The Chinese Regime Wants to Control and Dominate the World: John Lenczowski

The Chinese have 600 front organizations operating in the United States today, trying to influence all sorts of segments of our society. Dr. John Lenczowski is the founder, chancellor, and president emeritus of the Institute of World Politics, and was the principal Soviet affairs advisor to President Ronald Reagan. The problem is that our foreign policy establishment is principally concerned with creating what I consider to be the false atmospherics of peace rather than genuine peace. We sit down to discuss America's failure to recognize the full extent of the threat of communist China and what should be done to counter it. The Chinese Communist Party is effectively like an organized criminal enterprise. The Chinese regime has killed somewhere between 60 million and 200 million of its own people. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. John Lenczowski, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It is my pleasure and honor to be here, Jan. Thank you. So John, I read your article from earlier this year, Cold War Strategy for Genuine Peace with China. And in there, you have an astonishing list of various offensive actions that the Chinese regime has taken against America, against the West. And I didn't even know about some of these things, like, for example, Stinger missiles, an attempt to deliver Stinger missiles to gangs in LA. How is it that we don't know about these things? Well, there are many reasons. And particularly, it is the failure of our national leadership to tell the American people the truth about these acts of aggression against us. There is willful blindness. There is wishful thinking. There is mirror imaging. There is corruption. There are all sorts of business interests who would prefer to try to do harmonious business with the Chinese communist regime, just the way there were businesses that wanted to make money by doing business with Russia and with Nazi Germany before the Cold War, and I should say the Soviet Union. In any event, there has been self-censorship about these matters. The academic community and the media community have been corrupted effectively by the Chinese communist regime. Academics have learned to respect what I call the four taboos. And journalists, too, don't write about Chinese human rights violations, don't write about their military buildup, don't write about their espionage, and don't write about their covert political influence operations, many of which have also are overt. And so, if you don't write about those things, then you'll get a visa to China, and you can go to the country of your expertise, and your New York Times bureau won't be shut down, and you won't be expelled for writing things that are offensive to the Chinese communist regime. So there are many, many reasons for this. Although, John, if I can jump in, all those things that you just described, they are covered somewhat today. Human rights violations to a better extent. But for years, the New York Times and the Washington Post, most notably, were taking millions of dollars from the Chinese propaganda ministry to publish Chinese communist propaganda in the periodic China Watch supplement. And during that whole time, I don't know how much that supplement was influencing people. It was designed to give people the impression that China is a dynamic, culturally rich, innovative country that's basically a normal society that is a natural competitor to the United States. But it is designed basically to obscure the aggressive intent of the Chinese communist regime, and the acts of aggression that they have actually taken against us. And meanwhile, while these newspapers are accepting all of this money from Beijing, they are not reporting about the matters in the four taboos. A little bit on human rights, because when both Republican and Democratic administrations declare that the communist regime is committing genocide against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, East Turkestan, somebody has to write a little something about this. But almost nothing is being written about forced organ transplants, about forced abortions, about the persecution of various different religious groups. And you would see nothing in the Washington Post and the New York Times about military and espionage activities that are inimical to the national security of the United States. The television networks follow their lead in terms of what is politically acceptable to report. After this corruption, the accepting of the Chinese money to publish the Chinese communist propaganda was exposed. I don't think that they're publishing. I don't see now the China Watch supplement anymore. But those weren't the only papers. The Des Moines Register was publishing this kind of stuff, just as an example. And then look at the think tanks. Something like a half a dozen, maybe it's seven or eight, blue chip think tanks were accepting money from front organizations of Chinese intelligence and doing joint projects with them. We're talking about the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carter Center, my own alma mater, which is Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This is scandalous, absolutely scandalous. And some of these think tanks, like the Carnegie Endowment, were actually hiring Chinese intelligence operatives to work on their staff. This is of interest. The academic institutions are addicted to Chinese students who pay full tuition. Many of these students are going into the STEM departments. Many of them already have