consider warfare that is intended to weaken their enemy, while strengthening themselves. But we don’t look at it that way. There are other lines of attack that China sees as warfare— biological war, chemical war, cyberwarfare, and proxy warfare.
That means getting your opponent’s prominent and influential people to do your bidding for you. It was very interesting the other day when we saw the CEO of TikTok testifying before Congress. It was interesting to see him, but it was more interesting to see behind him a phalanx of Americans who had signed up to do China’s bidding. Money has a way of doing that.
There’s also one point I wanted to mention as to why Taiwan matters. Taiwan is a small island with 23 million people. It’s an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party, and how could that be? It’s such a small place. It is proof that people of Chinese origin can handle democracy, consensual government, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and all the freedoms we think are important.
Taiwan shows what is doable and what China could become. That is one of the reasons Beijing wants to strangle it, because it is a daily living reminder there is an alternative for China besides Chinese Communist rule.
You hear it all the time. “Chinese people can only be handled or ruled by a boot on the neck with force.” Even Jackie Chan said something like that, and others have said it. It’s nonsense. Taiwan is proof that it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s really a priceless reminder of what China could be.
Mr. Jekielek: It suggests that any country that’s a free country actually acts as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, I was just discussing this very issue on a podcast recently that totalitarian regimes fear any freedom, because it shows people that there is another way.
Col. Newsham: Definitely. That is something that the Chinese Communists really don’t like, if you listen to what they say. Xi Jinping gave an official speech around 2013 where he effectively said that Western values are antithetical. They are the enemy. They are the opponent. They are not at all compatible with the Chinese Communist, Chinese socialist ideas, and he is very clear on this. There was no live and let live, or let’s take some of the good parts. He was very clear on these Western values.
I’ve never come across too many people anywhere that like to be enslaved or treated unfairly. That is an absolute threat to the Chinese Communist Party that ultimately rules by force, and does not rule with the consent of the governed. An easy way to prove that is to have a real election. That doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about TikTok. A few years back you wrote an op-ed for us about TikTok and its relationship with a certain piece of legislation, the 2017 national intelligence law that the Chinese Communist Party enacted, and that it may have some bearing on what TikTok is ultimately required to do.
Col. Newsham: That’s an easy one. High-priced American lawyers would insist otherwise, but TikTok has to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party tells it to do. That is required by the national intelligence law you just mentioned. Even before that law was passed, if the Ministry of State Security comes to your company and says, “We would like you to come in for tea,” there’s only one answer to that.
That has always been the reality for any Chinese company. There’s really no such thing as a private company that’s free of government coercion, in the way we would see it. It’s ironic that we’re spending so much time debating the degree to which TikTok and similar companies have connections to the Chinese government. They all do and it is about that simple. Jack Ma, for example, you hear about him and it was thought, “He’s a brash private sector guy.” He has always been a creation of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s one of the aspects about that regime and that system—a company in China will only be successful for as long as the Chinese Communist Party says it will. That is the reality, but when you’re paying a lawyer $800 an hour to argue the point, they’re glad to do it. But some things are not that hard to figure out when it comes to the PRC [People’s Republic of China].
Mr. Jekielek: I was recently at a hearing where the Chinese doctrine of civil-military fusion was discussed. It’s actually one of the top seven national priorities if I’m not mistaken. Something is very relevant here to the realities around TikTok. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Col. Newsham: Yes. That civil-military fusion is the description of how the economic activities and military activities are combined in China. One supports the other and vice versa. If something that is developed for military purposes and there is a commercial use for it, it’s going to get shared and vice versa, and that is strategy. It’s the way that Chinese look at things, and they have been very effective with that.
With TikTok, you can think of what the harmful aspects are. If you can influence your target, particularly young people or even older people to think a certain way, that directly benefits your military. It thinks about how it can weaken the enemy in order to set them up for eventual assault and eventual domination. With the intelligence-collection capabilities of TikTok, there is a usefulness there. Once again, that benefits the military and the security part of the Chinese governmental structure.
