Ralph Sawyer and James Gilliland explore China’s calculated expansion, from its 2050 dominance push—backed by 10% annual growth and $160B trade surpluses—to Taiwan’s vulnerability via internal subversion and Qin dynasty-style tactics. Sawyer warns of cyber warfare (e.g., Naval War College shutdowns), nuclear modernization, and a military poised to exploit U.S. distractions, while Gilliland revisits the UFO Intention Experiment, linking sightings in Wisconsin and elsewhere to indigenous prophecies like Black Elk’s. Amid calls on chemtrails and HAARP, the episode underscores China’s hidden aggression and humanity’s struggle to discern reality amid overwhelming data. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, as the case may be across the cosmos, known and otherwise.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, covering every single one of those time zones like a blanket.
And last night, a lot of you will have missed it, but my guest, James Gilliland, was talking about UFOs.
That's his subject.
And, you know, he kept talking about the intent and how he goes into his area, goes into, he's already there, and he produces UFOs virtually on demand with intent.
Now, that's really, really interesting because, as you know, I've done a number of experiments in the past that involve intent and weather and people's health and all kinds of things.
Well, I finally broke down in the last hour and I said, all right, what the hell?
Let's give it a try.
Let's all concentrate on producing UFOs in our skies worldwide, all across the country, all across the world.
No particular location involved.
Well, I can tell you this, I've received upwards of 2,000 emails, so many that my email program kind of went wacko, of people who saw things.
So we're going to do a repeat performance tonight.
And then we're going to look at this, you know, the next several days.
But I thought it'd be worthwhile at the beginning of the program, right here up front, to bring James Gilland online right now, actually.
Well, you know, we never actually gave my email or my website out on the air, and I got just slammed with emails anyway, regardless of that.
And what happened with me is, I mean, I got emails of seeing multiple ships to just amazing encounters everywhere from there's two crafts in Berkeley, Seattle, there was about three or four sightings in Seattle, Hawaii, Houston, Texas.
And, you know, within the field, there's all these planes and dimensions existing right alongside of art.
And, you know, they're just sitting there in that field waiting to drop in, waiting for us to open to that reality and put the intent out for them to step in.
So the skies are full of ships right now.
And all we have to do is initiate and kind of open the doorway for that to happen.
Okay, and I've got a lot of elders, like Lakota elders and people of that nature that I've been working with.
And this has all been prophesied.
They know this is coming down.
Wallace, you know, Black Elk and a lot of other ones have all given prophecies about these times and that this is going to be happening for these times.
James Gilliland, and we've got a couple of experiments coming up in a few moments.
Stay right where you are.
Well, all right.
Skimming through the world news, militants struck back Sunday in their first major blow against U.S.-led security clampdown in Baghdad with car bombings.
Listen to this, that killed at least 63 people, left scores injured, sent a grim message, indeed, to officials boasting that extremist factions were on the run.
Not exactly.
64 die on India train militants blamed a fire that raked through a train traveling from India to Pakistan early Monday morning, killed at least 64 people, and India's top railway officials say it was an attack by militants trying to harm India-Pakistan relations, or should I say, worsen them.
Hoping to turn the page on six years of stalled Mideast negotiations, the U.S. instituted found itself boxed in Sunday by a characteristically complex political impasse involving the Israelis and Palestinian Secretary of State Kanalis Hawaii came to the region intending to lead a symbolic peace summit.
Her plans, however, have been eclipsed amid uncertainty and disagreement over how to handle last week's sudden announcement of a power sharing deal to end internal Palestinian fighting.
Democrats seek to impose limits on the Iraq war.
Senate Democrats pledged renewed efforts on day to curtail the Iraq war, suggesting they'll seek to limit a 2002 measure authorizing President Bush's use of force against Saddam Hussein.
The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the proposal had little chance of succeeding.
All right, looking at some other news, the following is from the BBC, of course, and it's about dead zones.
The delicate interplay between the oceans and the atmosphere is changing with catastrophic consequences.
Entire marine ecosystems have been wiped out, devastating populations of seabirds and larger marine mammals.
These dead zones occur where there are disturbances to the nutrient-rich ocean currents, which are driven by coastal winds.
Extreme marine suffocations have occurred off the west coast of the U.S. every year for the last five years.
The most intense event, which left the ocean floor littered with the carcasses of crabs, occurred in 2006.
It was unlike anything we've ever measured along the Oregon coast in the past five years, according to Dr. Francis Chan of the Oregon State University.
Other coastal countries, including Chile, Namibia, and South Africa, also affected.
The common factor between all the areas is the marine currents off the coast that rise from the deep ocean.
These upswelling zones being nutrient-rich water up from the deep, triggering plankton blooms that underpin the coastal food chain.
Nearly 50% of the world's fisheries are in these areas.
The currents are driven by winds that move surface water away from the coast, drawing more up from the deep.
But now, observations along the west coast of the U.S. suggest the upswelling is being disrupted, changing its timing and intensity, for example.
In 2005, the upswelling was delayed.
Now, that means the plankton blooms did not occur, leading to a collapse in fish population.
This particularly hit migrating salmon, which pass along the coast in April and May of every year.
In 2005, they found nothing to eat, said Dr. Bill Peterson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.
By the time upswelling did begin, they were all dead.
An even more catastrophic event, this is hard to read, occurred in 2008 when the amount of upswelling doubled, leading to a huge influx of nutrients and a supercharged plankton bloom.
Sounds good, right?
Wrong.
When these sank to the ocean floor, they stripped the water column of all oxygen, creating a 3,000 square kilometer dead zone where creatures unable to swim away suffocated en mass.
Dr. Francis Chan used underwater cameras to survey the area two months after the event.
We were shocked to see a graveyard, he said.
Frame after frame of carcass, carcass, carcass.
Crabs, worms, sea stars all perished in the water.
The event was so severe that the researchers fear marine life will not ever return to the area.
Quote, in previous years, fish that have escaped the low oxygen area appear to have returned once the oxygen was renewed.
This year may be different, however, because unlike earlier years, the living habitat also was suffocated.