the advanced degrees in engineering, for example, that they are seeking in the American institutions. Why would they come and get a duplicate degree? Well, because they learned the basics in China, and now they know what the cutting edge research could be that their professors are engaging in, all the easier to steal it and to report it to the Chinese MSS, their intelligence service. So there's so many reasons why the American people don't know about it. But the biggest problem is that our national leadership that is privy to at least a lot of the intelligence about this is not reporting these facts to the American people. In contrast, take a look at Ronald Reagan and his administration. He was warning us about the Soviet military buildup throughout the 1970s. He was questioning the policy of detente, which is the equivalent of today's policy of engagement with the Chinese Communist regime. In November 1982, Reagan gave a nationwide televised speech on the Soviet military threat and how Soviet armaments were growing and growing and growing while ours were declining. He helped build a pro-defense consensus in this country that ended up having extremely salutary effects. Of course, you'd be very familiar with this whole thing because you worked on his National Security Council back in the day before founding the Institute of World Politics. You're describing, I guess you could say, the overall state of affairs over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Things have changed significantly, at least in the last eight, five, seven, eight years, something like that. Would you agree? I think that what has changed is that Xi Jinping has decided to take the gloves off in many respects. The grand strategist behind China's rise as a strategic peer and competitor of the United States was Deng Xiaoping, who said, we should hide our capabilities and bide our time. He was a master of the central strategic deception exercised by the Chinese regime, which is the same thing as the central strategic deception theme of the Soviet Union, and that is, we are not communist anymore. We've changed, and we are just a bunch of nice people, and we give you ping pong games, and we give you pandas, and you can hug our pandas and do harmonious business with us and make a lot of money, and everybody will be happy. During this whole time, China has been building itself up, has been stealing our technology, the head of the National Security Agency, a recent head of it, declared that the intellectual property theft being committed by the Chinese intelligence services, and their students, and their business, their friendly business delegations, and everything else is the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of the world. It is at our expense, it is at the expense of our ability to be competitive economically in the world, and it is at the expense of our competitive edge in military and intelligence technology. We became convinced that the Chinese communist regime is not communist anymore, and of course, if they had actually changed, as the strategic deception theme tells us, that means that by definition, they no longer have unlimited objectives on the global stage. Accepting this strategic deception theme is the same intellectual error as those in the 1930s who assumed that Hitler's desire for Lebensraum, more room for the German people, was effectively no different than the Kaiser's imperial ambitions, which were limited. The Kaiser simply wanted Germany to have its place in the sun, as they said, alongside the other great imperial powers of Europe. Why shouldn't Germany have an empire, too? So if Hitler is no different than the Kaiser, then perhaps, and if he has indeed limited objectives, well, perhaps those limited objectives can be accommodated, perhaps even appeased. In fact, if you are dealing with a voracious power, with a revolutionary, ideologically-based ambition of unlimited objectives, then appeasement will only whet the appetite. John, just a quick sec. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back. And we're back with Dr. John Lenczowski, Chancellor and President Emeritus of the Institute of World Politics. Well, I'm going to get you to, first of all, just explain to me, it might seem obvious, but what exactly unlimited objectives means, and how can you know? This would seem to be a foundational question. Well, it is in the nature of the ideology. Marxism-Leninism has a vision of the inevitable victory of communism worldwide on the basis of the proletarian class struggle against the oppressor class. Now, Communist China has a variant of this. They claim that their main ideology, and they reiterate this all the time, they just did it this summer at the plenum of the Communist Party. Their ideology is Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics. They're emphasizing the importance of Mao Zedong thought, and the importance of Xi Jinping thought. And so, in the case of the Chinese, and I do not think that the regime represents the people, I consider it to be the oppressor of the people, but the regime attempts to harness Chinese nationalism as a part of its global strategy. The Soviets tried to do this too, from time to time. When they were threatened by Hitler, and they had to embark on the Great Fatherland War, and it wasn't the Great Class War, the Great Proletarian War, the Great Communist War. It was the Great Fatherland War. They had revised Russian history. They had thrown historic Russian heroes into the dustbin to destroy the national memory and to remake the national identity. But now, they