You see this all the time. Don’t ever think there’s a purely private company in China. If push comes to shove, they are obligated by law to cooperate with the authorities. Remember when Apple refused to unlock the phone of a mass-murdering terrorist and refused to help out the FBI. But at the same time, they actually did help out the Chinese government unlocking some things. Things you can do in America, you cannot do in China, and that needs to be kept in mind.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost unthinkable that when there is a civil-military fusion opportunity, that it wouldn’t be used. Otherwise, heads would roll, maybe not literally, but proverbially. What do you think about that?
Col. Newsham: That’s how it is. It’s something that is so foreign to us. We sometimes admire the brash business executive, like say, Howard Hughes going in front of the Congress and talking straight and talking tough. There is no Congress in China, but if there was, you would only do it once. We look at this as very natural, that the private sector business is separate from the military and security activities.
The Chinese see it very differently. Everything comes together to enhance Chinese power. They see it that when Chinese power grows, ideally, it happens at the same time that American power reduces. I mentioned Motorola, for example. Think about that. In its day, it was one of America’s top companies that was really respected. It got in trouble partly by getting into the China market without being wise about what they were doing, and now it basically doesn’t exist. There’s a little bit left, but the bulk of what was Motorola is now owned by Lenovo, by a Chinese company.
Just think of the effect of that. You had multiple generations of people who worked for Motorola in Schaumburg, Illinois and elsewhere. It’s all gone and it hasn’t been replaced with anything. China’s high-tech industry has expanded rapidly. Now, it’s a real threat to the U.S. companies. America has gotten weaker, and China has gotten stronger. That’s how the Chinese Communists do the calculation.
Mr. Jekielek: While we’re on this topic, tell us about this concept of comprehensive national power, which the CCP uses to rate itself against every nation in the world. You’ll have to tell me the details, but it’s important to know how they think about this.
Col. Newsham: I’ll try to explain it simply in a way you can understand. If you look at it in the sense of, “Whatever is good for me is bad for you,” that is the ideal. Something that weakens your opponent while strengthening you is ideally what you want. China actually counts all of these wins and successes that they have around the world. They set up and get ownership of some strategic locations or air fields. The Americans aren’t getting in there, and it all goes into that accumulation of national power.
Everything that is good for China and benefits China, that’s exactly what they want. But it’s not as if they want it to have the so-called win-win where everybody is benefiting. They want the other side to go down. If you can weaken your enemy, confuse him, take away his key industries, weaken his currency, weaken the dollar, and you get people to start using Chinese currency overseas, that is a big addition to China.
It’s on the plus side for China’s comprehensive national power, and it’s a decline for American national power. It helps if you just forget the idea of win-win. The Chinese use that expression a lot, but what they mean is we win twice, and you lose. Another example would be when the Chinese get the blueprints for the F35 fighter and the C17 long-range transport. That’s a good thing for China.
It goes into the plus column. What does it look like on the American side? It’s on the negative side of the ledger. They are very much keeping score on this. It’s helpful to remember the ultimate objective of the Chinese Communist Party. You really have to listen to them. Ultimately, it is to get the Americans out of Asia, but also to keep pushing and eventually dominate the region and dominate the globe. They have gone about setting things up to do that. They have a way to go, but it’s been a very impressive move over the last 20 to 30 years.
Mr. Jekielek: On the side of the Chinese military, and you’ve been looking at this, what is the state of the Chinese military? I’ve heard wildly different assessments of their capabilities. What have you found?
Col. Newsham: Unfortunately, they are pretty good. People used to laugh 20 years ago when the idea of the People’s Liberation Army attacking Taiwan was mentioned. It was jokingly referred to as the “million man swim,” the idea being they didn’t even have the resources to get across the Taiwan Strait. It also implied that they weren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it.
Nobody is laughing these days. I actually have a chart that was put together by the former head of intelligence for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific fleet that graphically depicts Chinese military growth over the last 20 years. The first chart is 2000, and there’s not much there now. China doesn’t have much hardware, and it can’t operate very far offshore. In 2020, it’s very different. It’s just the whole charge is full.