The researchers believe the cause of these events was changes in the intensity of the coastal winds, perhaps brought about by global warming.
What we know about the climate change models is that the land will warm more than the sea.
It is this difference in temperature and pressure that drives the winds.
As you intensify that gradient, that will drive the stronger winds.
To confirm this link to climate change, the researchers say they need another 10 to 15 years of data.
In the meantime, they say We must change our approach to managing and using these ecosystems, particularly for fish stocks.
The most prudent course of action is to begin to think differently about what's happening.
Climate models predict uncertainty with wild fluctuations.
We should expect more surprises.
All right, in a moment, we're going to go to open lines, unscreened open lines.
Let me give you the appropriate numbers.
If you're west of the Rockies, out here in the West, 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, Big Jungle Land, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers, Area Code 818-501-4721.
Wildcard line, folks, area code 818-501-4109.
And finally, if you're outside the country, yes, we can help you.
Get hold of the operator and have her call 800-893-0903.
For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and begin a chain reaction, a kind of slow cascade of collisions that would expand then for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens.
Do you see what they're talking about?
A little piece of something could hit a big enough spacecraft that would break into hundreds of pieces and begin hitting other spacecraft, a kind of domino reaction in space.
In the last decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass, or in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable, they grew more anxious.
Early this year, after a half century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects four inches wide or larger reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket engines, a camera, a hand tool, junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.
Now, say experts, China's test on January 11th of an anti-satellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large pieces means the chain reaction will most likely start sooner if their predictions are correct.
The cascade could put billions of dollars worth of advanced satellites at risk and eventually threaten to limit humanity's reach for the stars altogether.
Now, I had never, ever given that a thought.
I, and I'm sure many of you, always, well, sort of considered the possibility of something getting hit by a stray this or that.
But I really never considered the possibility of a kind of a chain reaction, and there certainly could be.
One little object hitting a big spacecraft would cause hundreds of objects to suddenly be there and spread out, hitting other big spacecraft.
And you get the idea.
Well, the experiment last night looks as though it was a success.
It was amazing.
I had thousands of emails.
Now, I also had many like this since it was the last night, of course, of the last hour of the program.
Shirley wrote, Art, I'm sorry to say I missed last night's show.
Please, please, please do the same intent experiment again tonight, maybe in the first hour.
I really hope the response is incredible and unmistakable.
Looking forward to hearing about it tonight.
Okay, Shirley.
Here's, I'm going to kind of roll over the way we did it in the last hour or so last night.
James Gilluland and many others, including myself, believe that consciousness is a very, very strong power.
We believe that intent and certainly the intent of millions of minds thinking of the same thing at the same time has an effect.
James thinks they are there.
They are but awaiting an invitation.
So we are going to provide an invitation.
What we're going to do is sort of during this coming break, it's coming pretty quickly here, we're going to settle our minds.
We're going to quiet our minds.
Just kind of let your mind go to a nice, quiet place.
And in fact, what really works is to find one of the most joyous moments you ever had in your life.
It could be the birth of your child.
It could be a marriage.
It could be.
In my case, I actually reached out and considered that brief little out-of-body experience I once had in Paris and the incredible joy that I felt.
And while I did not re-experience the joy, I kind of brushed up against it a little bit.
And I felt a little bit of that joy.
Now, it'll be different for all of you, but the point of the exercise is to quiet your mind and then think of something very joyful so you're in a very good mood.
And then what I would like you to do is to either turn down or better yet, just turn off your radio as the break comes on.
And sit there and as hard as you can manage to do, after you've quieted your mind, found this little joyful place, whatever it is, project intent.
And the intent I want you to project is that of whoever they are, hopefully our friends.
They will show themselves in our skies.
Now, if you wish to go outside, and it's not 100 degrees below zero out there, and you've got a nice little porch you can go stand on or in your yard, stand In your, whatever, just go outside and kind of look at the skies.
And it would appear as though millions of us working together are actually able to produce results.
So, would you be willing to do that for me?
For all of us, if we all concentrate together, if we really project the intent for these beings, whoever they are, to show themselves with their craft in our skies, then I would suggest to you it definitely is worth a walk outside and a scan of your skies.
There are, well, it's probably been years now since I've done one of these experiments.
So it was just irresistible.
Intent, millions of you, and I finally broke down.
Well, tonight, part two, beginning right now.
Turn your radio down or off, and let's go to it right now.
We'll be right back.
Well, I know not what we have done, whether we've done anything at all.
I know yesterday we certainly produced results.
Thousands of emails, thousands of sightings.
We'll see what happens tonight.
We'll see what happens over the next several days.
I don't know how this works.
I don't know very much about it at all.
And we've discussed that many times in the past.
But I did break down and we gave it a try.
Listen, coming up in just a moment, all of you unscreened open lines directly ahead.
Top of the hour, Ralph Sawyer, and we're going to talk about China, past and present.
In the tape that was released by Al-Qaeda number two a few days ago, he asked all the mujahideen in the world to pledge their allegiance to Mullah Omar without ever mentioning bin Laden.
If I was them, if I were them, if he had died or been killed by one of our bombs, I would bury him quietly somewhere in the desert and forevermore, nothing would be known.
We would always imagine and fear he was still alive.
Wouldn't you do that?
unidentified
Yeah, I was actually thinking that if he did die, that would be when they would set it off.
See American Hiroshima or some other plan that they have in the operational stage.
Water equals ultimately fuel and the ability to go onward or go anywhere at all.
Good morning on the first time, Color Line.
You are on the air.
unidentified
Hey, Ark.
This is Mike on my way to Memphis.
Hey, I was just wondering if you could recap a show for me real quick and tell me if there's any updates on the, I can't remember the guy's whole name, but it was Vince, somebody in the Clinton administration that was killed.
When he went down or whatever happened to him, did you hear anything like, you know, somebody shooting at him or him going down or a crash or a bang or something?
In other words, he was screeching about a rail gun toward the end, you may recall, and some railgun that was pointed at him and firing and all the rest of it.
Well, if something connected with him, and he also talked about an F-16, but if something actually connected with him, as in he hit the aircraft, that would be the last you would hear.