had to mobilize every force they possibly could in order to fight the Nazis. And so, they rehabilitated those heroes, Alexander Nevsky and the others. They took the Russian Orthodox priests out of the gulag and said, you can go back to your churches because of the close relationship between Russian Orthodox Christianity and the Russian national identity. These people were all languishing in the slave labor camps if they were still alive. But now, they're mobilized in a great nationalistic war effort. And of course, so many people in the foreign policy establishment, if you ask them, what are Soviet objectives in the world? What is the foundation of Soviet foreign policy? Well, they say, it's a combination of Marxism, Leninism, and Russian national interest, Russian nationalism. Well, excuse me, there may be such a combination, but which is the senior partner? In my book, the short answer to this is that it is a Communist Party operation that is attempting to harness the Russian national force in its battle plan. And the Chinese Communist regime is doing the same thing. They're trying to harness Chinese national pride, the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the restoration of the Middle Kingdom. But ultimately, they want to control and dominate the world, if possible, make all the rest of the world tributary states. Marxism-Leninism defines a new form of international relations. It's called proletarian internationalism. You don't hear the Chinese Communist regime using this expression very much because it was a Soviet expression. And they called it explicitly a new form of international relations. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means that international relations are now not going to be conducted on a nation-to-nation basis, because the nation actually is a dangerous thing. The nation-state government is actually part of the system of oppression within a given country. And so that's why the state has to wither away, and will wither away, according to the communist prophecies. And so then how are relations conducted on a global basis amongst peoples? Well, they're conducted on a party-to-party basis, because the party is the genuine representative of the people, you see. And so how does China conduct its relations with North Korea, for example? Not through the foreign ministry, not through the instruments of the state. They conduct it on a party-to-party basis. So even though they don't use this expression, the Chinese Communist regime is de facto pursuing a policy of proletarian internationalism. And you can extrapolate that to the rest of the world as part of Chinese ambitions. First, they'll have a system of tributary states. Then those state systems are basically designed to evaporate, and things will be conducted on a party-to-party basis, which is the only way the Chinese regime can fully feel secure when it doesn't have normal nation-states with self-determination, with consent of the governed, with alternative forms of legitimization of state authority. What is the legitimizing instrument of state authority in China? It's Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics. Many people, including some very prominent Sinologists, who even I have a deep respect for their work, will tell us, hey, most people in China don't believe in communism anymore. Something different. Including party members. Correct. Well, no, exactly. Well, this is the terrible failure of mirror imaging. Mirror imaging is the treacherous methodology of looking at other cultures as if they're just like us. And so the assumption here, by all sorts of people observing China, including prominent and otherwise very sound-thinking Sinologists, is that you have to believe in an ideology for it to be politically operational. But this is not the case. This was not the case in the Soviet Union, and it is not the case in China. And one has to study enough about ideology, not only to know what its guiding principles are, or constraining principles, if you want to put it from another perspective, but you have to understand what its functions are in the system. And in China, as it was in other communist countries, as it is in North Korea, the ideology serves two fundamental purposes. One is to legitimize the regime in power. Why does the party deserve to be in power? Well, it's the Marxist-Leninist ideology that supplies that for them. And I can explain that, if you like, but that's their principal instrument. They have auxiliary instruments. They like to say, well, we are Chinese patriots who are building up the Chinese nation. They can say, we are presiding over a growing economy and have brought millions of poor people. But that's entirely tangential. For the century of humiliation. Right. And nobody else could have done it. We were the ones who did it. The Soviets had a similar thing. We may be bastards, but we're your bastards. We were the only ones who could get rid of and fend off the Nazis. So the Chinese have a variant of all of this themselves. So legitimization or legitimation is one essential function. But the other essential function is internal security. The Chinese regime is an illegitimate regime. It rules without the consent of the government. And so it has an internal security problem. They're afraid of their own people. Well, John Lynchowski, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's been a pleasure being here. I don't often get the chance to talk about all of these things, so thank you. Thank you all for joining Dr. John Lynchowski and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.