China has a military, has a Navy Air Force, ground forces, and also, as everyone knows, rockets and missiles. It’s got a lot of them and it’s figuring out how to use them. It actually already knows how. It knows its weaknesses and it’s trying to address those. Now, China is able to really throw its weight around in the region, and the idea is to eventually throw it around globally.
There was a condescension towards the Chinese over many years that they could never be our equals. Five or six years ago I suggested to some Marines that the Chinese would have the equivalent of our amphibious force and units that patrol the oceans. People laughed at me and said, “They could never do it. It’s too hard to do.” Well, it wasn’t. The Chinese could put together two or three of these things at least if they wanted to. They’ve had them out and about for more and better future operations.
We have underestimated them. That was a mistake, but they do have problems. It’s not as if they figured everything out, and that is something that we do need to keep in mind. You don’t want to psych yourself out, but you do have to realize just what a formidable force they’ve become. In certain circumstances, they could probably beat us or at least kill a lot of us if they chose the timing.
For example, with something close to the Chinese mainland, we would have a hard time, because they would have the advantages of operating from so-called interior lines. From the Chinese mainland, it would be a huge advantage for them. It would be hard for us to get in there. But if you get farther out, then it gets more difficult for the Chinese. It could be five years before they really have the power projection capability where you can send military units way far away and shoot somebody and use force.
The Chinese are very capable of sending naval flotillas to the ends of the earth. They do it in Africa and Latin America. They go down to the Indian Ocean. They’ve been sending units to the Horn of Africa for a long time and they’re smart. They’ve learned what their shortcomings are. They’ve learned how to operate combining different forces and different types of units, and they’ve done a very good job.
The Chinese leadership does complain sometimes about the so-called peace disease. They fret that they haven’t had combat experience and that is a real drawback. But the U.S. Navy hasn’t really fought a major enemy since 1945. With U.S. forces, the combat experience tends to get winnowed out pretty quickly as time goes on.
If you understand the problem, if you say train to address it and you train hard, you can make up for that lack of experience. I don’t see that as much of a problem as some other people do. The fix we’ve gotten ourselves into with the Chinese does come from not having taken them seriously enough and maintaining our edge. We spent so many years in the so-called sandbox in Iraq and Afghanistan focusing on those kinds of wars, that the Chinese caught up in many areas and surpassed us in some as well.
Mr. Jekielek: Since we’re talking about maritime capability, there is this unconventional fleet that the CCP has used in a military way, which is essentially their fishing fleet, but which also doubles as a maritime militia with its swarming tactics. Perhaps it is a way to explain the Chinese Communist Party’s mentality around war fighting, what kinds of tools can be used, along with what this group of fishing boats is doing.
You couldn’t have a military response to that, because these are just fishing boats. It would be an outrage. It would be an international crisis, irrespective of what those boats were actually doing. Please tell us how this maritime militia works. Is it actually just an arm of the military?
Col. Newsham: Part of the people’s armed police is probably a good way to look at it. But just think of it as military, and that will work. These are fishing boats that sometimes do fishing, but they’re also built for double hauls, and are up-engined. They have people with arms on them and they use them to ram, intimidate, and sink other vessels, particularly other fishing vessels.
You have this charade that they are not a part of the military and they’re just fishing boats. They’ve used these very successfully in the South China Sea. You can establish a long-term presence in places and really drive your opponents out, and they won’t go back in. If you’re a fisherman, there’s no way you’re going to go in and challenge a big boat with a double haul and guys with weapons on it that is willing to ram you and sink you and shoot you if necessary.
It’s a nice adjunct and it gives you the cover, as you pointed out, by saying, “This is just a fishing boat. What are you complaining about? It’s not a naval vessel. “The Chinese have a lot of these, in addition to their regular fishing fleet, which sails the seven seas vacuuming up fish.
