Lately, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has 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, CCP may be an avatar of hope and prosperity; an organization working arduously for the betterment and development of the Chinese nation. However, for its detractors, CCP is more a criminal organization, than a political party.
Read more: CPC’s 100th Year Anniversary
CCP works on the canons of facism, totalitarianism, and bonapartism. In such a regimented milieu, dissension is no longer let to evolve and is, hence, nipped in the bud. Those who are not in consonance with the dispensation as practiced by CCP, are suddenly vanished, never to be seen again
CCP believes “whatever is yours is mine and whatever is mine is not yours.” It takes over successful businesses from billionaires (Ali baba from Jackman), enslaves entire communities (Uyghurs), and generally behaves like lawless goons.
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.
Read more: Can China replace the US in the near Future?
How much is it true? Has china really embarked on the plan of ruling over the world? Is it really smoothening its way to clinch a slot of global leadership? If yes, then how it is going to 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.
Propaganda warfare by China?
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 to others 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 its 6 billion dollars ‘Grand External Propaganda Campaign’ to spread the reach of the official mouthpieces of the party like Xinhua. They simply decided to use their money power to exploit the freedom of speech in the West to spread their own propaganda and so drown out Western media voices.
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For instance, they put huge paid inserts in Western newspapers that are indistinguishable from real news. These paid stories talk about how good life is in China and how freedom flourishes there!
The other 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 strictly restricted media policy, for sure, has done great damage to the ongoing campaign against covid-19 as well.
CCP has foxily manipulated international media in its favor. Resultantly, the press rather than censuring China for its spread of coronavirus started lauding its efforts for keeping the deadly pathogen under control.
Read more: China’s Leaked Documents Reveal ‘No Mercy’ for Uighur Muslims
China’s debt peonage
China’s debt policy is, in fact, is a debt peonage which it uses as a tool to exert its influence around the world. China, while doling out to any state, keeps three things in account.
Firstly, the target country must possess the land that is of strategic interest to China. Basically, it should fit in with China’s trillion-dollar BRI (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, and also grab the land of strategic military value.
Secondly, the target country must be indigent and welcome funds to do some massive projects and have officials, dying to accept bribes. Thirdly, the project should not be feasible from a financial angle. It must have no chance of generating income to help the target nation pay off its loan to China. If all these factors are in place, China will go ahead with its biggest financial con.
Read more: China’s debt trap diplomacy: Is Pakistan a victim in CPEC?
The Sri Lanka port at Hambantota is a good example. The Chinese were interested in getting this port as it is strategically close to their rival India, and also helps in their Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese offered to help Sri Lanka not just build a port, but also give them an 8 billion dollar loan at 6 percent interest to finance the construction of the Hambantota Port.
Once the port was built, the Sri Lankans realized that location was not near international shipping lanes. It wasn’t going to generate business to help them pay off the loan. 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 to manage the port.
The predatory nature of China can also be seen in how it has targeted poor countries like Laos and Cambodia in Southeast Asia, Montenegro, and Kyrgystan in Europe, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Pakistan in the Indian subcontinent, and almost all of impoverished Africa.
Read more: China Africa Relationship: Win-win or debt trap diplomacy
Additionally, China’s ingress into Africa is also not bona fide. It does not intend to help the impoverished nations of Africa, but it just wants to control its resources, people, and potential.
Further, Chinese projects do not create jobs for the impoverished locals. The Chinese firms bring in their own drivers, construction workers, and support staff, and live apart from the African societies in which they reside.
In short, China is colonizing the world of its choice through its diabolic policy of debt trap. It is startlingly reminiscent of how the British colonized India for 200 years.
Intellectual property theft by China
Intellectual property theft is yet another tool used by China to dampen its rivals financially. Surprisingly, if a Chinese company steals your product idea or your product 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.
Read more: China’s mobile giants teaming up to challenge “Google Play” dominance
Likewise, you can find ripoffs of all major brands. Be it Gap, Nike, Bose, or any other 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 legalized theft!
Achieving ends through unethical means
The CCP is fully conversant with the fact that civilized nations have ethics and they play by the rules. So if you have no sense of honor and accept no rules, you will have a huge competitive edge over your rivals. Simply put, the CCP’s philosophy is, “What is mine is not yours, but what is yours is mine.” Law courts exist in China, but only to be used by the CCP against its detractors.
One such example of China’s unethical modus operandi to achieve its ends is “Hacking” though it is unethical yet is a favorite weapon of war for the CCP. They employ 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.
Read more: China denies US allegations over military ‘hackers’
One of the most notorious of these hacks happened in 2007, when the airplane 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. This was plain and simple, state-sponsored theft.
Strict surveillance and military expansionism
Foreigners visiting China need to be very cautious as the CCP is always setting honeypot traps. It’s rumored the CCP has incriminating videos on top Western figures, and blackmail them to support China wherever possible.
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 realized 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.
Read more: Spotlight on China’s nuclear involvement in the UK after Huawei bans
Although CCP does not admit publicly that it has any design to conquer the foreign land yet its military expansionism is in full swing. President Xi Jinping in 2015 in a press talk with Barack Obama in the Rose Garden at the White House promised that “there is no intention to militarize” a collection of disputed reefs in the South China Sea known as the Spratlys.
But since then, Chinese dredgers have poured mountains of sand onto Mischief Reef and six other Chinese-controlled features in the Spratlys added at least 3,200 acres of new land, and militarized the whole place to its teeth. The islands can now host long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
To sum it up, what can be learned from this is China is fully determined to rule the roost in the world and for this, it is ready to do whatever is possible regardless of what is right and what is wrong. The apothegm “everything is fair in love and war” best defines China’s contemporary international demeanor.
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The author is an advocate and a columnist based in Quetta Balochistan, Pakistan. The views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.