You wouldn't hear, you know, kind of like on TV or in the movies, where you get to hear the explosion and the aftermath and people running and all the rest of it.
Well, you know, it seems to me every time that we have some sort of storm come through, it knocks down the power lines.
And, you know, then they have to go back through and restore everybody's power one by one or area by area.
You know, it looks like the people in Congress would realize that we've got to get together and we've got to do some sort of effort to move the devices that are out there hunting pack here and there and get them moved forward with some sort of way to put distributed power in people's homes where they're generating the basic power needs right there at their own homes so that when the storms come through,
that we don't have to worry about the power unfailing.
And if they do fail, then people will still have power for heat and for the basic needs.
You have a little story, and we have a little time, so go ahead.
unidentified
Okay.
I'm calling actually from Wisconsin, Port Washington.
Been living there for about 22 years, approximately.
Single man.
Lost my wife about three years ago.
Now, the thing is, is past couple weeks, I'm on the first shift, so I'm home about 3.30.
I decide to hop in bed around quarter to 10.
And every once in a while, it's pretty weird because I've been hearing almost as if she's been coming around because I hear her voices.
You know what I'm saying?
And it's pretty wild because every once in a while, just recently, two nights ago, I'm laying in bed, I'm watching TV and everything, and it's like I feel her presence.
Well, he was doing pretty well up until he said a word that we can't air.
I understand, sir, exactly what you're going through.
And when somebody has a personal loss of their mate or somebody very close to them, it's not at all strange that you would feel their presence, perhaps hear their voice, otherwise know they're still with you.
And it is my considered and firm opinion that she is still with you.
So I hope that's of some comfort to you, and I hope it doesn't scare you.
I think it's quite natural.
I'm Art Bell.
All right.
The intent is out there over the next several days.
We'll see what happens.
But already, my mind.
Very interesting stuff, I would say indeed.
Coming up in a moment, Ralph Sawyer is an independent historical scholar, lecturer, and consultant to both government agencies and international conglomerates.
Now tonight for you.
He specialized in Chinese military, technological, and intelligence issues for nearly four decades, most of which have been spent in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia.
A former Fulbright Fellow, following undergraduate work at MIT, graduate study in Chinese studies at Harvard, and advanced language study at Stanford, and with local scholars throughout Asia, Sawyer has continued the traditional Chinese practice of public activity and private scholarship over the decades.
His written works focus on Chinese military history and martial writings, while his lectures and strategic consulting emphasize the reformulation and applicability of paradigm lessons and theoretical concepts in modern contexts, including their integration into contemporary PRC doctrine.
A fellow of the Center for Military and Strategic Studies in Calgary and a senior research fellow with the Warring States Project at the University of Massachusetts, he is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the International Institute of Strategic Studies and a frequent presenter at academic conferences.
So coming up, it is certainly timely.
It is the year of the pig, everybody.
That's the year of the pig, Chinese year of the pig.
Of course, it's a kind of funny issue because there is a debate in Hong Kong and other places as to whether this is a fire pig or an earth pig or, in fact, it might be the golden pig.
And people are inclined to want to believe it's the year of the golden pig.
But there are several systems that are being consulted by the various astrologers and geomancers.
And they're arguing among themselves pretty vehemently, actually.
A couple of them came to blows last week in Hong Kong at a time.
Just like the Taiwan legislature seems to do these days as well.
And when you look at this, it's probably a year of some turmoil because the Chinese characters for the year, there are always two characters that make up the year designation, they generally are understood as representing fire and water.
And in this case, the fire is above the water, and that's considered not too good a situation.
On the other hand, if you're an Eijing scholar and you look at that, you might say, well, lightning should be above the water, or the sun should be above the water.
So it depends upon your kind of perspective and how you want to interpret this.
Well, it's actually 60 years because the Chinese calendar uses a system, a running system of 10, what they call heavenly stems and 12 earthly branches.
And the 12 branches are associated with the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac, which for this year would be the pig.
So if you start by running A in the first one and A in the bottom, you go A, A, and then B, B, etc.
So it takes 60 to run the cycle because of the difference between the 10 and the 12.
So the characters for the golden pig can only come up every 60 years.
Well, because over the centuries, people have put forward different interpretations of how the five elements, earth, air, fire, metal, water, and wood, actually relate to each other and how the cycle should run.
So some of these sequences come from 2,000 years ago, and others come from 1,000 years ago.
And depending upon what system, just like our astrological systems in the West, depending upon which system you happen to believe in, you get a different interpretation.
Is this belief supported by the Chinese government, or did they, it seems to me they ran through a big thing where they tried to eradicate all these beliefs, right?
This was one of the premises of the communist movement back in the 40s, that anything that was feudalistic, and this, of course, was highly feudalistic, anything feudalistic had to be eliminated.
And when they had the Cultural Revolution, if you were caught with, say, the almanacs, which everybody now has in their hands to decide what you should do on what day, I mean, that would be certainly grounds for a beating or getting sent down to the farm for the rest of your life.
But of course, among the common people, these sorts of beliefs tend to persist.
They couldn't be eradicated that easily.
And now everything, all these excesses that are related to the popular practice of religion, having children, funerals, weddings, etc., have all come back with a great fury.
People Finally, beginning to have a little prosperity, and they're going out and spending money once again.
For example, for tombs, they're spending $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 U.S. for a favorable tomb site so that when they die, their descendants and their ancestors can benefit by the proper, what we call geomantic orientation.
That's the feng shui.
And these are astronomical prices.
The government is opposed to this, but it's not an issue they want to crack down on right now because they have enough internal unrest problems.
I mean, all of a sudden there are 35 billionaires in China.
How many of them made their money through corrupt government connections, we won't speculate on.
I have enough enemies looking to hit me in the head already.
So yes, well, I'm known as an enemy of the people.
And oh, I'd like to make it clear at this point that when we talk about China tonight, we are not talking about the Chinese people.
We are talking about the small minority, the oligarchy, the autocrats who control the government, the few hundred on the very top, and maybe the 13 million important Chinese communist members out of, say, the 86 million.
