Friday, March 29, 2024

Bannon: We Are at War with the Chinese Communist Party

To longtime China-hawks like former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, the Chinese Communist Party’s early mishandling of the novel coronavirus pandemic and subsequent cover-up is a providential wake-up call.

“It’s made things crystal clear. We’re in a war with the Chinese Communist Party,” he says.

In an exclusive interview with The Wire China, Bannon highlights the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States and the urgent need to decouple completely from China’s authoritarian regime.

On January 23rd – the impeachment saga dominated the news cycle – Bannon attempted to isolate “the signal from the noise” and transitioned his daily “War Room: 2020” election radio show to a two hour “War Room: Pandemic” – focused on uncovering the depth of what was happening in China, and how it affects the world.

Preliminary investigations into the origins of the outbreak indicate that the Chinese government possessed evidence of community spread no later than the third or fourth week of December 2019.

When whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang tried to warn their fellow citizens about the virus, the Chinese government prosecuted the dissidents and made them sign rumor mongering confessions. Dr. Li Wenliang died of coronavirus shortly after at the age of 33.

Records now show that Taiwanese officials also attempted to sound the alarm and sent an email to the World Health Organization (WHO) on December 31st inquiring about the person-to-person spread of the novel coronavirus. Taiwan’s email mentioned an “atypical pneumonia” reminiscent of SARS (which is transmitted by human contact). Taiwan maintains that “public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease.”

The WHO swiftly dismissed Taiwan’s concerns and tweeted on January 14th: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan, China.”

Bannon points out that, by this time, China – once a net exporter of personal protective equipment (PPE) – became a net importer of PPE.

A study conducted by the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom found that, if the Chinese had been honest about human-to-human transmission and community spread in the last week of December or early January, 95 percent of the deaths could have been avoided.

Ultimately, the WHO’s mismanagement of the pandemic and the acting Director General’s praise for China’s handling of the outbreak forced President Trump to halt all United States funding of the World Health Organization on April 14th.

The bureaucratic elite class working at the WHO unfortunately represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party’s running dogs. To Bannon, once Western leaders’ lost confidence in Western ideals, they chased the money.

For decades, globalist elites – courted by cheap Chinese labor and low production costs – sold out to the Chinese Communist Party and facilitated the managed decline of the Western system.

The offshoring of American jobs at the direction of Wall Street corporatists and K Street globalists disproportionately hurt blue collar, working class Americans and exposed United States infrastructures to numerous national security threats.

Under the guise of ‘One Belt One Road’ the Chinese Communist Party drives their Made in China 2025 scheme – which Bannon describes as “the convergence of advanced chip design, artificial intelligence, robotics, and maybe biotechnology.”

In a calculated move, Bannon says the Chinese Communist Party made the decision to untether from Western technology in April or May of 2019.

“To the Chinese, the future is technology,” Bannon told The Wire China, and China’s leaders essentially said: “We are going to have our own standards. The future Tencent, and the future [of the Chinese companies] Weibo, Alibaba, Huawei and ZTE are not going to be based upon Western technology.”

The CCP uses their technology to access critical United States intelligence systems and to exploit our national economy.

“Institutionally we [Americans] don’t understand economic war. We don’t understand information war. They [the Chinese government] are masters of it,” Bannon said.

He’s right.

From 2001 to 2011, the United States lost 2.7 million jobs to China in just 10 years, in part because of Chinese currency manipulation.

China’s gradual dominance of American industry also benefitted from routine intellectual property theft. In 2019, one in five US corporations said that China had stolen their intellectual property within the last year.

The Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive espionage tactics accounted for roughly 90 percent of the United States Justice Department’s total economic espionage cases from 2011 to 2018.

William Evanina, director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center, believes that Chinese theft as it pertains to American trade secrets costs the United States between $300 and $500 billion each year.

So where do we go from here?

Bannon credits President Trump’s stunning 2016 victory to the campaign’s aggressive stance on China and trade.

Just before the inauguration, Bannon reportedly told Roger Ailes: “China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right.”

Bannon believes China will again frame the 2020 election and advocates for an aggressive US stance on China. “We ought to, quite frankly, seize their companies here in the United States,” Bannon says.

Likening present-day China to Nazi Germany in 1938, Bannon warns that once China becomes a hypernationalist state – you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

“This is that moment,” he said. “If we blink, we’re heading on a path to war, to kinetic war, if we don’t stop it right now. The elites are going the wrong way.”

This much we know: when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party, Steve Bannon won’t blink.

Read Bannon’s full interview for The Wire China here.

More From The Pulse