One example of how they throw their weight around causing their opponents to back off is Japan. A handful of times over the last decade the Chinese have flooded the zone around a tiny Japanese island with around 400 fishing boats with maritime militia mixed in. The Japanese don’t have anywhere near enough patrol boats, Coast Guard or naval, to take care of that. The Chinese have done this now and then, and the purpose is to tell the Japanese, “Look, when the time comes we assert administrative control,” which is the legal term for asserting dominance over your territory, and the Japanese are very worried about this.
The Chinese have driven Japanese fishing boats out of their traditional waters. They don’t go into some of these because they’re afraid. It’s either maritime militia or the fishing boats, and then throw in a couple of Coast Guard boats, and it’s a formidable force. Chinese Coast Guard cutters are effectively warships. They’re big, and they’re armed.
They’re really almost the size of U.S. naval combatants. The Chinese have also understood one of the weaknesses of their opponent is that we insist on law and playing by the rules. When somebody doesn’t do it, we’re flummoxed. We don’t quite know what to do.
You hear this all the time on the U.S. side, “China’s gray zone activities, what do we do about it?” That’s about as far as it gets. We say, “What do we do about it?” Nobody has actually come up with the common sense approach that lets them know that we consider these naval ships, and we are going to respond accordingly. A while back, there was actually a U.S. naval commander who stated, and he was on the right track, that it takes a certain willingness on our side to push back, but also to fight back.
The other guy knows that he can break the rules and elbow in on you and hurt you, and you’re not going to do anything, because it’s against the law. He’s going to take advantage of that. It’s almost an aspect of so-called lawfare, where the Chinese use international law to their advantage. Partly, it helps them if they don’t obey it, but we do. You can see the advantage that it gives to the Chinese compared to us and others.
Mr. Jekielek: What I find most fascinating about the hypothetical assault on Taiwan chronicled in your book, is the gray zone activity and the reaction, which is pretty much what would happen, unless we have a dramatic policy change like you just described.
Col. Newsham: You can use these regular fishing boats and maritime militia to surreptitiously lay mines off of Japanese ports where the U.S. Navy operates. Cargo ships, for example, can launch drones that can cause Americans a lot of trouble as they’re sailing out of San Diego. These are things that we don’t think of as war fighting, but it’s a platform and we should expect that we’re going to have to deal with it.
Mr. Jekielek: Think about what that means—cargo ships coming out of China being weaponized. What portion of the world’s cargo chips come out of China? It’s probably a very significant portion.
Col. Newsham: Yes, it is. One of the key worries is containerized missiles. You’ve seen a big container ship that has thousands of containers on it and you just need a couple of them that have anti-ship cruise missiles in it, and which one is it in? It’s a giant shell game.
If you’re willing to do that, it can give you a huge advantage. Then, all you have to say once it happens is, “We don’t know.” We Americans insist on evidence to be able to prove the charges, and if the Chinese just shrug their shoulders, one can see the usefulness of this.
It could make it very hard for the Americans to respond to a Taiwan scenario. You don’t have to sink an aircraft carrier, just disable or immobilize a couple of other naval ships. We don’t have enough ships, but you also get worried about what other problems you’re going to have.
That is very much part of the Chinese military strategy, making use of these so-called gray zones and what look like civilian resources or platforms to go after us and their enemies. The Australians will find something similar if they head north from Australia. They’ll find that, because they will have lost a few ships on the way up from the Chinese fishing fleet, most likely.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to stay in the Pacific for a moment longer. There are all these different unconventional warfare methods that the Chinese Communist Party is affecting on the U.S. mainland. I want to get to that. This is incredibly important, but I’ve recently become more aware of some of these bullying actions of the Chinese Communist Party, trying to get the leaders or leaders of some of these small island chains to basically play ball, seemingly on the course to assuming administrative control eventually. But there have been a few of these leaders that have, unbelievably against all odds, stood up to the behemoth.
In one case, President Panuelo, of the Federated States of Micronesia, is on record saying that Chinese officials have threatened his life. These are people that are in the capacity of serving as Chinese officials, not this gray zone thing that you usually see. In this long letter, he describes a host of serious threats to his nation. It’s unheard of anywhere, nevermind in a tiny island chain state. What is the significance of this?