We're not talking about the Chinese who live down the street from you or the average Chinese in China who are basically apolitical and they just don't want to be bothered by the government.
My feeling would be that within the next 30 years, we will certainly have conflict with China.
The size of the conflict and the type of the war is very much open to question.
Obviously, in this day and age of the dispersed battlefield, we're not going to have two massive armies pick up sticks like India and China may and meet somewhere in the middle of Pacific and start clubbing each other to death.
The points of conflict, of course, right now is Taiwan and then the Southeast Asia.
And the question is whether China will at some point grow so confident and so belligerent that it decides that it has to retake Taiwan.
Well, to take the second question first, we've been practicing this policy of strategic ambiguity, which means we try to keep the Chinese off balance as to whether or not we would, in fact, interfere.
And events in Taiwan have suggested some distancing between the United States and Taiwan.
On the other hand, there are a number of business interests that have important assets in Taiwan, and wouldn't like to see those disappear at this point.
Five or ten years down the road, probably doesn't matter.
When you go to Washington these days, as I unfortunately have to do, you find that the general temper is that Taiwan isn't worth defending.
And that's not official policy as far as I know.
But generally speaking, our assets would be very exposed, our carrier battle groups and so forth, by the time they could reach Taiwan with the new Chinese weapons that are coming online, the Chinese practice of unorthodox warfare, which we can talk about a little bit later, and striking nodes of vulnerability, maybe sabotage and subversion, and a number of other things applied in coordination, the U.S. response might be too little and too late.
My own opinion, and that of maybe one or two others, is that Taiwan is going to fall from internal subversion.
The people in Taiwan are already becoming very much acculturated.
There are hundreds of thousands, if not a million, Taiwanese in mainland China doing business these days.
Taiwan provided the initial economic impetus and much of the basic technology over the last few decades to get the great economic engine of mainland China going.
For your listeners who aren't too familiar with these things, in the early days, shoe factories and plastics factories went to mainland China.
And everybody says, well, these kinds of factories are kind of throwaway.
I mean, this is low-level production.
Who wants it anyway?
But when you transfer a shoe factory, it takes 2,000 employees.
You teach management practices, rubber chemistry, adhesives, all sorts of technological fundamentals.
And you also now have an army, which before was barefoot, can be equipped with Air Jordans at a moment's notice just by confiscating the shoes.
So this kind of bases, get your engine going.
People in Taiwan these days, some are pro-unification with China.
Others are for Taiwan independence.
We know that the Chinese have been able to penetrate Taiwanese defensive computer system, the power system, the water system.
They have something like 900 short and intermediate range missiles aimed at Taiwan, some of which have enough accuracy to hit within 60 meters of the designated target that could be used for a kind of surgical strike to take out the defenses, the airfields, and so forth.
And you have unknown number of agents and sympathizers, fifth columnists.
So the question is, if push came to shove, would Taiwan itself fight?
Never mind, would the United States, in fact, come to the aid of Taiwan?
My feeling is that Taiwan will just collapse from within.
People will throw up their hands And say it can't be helped.
And in terms of unorthodox thinking and unorthodox warfare, the best time to do this would be this coming fall because everybody expects prior to the Olympics: no, China will not make any moves to upset the apple cart.
This is going to be China's great glorious moment.
But if you can have Taiwan collapse from within with a little bit of aggressive help and maybe a little blockade, by the time January, February got here, everybody would say, just like with Tibet, oh, it's all over.
Of course, every time there's been a problem previously, we've always shown the flag.
You know, we get a carrier over there or a battle group over there.
And there is always this danger that if we did, Ralph, if we did nothing more than, for example, send a battle group over there to kind of show the flag as hostilities began or whatever, and one of our big assets was hit, you can take it from there.
That's the danger of entanglement, and that's why a lot of people are reluctant, in fact, to commit groups.
On the other hand, the Pacific War Command, which is based in Hawaii, is bulking up its assets to the extent it can with the commitments in Iraq and the Middle East, Afghanistan, and so forth.
And additional submarines and presumably another carrier are going to be assigned to the Hawaii headquarters for deployment in Southeast Asia.
So we are increasing our exposure.
Of course, the closest Air Force assets are Japan and then Okinawa and Guam.
They can be there generally in two to three hours flight time.
But our response is pretty much prescripted.
And the PRC will be able to anticipate what we do.
They'll be able to anticipate the sailings of the aircraft carriers and so forth and so on.
And there are many ways to disable an aircraft carrier and make it ineffective short of hitting it with a cruise missile or a torpedo.
For example.
Well, if you arrange for some sabotage in advance, the placement of certain types of jamming devices, the use of jamming devices in the skies, an EMP pulse or something like that, you can probably find some disgruntled sailors who are willing to, say, disable the elevators.
Well, if your elevators don't work, you can't get your planes up on deck.
But when somebody takes out one of your aircraft carriers, you probably have very little, you have limited options.
And it seems to me, I know about this doctrine of proportional response, but I've always thought and still think now that that could conceivably fall apart very quickly.
It depends upon who's in the White House and what his thinking is.
One thing we should keep in mind is that the Chinese historically have always been willing to take enormous numbers of casualties to achieve their objectives.
And it's not just historical practice, which we saw in Korea and throughout Chinese history where hundreds of thousands were killed and died in single battles, but it's also a point of military doctrine.
One of the traditional writings that dates back to 200 B.C. states unequivocally that the best commander is willing to take 50% casualties to achieve his goal.
This is certainly, when I say that at West Point, half the cadets fall off their chairs.
And of course, if you take more than 5% or 10% casualties, your career is over in the United States, at least.
I mean, they have something like 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
They're liquid fuel, take a couple hours to fuel.
They're basically based around a Beijing area, although they've been building dummy silos as well.
They can hit a good portion of the United States, and certainly our forces in Hawaii and Alaska, Guam, and in Japan.
And they have some more, another 20 intermediate-range missiles, which they can use throughout in the Pacific area to strike battle groups or whatever.
However, they are in a major modernization mode.
They are shifting to solid-fueled, mobile-launched ballistic missiles.
