The Chinese communist regime uses the tools of information and finance to advance its political warfare operations in the United States, according to China expert Robert Spalding.
“China seeks to achieve political outcomes, but they do so using financial and economic relationships and the internet, to slowly erode any popular support within a free society for opposing its interests,” he said.
He further explained that this approach stemmed from a doctrine laid out by two Chinese colonels back in 1999 in their book “Unrestricted Warfare.”
“What these two colonels identified was political warfare could go global if you embrace these two new tools, the internet and globalization,” Spalding recently told Epoch TV’s “China Insider” program.
“They laid out a doctrine for how you make political warfare a global phenomenon.”
In his new book “War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination,” retired Air Force Brigadier General Spalding walks readers through the principles outlined in the Chinese publication, revealing the regime’s belief that there is no sector of life outside the realm of war.
Spalding pointed out that the notion of war espoused by the Chinese communist regime is completely different from ideas in the West.
“From our standpoint, we use military force to achieve a political outcome,” he said.
“In terms of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), they see the outside as always in a state of war. So they’re constantly in a state of war, they never exit time to peace. And that means they’re always fighting for advantage, they’re always fighting … to gain an advantage over their opponent, and … are willing to do whatever means necessary,” he added.
One of the things that comes out of the doctrine of unrestricted warfare, he said, is the idea of dominating or controlling the narrative.
“What they [the CCP] have been able to do is use proxies in the West to have the same control over the narrative in the West that they have within China,” he noted.
To illustrate this point, Spalding referred to how the Chinese regime pressured the NBA to file then-Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey after he wrote a tweet in support of democracy protests in Hongkong.
“All elements of society are really imbued with this Chinese Communist Party incessant need to control the narrative, and therefore control ideology,” he said.
Over the past decades, the regime also took advantage of the corporate sector to “pull economic productivity out of the United States” which “drove millions of Americans those who had lost their jobs, into despair,” Spalding said.
In the global sphere, China has sought to use international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote the regime’s message and interests, according to Spalding.
In his opinion, “it is the most effective way to undermine the principles of democracy.”
“If you can take an international order … designed to promote the principles of democracy and liberty and rule of law, and over time those institutions begin to promote authoritarianism or totalitarianism, they will then have the veneer of being committed to freedom, but in reality be supporting authoritarianism,” he explained.
The narrative of China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is part of its unrestricted warfare campaign as well, according to Spalding.
China in January 2020 was the first country to impose a strict lockdown to contain the COVID-19 outbreak and initially drew praise from the WHO and some countries for how it handled the pandemic. In the years since, it has since doubled down on this approach under its heavy-handed “zero-COVID” policy even when most of the world has lifted restrictions opting to live with the virus.
“What they wanted the world to believe is that the Chinese model, the Chinese social, political, and economic model is superior to the democratic model. And in particular, they wanted to show that, China has done a better job at protecting this population from the coronavirus,” he said.
“So the idea here was to promote the Chinese model to nations around the world, so that they can… get those nations to adopt that model,” he added.
“The measure of lockdowns, which are embraced in the U.S. and the West, actually originated in China and Wuhan,” according to the expert.
To push back against this unconventional war imposed on the United States, Spalding called for the country to decouple from China.
“If we can decouple from China … get them out of our economic, political, academic and natural systems and begin to reinvest in our own citizens, reinvest in infrastructure and manufacturing in science and technology and STEM [science, technology, engineering, maths] education, you’re going to start to see opportunities arise that haven’t been there for decades in the United States,” he said.
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