Col. Newsham: Keep in mind that we won’t even say those things, because we’re afraid China might not let us do business there. Even American leaders are reluctant to speak out in too many cases.
Mr. Jekielek: Please give us a quick summary of what President Panuelo has alleged or said.
Col. Newsham: He writes in great detail about things like the Chinese paying off all sorts of officials and influential people in Micronesia. They’re providing money to secessionist groups in several of the states in Micronesia. It would be like providing money to Texas so they could go independent, but they’re doing that.
In just the most amazing way, just recently at a meeting down in the South Pacific where the Micronesians were not going to participate, the Chinese designated a Micronesian guy and said, “You represent Micronesia.” He had no authority to do that, but they just did it and brazenly ignored the rights of a sovereign nation.
They have also been sending survey ships to follow the communications cables. They’ve been doing this in a lot of places. The idea is when the time comes, they will cut them. You’ve seen this full-fledged political warfare, and an influence effort against Micronesia. This is just Micronesia. You have huge Chinese investment where these real estate developers come in and promise billions, and they insinuate themselves commercially. That leads to political influence, and then they pretty much get a lock on the local economy.
They create a constituency of people that get a ton of money from the PRC. Most people don’t like this, but there’s nothing you can do. They’ve been very effective doing this in the Pacific. These are the islands where, during World War II, there was bloody combat to take them back from the Japanese.
These islands in the Central Pacific are actually in the middle of America’s defenses. We have the first island chain with Taiwan, but the Chinese are setting up behind us. The third step in Chinese influence efforts is a military presence. They’ve taken their time on that. In the Solomon Islands recently they have signed a deal with the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands that effectively lets the Chinese military into the Solomon Islands. That’s where Guadalcanal was, the World War II battle. The Chinese military will get in there before too long.
But you have President Panuelo. He had the nerve and the courage to stand up and say this, and this was actually the third letter he’s written. He wrote one last July and one a little before that, warning his fellow citizens or fellow officials, but also the leaders of other countries of this Chinese subversion that is coming. He says it means there’s nothing good for the people of the country when this happens, but it’s important to note that he’s put himself at real risk.
China does play hardball and you can take that in its fullest meaning, but he’s spoken up. I really recommend people read the letters because they’re so well written, a real cry from the heart and also asking for help from the Americans which doesn’t seem to have been forthcoming yet. Panuelo also offered to change Federated States of Micronesia’s recognition from China to Taiwan.
It is very rare to have that happen, but there’s some timing issues here. You’ll notice it doesn’t seem as though the Americans have taken advantage of the opportunity. If you’re a guy who’s stood up against the Chinese, you’d think you’d get some sort of support from the United States. If it’s being given, it’s really well hidden.
Mr. Jekielek: If you’re watching this episode online, we’re going to embed it into the webpage, because it also functions as a blueprint of Chinese Communist Party influence operations anywhere. Everything listed there are things that I’m aware of in other places.
Col. Newsham: It really is. It’s a predictable sequence. It applies to the U.S., Canada, and anywhere. It starts with a commercial presence because it’s just business. Who can complain about that? But the business leads to political influence. It creates dependency within the societies. From the Chinese perspective, they’re happy to have the society have internal fighting; people who don’t want the Chinese coming in, and others who do. You get that society turning on itself and that’s very good from the Chinese perspective.
Ultimately, the objective is to have a military presence. They’re patient, and that will come. It’s not hard to see what’s happening. You see something very similar happening in so many countries where the commercial and political dependence that they create has worked very well. There are usually financial benefits involved, but it tends to corrupt the country. As noted, it does cause people and society to get very unsettled, and people fighting with each other, which from the Chinese perspective is a good thing.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about one of these unconventional warfare methods which the CCP has been engaged in, which is Fentanyl. This is something you write about, and that’s very close to your heart as well. Please explain to me how this works.
Col. Newsham: It is as clear a case of chemical warfare as you will find. What China provides is about 99 percent of the fentanyl precursors. The raw materials go to Mexico and then get turned into pills and moved into the United States. Fentanyl killed about 70,000 Americans last year, and that’s Americans of all types. In the entire 12-years of the Vietnam War, only 55,000 Americans were killed.