And these 20 that they have right now, we should be replaced by 30 to 50 within the next couple of years, which will probably have multiple warheads with a total destructive potential of over a megaton.
Currently, the destructive potential of the warheads is probably down around 300,000 kilotons, something like that, of each warhead.
And I was recently in China, so I've got a couple of comments and questions for Ralph from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
Most people don't have a firm grasp on the power of China, how big China really is, and most of all, how big it's about to be and how powerful it's about to be.
I've spent a good portion of my adult life in the Far East and Southeast Asia.
So in a moment, I've got a couple of questions for Ralph about what China is doing.
Ralph, I was in Hong Kong about a year before Hong Kong reverted to China.
And it was a very interesting I actually went on up into Canton and on up into China.
And at that time, it was scary, Ralph.
I saw miles and miles and miles of factories and 18-wheelers just everywhere.
The traffic was unbelievable.
The air was horrible.
And the amount of commerce was frightening.
Now, I went back to Hong Kong, oh, about six months ago, Ralph, less than that even.
And this time, I was shocked.
In Hong Kong, the factories were, oh, 40, 50% of them were empty.
They had all moved up into China.
So the Chinese economic machine is rolling right along.
Well, the old-line communists, Ralph, are still in control.
There's no question about that.
But the economic machine is almost the other side of that.
And anything the old-liners will do that upsets that apple cart, if enough time passes, it seems to me that eventually the economics take over the politics.
Well, one, we'll hope that that's true, and we can also hope that hedonism will overtake the populace so that they'll be so busy enjoying themselves they won't want to go to war with anybody.
But there are significant numbers of hardliners and disaffected people in the military, and the military has been kind of shunted out of power in the last two regimes.
I mean, Zhang Jia-min and now the current Hu Jintao.
These two regimes were not military men.
This is the first time that this had happened.
And this caused a lot of resentment among the military authorities.
We do have a lot of voices saying that as soon as China gets powerful enough, it should assert itself in various ways on the world stage.
They're tired of being kicked around by the Caucasians and others.
They still wave the card of shame how a paltry 3,000-man British force was able to subjugate the Qing dynasty.
The Qing dynasty, of course, was an alien regime.
It was corrupt and it was effect.
And if they had had the will, 10,000 crossbowmen could have decimated that column of 3,000 British Marines.
But the government didn't get itself together to do that.
So they're still reliving that and trying to live down that shame.
China's beginning to flex its muscles.
Since antiquity, they've realized that having a vibrant market economy is the basis for a good defense budget.
Now, China ordinarily is regarded as a Confucian country, and the Confucians are not very mercantile-oriented as far as government bureaucrats go, but the people certainly are.
And under Deng Xiaoping, the decision was kind of made that let's get the economic engine going first rather than emphasizing defense, which we didn't have the funds for.
And once that becomes vibrant, it will fund all kinds of military expenditures, the latest weapons.
And because many of the factories that have gone into China now, the electronics, the fiber optics, and other companies, they are manufacturing these dual-use technologies which have immediate military application or can be modified and adopted regularly easily, the policy is working very well.
The economy is booming because the wages are low.
The infrastructure, of course, as you saw, is totally clogged and it's a problem to overcome.
The air is killing everybody and half the water isn't drinkable.
If you put your foot up in the Dongqing Lake, it will probably fall off.
The Yellow River doesn't even flow to the sea a couple of months of the year now.
They have every problem you can possibly imagine.
But at the same time, they're generating huge funds, and some of these funds are now going to pay for the latest in the military toys, some of which are being bought from Russia, and some of which are being developed indigenously, because they have this great emphasis on Chinese military doctrine and Chinese military devices with unique Chinese characteristics.
In other words, they don't want to just borrow Western stuff.
They want to innovate and be kind of unexpected and have what they call their own indigenous technologies.
I mean, they talk a peaceful rise, and they're portrayed as becoming a responsible world citizen, but you don't view them that way, and you view them apparently as America's greatest Threat.
Because when you look at the doctrine that goes back to antiquity, the first thing you always do is conceal strength and display a weak and benign countenance.
And Deng Xiaoping had emphasized that when he talked about hiding their light under a bushel.
And ever since then, the last 15 years, China's always talked about being a good world citizen, having no aggressive intents towards anyone.
And of course, if you want to be unhampered, and if you don't want to scare the other countries around you, Malaysia, Indonesia, et cetera, et cetera, into constantly thwarting and opposing your every move, particularly as you try to expand into the South China Sea and Southeast Asia, then of course you want to seem like a benign citizen.
In addition, they found that soft or economic power is working extremely well.
If you go to Washington, you'll find anyone who criticizes anything that happens with China is almost immediately marginalized and then dismissed as irrelevant.
And if you don't mind, I'd like to take one example, which relates to the satellite issue which you've been discussing on your show in the last couple weekends.
Well, Michael Pillsbury, who's one of our leading thinkers and scholars on China and an advisor to the Secretary of Defense, on January 19th, he presented testimony in Congress describing the commitment that PRC has to space weapons.
And as I sit here, I have a stack of the Chinese theoretical military journals.
And the top two that I have, both are featuring space weapons, 50 years in space, anti-satellite weapons, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is not some sort of shot out of the blue.
This is something they've been discussing and planning on for some years.
And in addition, they're positioning all these unknown micro-satellites up there in the sky in different places, which have no known purpose at the moment.
So there's some consternation about that.
Anyway, Mike Pillsbury presented his testimony to Congress and said that this is part of their basic program to achieve dominance of space.
The Chinese have realized that net-centric warfare, which is what the U.S. is totally dependent on, which means GPS communications, et cetera, et cetera, net-centric warfare can be easily blocked simply by taking out the satellites.
And also the observation satellites can be blinded with lasers.
So we had the laser test last year where they so-called painted one of our observation satellites as it passed over.
And we have this test this year where they shot down a satellite and put all that debris up there in space, which may cause all kinds of problems down the road.
After Michael gave his testimony, the next day the reaction was, oh, the sort of people that he's sighting, we don't know if these are fringe people or not.
