הריאיון עם סטיבן מושר - חלק 2 (אנגלית בלבד)

China experts are debating CCP leader Xi Jinping standing within the regime. What is the future of the CCP and its failing economy? We now bring you part two of my interview with author and a foremost China scholar, Stephen Mosier. There's a discussion among scholars, China watchers, China scholars, or a debate whether or the dictator, Xi Jinping, is in complete and total control, or if he's paranoid about losing control. What do you think is the state of politics inside of China? What we have in China today is an economy that's faltering. It's faltering. Why? It's faltering for three reasons. One, because of the demography decline. Those hundreds of billions of young who should be getting married and buying homes and cars aren't there. There are 70 million empty apartment buildings in China which will not be occupied ever because the people who would have occupied them and raised families are gone forever. The second thing is, of course, all the misdirected government investment into white elephants, the state-owned enterprises that continue to lose money each year, like China Rail, for example, which is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. That debt will never be paid off. Then you've got the tariff pressure, the pressure from the tariffs of Donald Trump. The only sector of the Chinese economy that actually works according to market principles is the export sector. The export sector only works because of access to the American market. They've got nothing else. They've got no domestic consumption, in part because of the one-child policy, in part because nobody in China trusts the government. They want to hold on to their capital or get it out of the country as quickly as possible and buy a safe investment like a home in California or a home in Sydney. The Chinese economy is in for some very, very dark days ahead. I believe that the sooner the collapse comes, the sooner Xi Jinping will be forced, as Mao was, to either step back to what he called the second line or to be forced out of power altogether. He's alienated all of the other factions in China. He's alienated the followers of Jiang Zemin by purging members of his faction. He's alienated Hu Jintao's faction. In fact, he had Hu removed for health reasons from a meeting in front of the assembled senior leaders. That was a tremendous loss of face for Hu Jintao. Tremendous. So he's alienated the factions in the Communist Party, he wanted to leave only his own faction standing. And yet recently, members of his own faction, generals that he's appointed, have been removed. That makes no sense. It makes no sense for Xi Jinping himself, who has only the support of his faction, to begin removing members of that faction. So I think that the pressure from the other elite families in China, and we're talking about families that go back to the Long March, we're talking about families that are now third, fourth generation Communist Party elites. If those families unite together, they can remove Xi Jinping. And so right now, I think that his days are numbered. He will either be put out to pasture or simply sidelined in one way or another. And the evidence seems to be that in terms of at least control of the military, he's not in total control. I want to revisit something that you mentioned when it came to your research and your time in China, where it came to a head and basically an ultimatum was given. Is that something that is still prominent, whether it be in media, if you have a bureau, if you're a Western media organization inside of China, as well as China scholars that really enjoy the access, whether it is a junket or some type of research that they want to do in China, where you have to tow a certain line? Is there a concern that we've been contaminated as a society? Well, I've been concerned about this for a very, very long time because we have in the United States an open society. And we also, because of our Judeo Christian heritage, I think always try to assume the best of people. That operating principle doesn't work very well with regard to China because one has to assume that the communist official that you're dealing with is being duplicitous unless you have evidence that he's being honest. In order to be on good terms with the Chinese Communist Party, you have to play nice. You have to say nice things about them. And if you do, you get invited on all-expense-paid junkets to China. You get a visa, of course. First and foremost, you get a visa to go to China, and then you get an all-expense-paid trip to China. You would think that if they were to give up on anyone, they would give up on me because I've been a critic of China since 1980 and will continue until my death. They have tried to get me to come to China. They have offered me all-expense-paid trips to China. They have offered me a visa. They have offered me lecture fees. They have tried to compromise me. Now, if they try to compromise me, they'll try to compromise anybody. For many years, I held conferences on human rights in China, annual conferences. And I always invited members of representatives from the Falun Gong because they are right there, first and foremost, among the groups who are being persecuted in China. I would invite China scholars to join me at these conferences. And more often than not, they would turn me down. And I don't want to mention names. There are famous names in the China scholarly community. But they would tell me, no, I want to keep my channels of communication open to China. I don't want to criticize the regime. So the Chinese Communist Party is very, very good at manipulating public opinion, at making sure that the people that it allows into China are hewing the party line and come back to spew party propaganda, or at least not say anything critical of Communist China. Think about the fact that China is still allowed to purchase inserts into major American newspapers and run propaganda articles. I don't think we've been able to place, and our Voice of America hasn't been able to place an article in People's Daily for I don't know how long. I mean, reciprocity, we shouldn't be allowing that. I think about the fact that radio stations here are owned or controlled by Communist Party interests. I was involved in 1998 in the Cox Commission, which investigated the effort of China in the late 1990s to set up espionage shops in the United States. And at that time, Chris Cox, who was the head of the Cox Commission estimated that there were 10,000 Communist Party front organizations set up in the United States. That was 27 years ago. How many front organizations of various kinds do we have now? Many more than 10,000. We are at war with China across all domains except the kinetic. People need to realize that. In cyberspace, we're at war with China. China just set up a network of phony cell stations in New York City that would have taken down the entire communication system in the largest city in the United States. That's an incredibly aggressive thing to do. It is at one level an act of war. China is at war with us across all domains, all the time. It is ceaseless. I think the solution has to be strict reciprocity. If China is engaged in actions against us, then we tell them, unless we are allowed to do the same thing in China, you must stop. Unless we're allowed to open up a George Washington Institute on the Beijing University campus, they have to close down all of the Confucius Institutes. Well, since they will never allow us to do that, then the Confucius Institutes will be closed down. But we didn't do it. They did it by refusing reciprocity. Unless we're able to publish a newspaper in Shanghai and distribute it freely to the Chinese people, they can't publish their newspapers here. Unless we're allowed to own a radio station and broadcast news and information from our viewpoint, from American viewpoint, they're not allowed to own radio stations here. Now, on and on, across the board, United Front measures. Remember, the United Front Department is a department of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a weapon that the Chinese Communist Party is using, along with propaganda and along with People's Liberation Army, in order to achieve world domination. Their path to world domination runs through one country and one country alone. Only one country stands in the way of China's domination of the world, and that is the United States.