In one year, America lost 70,000 people, many of these are military age, and this is just ones who died. Then, there are the walking wounded, along with the effect this has on families and society. The cost of dealing with and trying to treat these people are immense. Some figures are over a trillion dollars, depending on where you look.
Think about it. You’ve effectively launched an attack on your main enemy. You’re taking what amounts to a couple divisions of troops off the battlefield every year and nobody does anything. You get away with it. This is really setting us up for the day when a shooting war actually starts, or just may not even be necessary.
Fentanyl or the chemical warfare ties into economic warfare. America needs workers. If a lot of them are drug addled, it gets hard to find them. That’s just one example. It’s actually very hard to find people to work in a factory if you do a startup.
Also, there’s a psychological warfare aspect of this. By getting so many influential Americans convinced that they have to be in the China market, convinced that they need to make money from China, and also convinced that we need China’s help with fill-in-the-blank—North Korea, climate change, transnational crime, as a result of that we have tied our hands and will not take on China on the Fentanyl scourge that is killing just tens of thousands of us every year. And it’s not stopping.
In 2018, Donald Trump did speak with Xi Jinping about it. Mr. Trump declared it was a game changer, and of course nothing changed. Xi Jinping even told him, “Look, you’ve got a drug problem. I don’t.” They could stop it anytime they want, but they’re glad to have it go into the U.S.
Mr. Jekielek: Multiple administrations have been “working” with China on this issue. You’re saying they can stop at any time they want, but not everyone would agree with you. Not everyone would believe it is that simple. How could that be possible?
Col. Newsham: Here’s a test. I would suggest anybody who goes to China to go from your hotel and go on a walk. If you see a picture of Xi Jinping, take out your Sharpie and draw a mustache on it and see if the Ministry of State Security is waiting for you before you get back to your hotel or five minutes afterwards. The level of control that China has over that society is immense and Orwell couldn’t have dreamed of it.
I used to do a lot of work in the organized crime field, Asian organized crime in particular. You always find that Chinese organized crime tracked back to the security services, to the Chinese military, and always to the Chinese Communist Party. This has just been a huge win for the Chinese to cause us this much harm, and then to get us to think China can’t do anything about it.
I’ve heard the excuses that it’s local officials, and the central government doesn’t know what they’re doing. Once again, that suggests you don’t really know how China works. People say, “The police, their hands are tied. Otherwise, they would crack down.” Actually, the police do whatever they want. The other good one is, “The guys that make it, they just rejigger the formula. It’s not illegal.”
As if in China the law actually matters. The law is what Xi Jinping says it is. China could crack down on this if it wanted to, but I would suggest it doesn’t, because it’s just been wildly successful in killing us. I don’t know why you would stop if your enemy is not wise enough to stand up for himself.
Mr. Jekielek: Some people have described it as a reverse Opium War.
Col. Newsham: A reverse?
Mr. Jekielek: A reverse Opium War.
Col. Newsham: I’ve heard that.
Mr. Jekielek: Some people have described it as a reverse Opium War. Indeed.
Col. Newsham: The Opium War was 180 years ago, roughly. There’s a point at which that excuse doesn’t get you very far. Go to those parts of American cities that are absolute war zones with a lot of it having to do with the drug Fentanyl. I wrote an article about this a couple years ago. A fellow who was a retired Navy pilot from Pittsburgh called me up and told me that his adult son had just died from Fentanyl poisoning.
Of course, he was distraught to put it mildly. He said, “I tried to get congressmen interested and they really weren’t.” All I could do was listen to him. To the extent I am able, I can cast some light on the issue and the effect of this on our country. To ignore it the way our ruling class and elites have, there’s a callousness that just isn’t my thing.
Mr. Jekielek: I really want to talk about solutions to this one specifically, as we finish up. What could we do? You did mention how the CCP might use climate change. There are many In the U.S. that believe that it’s an existential threat and say, “We have to work with the Chinese Communist Party on this. We need to make all sorts of concessions for this purpose.” How do you view that? Is that another tool of war fighting?