And this probably isn't the main thinking.
And so far, there are no indications that China is anything than a friend of America.
As far as we understand, they launched a vehicle up there, and then they maneuver it and struck it from the side, causing it to shatter.
It was not an explosive device, and it shows an ability to control a vehicle of unknown size and shape at the moment in space in this low-level atmosphere.
Whether they could do this at 12,000 miles and 24,000 miles where the GPS satellites are located is a totally different question.
But without doubt, they now have good control of their vehicles.
Oh, yeah, there's no question it was deliberate and it was engineered and it was planned.
The debate is on the interpretation.
Why did they do it now?
To prove that they could do it?
Because they wanted to make sure they could do it?
Because it's a lead-up to Taiwan?
Because they wanted to delay the United States from weaponizing space, maybe get a treaty going?
Well, if you look at Chinese military doctrine going back to antiquity, the unorthodox thinking prescribes whenever you want to achieve something, let's say you're going to attack the enemy, the first thing you do is talk peace, treaty, just like before Pearl Harbor.
The attack on Pearl Harbor is a perfect example of unorthodox warfare.
And so maybe China wants to sort of force the United States to the table so that we all agree to some kinds of limitations on what will be done in the common areas of sea and of space.
That doesn't mean they're going to adhere to it.
They just want to maybe set it up and then exploit it to their own advantage.
And since there'd be no way to police it, and since we know so little about what's actually going on inside China, it would be very difficult to know.
Ralph, do we know whether the little adventure they had blowing up that satellite, was that, I guess, a kinetic weapon, but a direct hit, was that ordered from the top?
There were some people saying that they thought it was some sort of a rogue military action.
Do you expect any sort of internal Chinese mess ahead of us?
In other words, is there going to be some sort of internal uprising, and are we going to see people, you know, scholars taken down, that kind of thing again?
Throughout Chinese history, the Chinese have always gone to extremes with these different kinds of millenarian revolutions.
The cultural revolution was just the latest embodiment of that.
When we look at China, and as you mentioned early on, it's a vast country.
Really, it should be a series of smaller countries, just like Europe.
All these different regions, Guangdong in the south and the Beijing area and so forth, Guangxi, et cetera.
These are really nation-size provinces.
And there's a lot of animosity.
There are a tremendous number of factors and elements leading to destabilization within China historically.
People in the Canton area, which is around Hong Kong, they generally don't like the rest of the Chinese.
And most of the other Chinese, they all think the people from Guangdong are greasy pigs.
So, you know, and there have been border fights between Jiangxi and Guangdong and things like this.
There's tremendous animosity between the interior and the well-developed regions along the coast, between the Shanghai people and the Beijing people.
There is this horrendous number of unemployed people, 150 million estimated.
You have this large growing male surplus, something around 13 million right now, but projected at 30 million within 10 years.
Who knows where they're going to go, potential reservoir for war.
There is economic disparity.
It was one thing 15 or 20 years ago when a few government cadres could drive around and beat up old Russian vehicles and thumb their noses at the populace.
But now you have all these rich people who have not just millions, but hundreds of millions and tens of millions.
You have peasants being displaced from their farmland.
You have riots going on.
Last year, something like 80 or 90,000 riots in which the People's Armed Police, that's sort of like our National Guard, were called in.
When you read the Chinese newspapers, the internal press, which I try to do every day, I read at least 30 newspapers online, you see reports of poisonings and bombings.
There was a report just last week that five of the main military warehouses in the South were emptied of all their weapons by the local people.
So you have weapons and explosives floating around the countryside.
If there is, say, a sudden shortage of electricity in your major cities, 20 years ago, people were happy if they had one 25-watt light bulb.
They thought that was wonderful.
Now, if you don't have air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter, there's going to be a great unrest if the discos don't have lights at night.
And China has an extreme energy shortage.
You have overcrowding and population in the factory areas.
People are beginning to think about organizing in these factories because the working conditions were something like the mills in the United States back in the 1880s and 1890s.
So you have a whole raft of factors that lead to destabilization.
And against that, you have this small 13 million, 3 million, whatever, exalted cadres leading the government.
And at the local level, really, they disdain the population.
And so everything the Communist Party promised has now fallen by the wayside.
You know, economic equality, the end of drugs, the provision of health services, that's no longer true.
With the collapse of the communes and such, you have no health services.
Education has suddenly become expensive.
People have to pay for education.
The one-child policy, the children aren't able to care for their parents.
You have this terrible problem with abortions and the killing of female children because people want to have a male child.
Although now with the sexual determination test that you can do, people know in advance, so it's more abortions rather than actual killing after birth.
So the government is trying to think of what to do here.
So the government is inclined to try to satisfy the people in as many ways as possible, which is why you see all these activities to try to get, for example, oil resources in countries like Venezuela, Mozambique, Angola, Sudan, Nigeria, to try to get mineral resources because you have to keep the people happy.
I'm an advisor to one oil company, actually two oil companies, and we're very much concerned about that.
But it's probably only 5% to 10% fluctuation.
I mean, that's the estimates that I hear.
I have no expert knowledge in this area.
I'm basically a business strategy advisor, but one here is 5% to 10% at this time.
The Chinese are going out of their way to secure resources that won't come to fruition for 5%, 10, 15, even 20 years on the expectation that there won't be any resources then.
And that's why they're going to build these 40 or 50 nuclear power plants and do a number of other things.
And by the way, 40 or 50 nuclear power plants will make an awful lot of nuclear weapons.
I think the government has a good handle on things right now.
I think they can continue, as long as they can keep the economic engine growing at about 10% a year and can solve some of these energy issues and such, and also achieve a bit of national prestige because whenever you have internal unrest, you always play the external crisis card.
I mean, North Korea is threatening us.
All the people come to the rescue of the party and all that stuff.
I think they're going to achieve their objectives, and I can see them dominating the world in 2050.
And I know that's hard for the American mind to grasp because right now we dominate the world.
Is our tenure really that short?
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
Country that turns back time.
The year of the cat.
Good morning, everybody.
Ralph Sawyer is my guest.
And he's talking about China.
He's an expert on China.
And he just said by the year 2050, they probably will dominate the world.
And if you've ever been to China, or if you've been to China in recent years, my sense is you'd agree with that completely.
We'll be right back.
Without getting into a debate about whether it's right or wrong, right now, we really are the world's adventuresome ones.
The United States has got its fingers entwined all around the world.
Now, Ralph, I wonder if we should begin to turn our attention suddenly toward Iran, and there's plenty in the wind suggesting that might occur, what you would expect, if anything, from China?
Well, the Chinese have an interest in seeing the United States frustrated and thwarted at every possible turn.
My feeling is that nothing makes them happier in Beijing than to look across and see what's happening in Iraq and to see our military is being stretched thin and our equipment is being depleted and our nation as a whole is being enervated by this problem.
And if we were to move towards resolving a nuclear threat from Iran, China probably wouldn't do anything overt.
But on the other hand, they are building rail lines right now to Iran so that they can have access indirectly to the Indian Ocean, just like they're building rail lines and paying for them through Pakistan so they can access that area.
I mean, and also through Burma.
So they're interested in integrating Central Asia and the countries of the Middle East into their sphere.
Iran, for them, represents a huge oil-producing area.
This perhaps gives us some leverage to get the Chinese to persuade the Iranians to act in a more congenial fashion.
The last thing China wants to see is their oil supplies from the Middle East cut off.
And that's highly likely to happen in the event of an Iranian conflict.
I wouldn't necessarily expect it, but it would be an opportune time.
The more the United States becomes entangled, the less it's able to respond to a situation like Taiwan, and Taiwan could easily be seen as something that might be jettisoned.
It's not particularly in our interest.
What assets do we have in Taiwan?
We don't have any bases.
It's not like the Philippines where we used to have a Clark and Subic Bay or Okinawa where you were or some other places.
Taiwan is not of any military value to us.
We do have a little bit of listing posts there and such, but that's about it.
Direct, and the more important ones are actually indirect because an awful lot of our IC and chip production is contracted through Taiwan, even though, say, 60% of that is in turn manufactured in mainland China.
We could find ourselves in a very difficult situation in terms of computers that the military uses, especially the more limited specialized chips, if Taiwan were to be denied to us.
Well, China, of course, is playing the civil war type card.
Whenever the United States criticizes or someone voices an opinion about that, they say, well, let's look at the American Civil War and what happened to reintegrate the country.
And therefore, this is exactly the same situation.
In addition, we have this agreement, this one-China agreement, which has some nebulous aspects to it and was rather hastily constructed.
We probably could have gotten something better, but that's a matter of debate, which suggests that the United States ultimately recognizes the territorial claims of the People's Republic of China over Taiwan.
However, feebly those are based historically.
I mean, Taiwan was never really integrated into the Chinese Empire at any time.
But on the other hand, neither was Tibet.
And yet, look what happened to Tibet.
And, you know, Tibet's just fallen off the pages of history.
I mean, they were invaded in 1951.
You can't have a people that are more distinctive culturally, ethnically, racially, religiously, or otherwise than Tibetans and Chinese.
And yet no one's concerned about the fact that China has occupied forcibly Tibet.
And yet they continue to argue that, oh, we're a benign state.
We have never committed aggression against any country or any state.
This is an amazing thing.
People accept this, and I get constantly into debate about it.
But if you look back across Chinese history, all the way back to 1000 B.C., you find that the central Chinese powers were constantly conducting major campaigns against the contiguous states.
And the time doesn't permit us to talk about it here.
But to take one example, between 598 and 668, the Chinese dynasties mounted something like 11
major invasions of Korea and eventually you know totally subjugated the the whole peninsula at one time forces involved were up to 500,000 so historically even though people you know the People's Republic claims they never historically committed aggressive acts here's a prime example and the Koreans will be very happy to jump up and tell you about that and in modern times of course they went to war against India they've invaded and occupied Tibet they had the Debacol in Vietnam which
claim as a chastisement.
They taught Vietnam a lesson, but of course they got their butts thoroughly kicked there.
And of course they had the little skirmish with the Russians.
So we have this kind of benign image and then we have actions that are kind of contrary to it.
And I think that's sort of a contradiction that we have to be aware of.
Well, you ticked off a number of items earlier in the discussion that would seem to indicate you believe that there's going to be another internal crisis not very far down the road for China.
I think it's a good possibility, particularly because major elements of the military I think are still very disaffected.
They've lost their economic base.
Their companies were taken away from them.
They tend to be sitting in the dustbin as everybody else is on the prosperity wagon.
Your average soldier, I mean, he's barely getting enough to eat.
And in the old days, being a soldier was a respectable job.
I mean, you had food, you had some status, you had living quarters, you had medical care.
Now, if you're a soldier, people laugh at you and say you must be some kind of dumkins who have gone into the military.
So, you get the military very disaffected.
And in addition, they've been riffing out a lot of people.
I mean, they've had major reductions so that their regular army is down to 2,300,000.
So that means 1,200,000 have been shed in the last seven or eight years.
These are people with, you know, military training.
weapons they know how to you know conduct the three block war as we say they know where the weapons are kept if these people get motivated such as we saw in the Zhengzhou riots two years ago 100,000 of them could gather in no time with cell phones text messaging and things like that China has always been very volatile and this is one of the strange things here in the West we tend to have this image of China as a very Pacific country tea drinking poetry
riding, sitting around, admiring the river.
And some famous scholars, including John Fairbank at Harvard, who was my advisor, said that China has no heroes and they have no martial culture.
And that is completely and absolutely wrong.
I mean, they have all kinds of heroes.
And if you want the most recent, of course, it's Bruce Lee and Jet Li.
They have a martial culture that's second to none.
They have a history of warfare that was unremitting and continuous.
They have the largest military writings, a huge corpus, 400 books right now that I have in my own personal library that go back to 500 B.C. And they have a conscious cultivation of a military ethos that's found among the populace in general.
I mean, everybody admires strongmen.
And China, in particular, admires things like assassins.
So when we talk about China coming to dominate in 2050, I see two kind of reasons.