Col. Newsham: It’s incredibly effective too. China is very sensitive to its human rights record where it’s just an absolute atrocity. Then, you have the climate czar, John Kerry, saying, “Human rights don’t matter. The only important thing is climate change. We’re not going to talk about this with the Chinese. We need their help.”
I mentioned North Korea and transnational crime, even though with so much of the transnational crime, there’s a Chinese role in it. With North Korea, what they’re doing is actually very much in line with what the Chinese want. You have the Americans in particular thinking, “They want what we do and we don’t want to pressure them, and we don’t want to get them mad.” It’s hard to see how you’re going to win a war or win this fight with the PRC if you’re thinking like that. You got to hand it to them, on some days you almost don’t know what to say, but what do you do about it?
Certainly, we need to do something different from what we’re doing and have been doing. You need to apply pressure where it’s really going to hurt, and you apply it almost asymmetrically from a different direction. One example of this that I cover in the book is that the Chinese government is absolutely dependent on the convertible currency, U.S. dollars. Without it, they really can’t fund their military or even their economic growth. If they want to fund the Belt and Road initiative, they have to pay in U.S. dollars or something like it.
Everything they want to do, they have got to find the dollars somewhere. That can be by manufacturing things in China and selling them overseas. That can be Wall Street pumping in tens of billions a year into the Chinese economy, which is just a godsend to the Chinese Communist Party. With America’s business class, the foreign direct investment it puts into China, it’s sending in the convertible currency that they’re using to build their economy, build their military, and the so-called comprehensive national power.
That doesn’t get nearly the attention that it deserves. They haven’t got half the foreign currency they need to pay all of the things they owe. You saw the American investor, Mark Mobius, just note the other day that he wasn’t allowed to take his money out of China. Welcome to discovering gravity. This has been the case forever in that system.
There’s a shortage of convertible currency, so here’s what you do. You take the biggest, and not even the biggest Chinese financial institutions and you cut them off from the U.S. dollar network. Start with the People’s Bank of China, and revoke its license to operate in the U.S. for six months. That would get some attention.
Additionally, many if not most of China’s elite have assets overseas. They don’t have enough confidence in their own system or its future. They put it in places like America, Britain, England, Singapore, and Australia. Ideally, they get a relative out there with a green card, and that has a residence permit. We should be seizing bank accounts, canceling the residence permits of their relatives, and also publicizing this to high heaven.
Bloomberg did some excellent reporting around 2013 on Xi Jinping’s family wealth overseas. They knuckled under and spiked the stories. That’s how sensitive it was. But that is a way you can apply pressure that matters personally, so that they feel a personal effect at the high end of China’s ruling class. Also, go after them on the human rights front nonstop. Every day, it should be nonstop.
But we don’t seem to do that. Those are things that the Chinese Communist Party is very vulnerable to. You can see none of those involve shooting, but these are forms of pressure that you can apply if you identify what the key weaknesses are. For the Fentanyl murder if we won’t do these things, we’re not serious, and that is heartbreaking.
Mr. Jekielek: Grant, to your point, there’s a piece of legislation, the Stop Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 that just passed the House. It basically has some teeth in terms of sanctioning officials that are involved in this ghastly business in Communist China, one of the most severe human rights violations there. We don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but it does seem like U.S. legislators are thinking hopefully at least a bit in the direction that you’re describing.
Col. Newsham: Yes, it’s a good thing. As you say, we’ll see where it goes and there are plenty of people on Capitol Hill who do take this seriously. The donor class of course seems to call the shots too often at the end of the day. But there are very good people on Capitol Hill on both sides who want to do something about it, and this shows one thing that’s doable. But you’ve really got to not just pass the law and then sanction a few unlucky officials. You have to go up to the highest levels and make them feel the heat. You do have to understand the system, realize how pressure and power is applied, then go to the top. It shows what is doable. We will see what comes.
Mr. Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show again.
Col. Newsham: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Grant Newsham and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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