One is that as their own economy grows very strong, they become self-sufficient.
So if you look at the world, it's divided up into, say, four major market areas, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, including Africa, and then China.
Pretty soon, China will reach the point where if it loses one of the other three, it will be irrelevant.
They can afford to antagonize the American market.
They can afford to, you know, get in conflict with Americans and not be able to continue to export to America, say, in 10 or 15 years.
And at the same time, they are also consciously modeling on the ancient Qin dynasty case.
The state of Qin was the one that's associated with all those wonderful tomb figures and soldiers that you see in Xi'an.
The state of Qin was a little peripheral state in the west of China.
And early on, it embraced the kind of Spartan military ethos compared to the other six states to the east.
And it gradually, through a program of systematic subversion, assassination, bribery, military power, corruption, soft and hard power, displaced and conquered the other six states.
And contemporary think tanks, looking at that and seeing that as an example, is how China today can proceed to end American hegemony in the Pacific and then in the world.
And all those elements, particularly bribery and disinformation, et cetera, et cetera, which make up a kind of unorthodox, subversive program, are very much discussed and embraced in their military writings.
So they seem to have this plan, and they seem to be willing to take 25 years to get there.
The first stage will be to eliminate the United States in the Pacific.
And we're already seeing that happen.
I mean, in Australia, the United States rating has gone way down.
Many Australians will not support the United States if we go to the support of Taiwan.
The Australian government has signed a number of agreements to sell uranium and other things to People's Republic of China.
And, in fact, People's Republic of China is trying to keep India from being able to buy uranium from Australia right now because they're concerned this is the only power that can be a counterbalance to India.
to them, the only threat.
And India's population will surpass China's, I think, in 15 years, something like that.
And India is, you know, building its military with amazing speed.
And now that they have nuclear weapons, well, the Chinese want to keep the Indians from having as many nuclear weapons as they do.
Anyway, you see this kind of soft power working in Asia.
Countries like the Philippines are now having Chinese taught as a second language in their high schools.
Even places like Indonesia, which are very, very anti-Chinese, always have been.
I mean, when I've gone into Indonesia, I've had my Chinese books taken away from me at customs and even gotten severe lectures about, you know, this kind of material is extremely evil.
All of a sudden, the Indonesians are cozying up to the Chinese and asking for aid and, you know, signing trade deals.
So you see this soft power of PRC beginning to be very effective.
Only the Japanese are kind of standing off and saying they're very threatening.
And that's why the Japanese have been much more open to military alliances and measures with the United States in the last year or so.
Well, cyber warfare is the new form of what we call Mao Zedong's people's warfare.
You may recall during the revolution when the communists came to power, they used massive human wave attacks and large armies that was called people's warfare.
Well, for the new information age, and Swinz's thinking is very much being used for this as well, new information age is cyber warfare.
Easiest way to defeat your opponent, according to traditional military thinking, is to thwart his plans and alliances.
Well, everything in a net-centric world is dependent on computers.
So the Department of Defense computers are constantly under attack.
And in fact, just this past fall, the Naval War College down in Newport, their system was severely compromised.
They had to shut down 100% just before a major conference on Chinese energy policies.
That was not a coincidence, of course.
It's known that Cyber Warfare College is able to penetrate virtually every corporation in the United States.
And about 18 months ago, they destroyed the hard drives on the two computers that I connect to the Internet because I had the given talk, which was somewhat critical of them.
And after I got my 18,000 pernicious emails with some very interesting language, they also managed to insert worms, and that was the end of my hard drives.
Well, I just suggested what I had mentioned a few minutes ago, that they are consciously following the Qin model of ending U.S. hegemony.
I'm not the only one who's said this.
Constantine Menges, who has passed away a couple of years ago, had a book come out, and he didn't speak about the Qin model, but he said, you know, China's trying to end the hegemony.
And I specifically related it to the Qin model and talked about how assassination played a role.
And they didn't think that was a particularly appropriate thing for their image.
What I would like to do is turn it over to the audience.
Let the audience ask you some questions in the next half hour.
So I really want to go to an open line show in the last hour of the program.
But I want to go to about 30 minutes of questions from the audience.
There are a lot of people very, very interested in China.
I'm one of them.
I don't know that I agree with you on the year 2050, but it certainly may come to pass.
They're making some big moves.
I just don't know.
I kind of balance in my mind, Ralph, the Chinese military, the Communist Party, such as it is right now, and the growing economic machine, which in the end may end up controlling the political end of things.
in fact, I don't think it's all that far away.
So it could go that way.
It doesn't have to go the way you're suggesting it will go, does it?
Well, I think the tendency is more towards what I'm thinking because we see, for example, 4,000 unemployed Russian and Ukrainian technicians who are military specialists down there working on developing weapons, and we see them buying all kinds of military technology.
Once you have these things, and of course they're adding to their short-range ballistic missile inventory at the rate of like $200 or $300 a year, once you have all these toys, there's obviously a tendency to want to wax very belligerently.
And once you can do that, then you can control the sea lanes and you can, you know, couple threats and coercion with your soft power.
One of the things that is interesting about the Japanese phenomenon, of course, was that the currency suddenly increased, appreciated in value.
And at the same time, they had this mass increase in property values within the country.
So from some viewpoint, a lot of that was very artificial.
And they talked about it as a bubble economy, and that bubble burst.
And I remember when the value of our office went from, you know, it had started at about $200,000 and went to like $1,000,000, and then the next day it was worth $600,000.
So we could see the thing jumping up and down.
Most of that was mortgage money, of course, unfortunately.
I tend to think that with the population that China has, the work ethic, and the fact that most of that disposable income is going to be spent within the confines of the Chinese borders itself, and is going to be on goods that are produced in China as opposed to, you know, Westinghouse refrigerators imported from the United States, re-imported from the United States, I tend to think that China will be the dominant economy in the world by 2050, if not sooner.
Art, just to show you how far-reaching the effect the Chinese are, I deal in mammoth ivory.
I've talked to you before, Art.
And I just got a friend come back from China, and it's like you were saying, Art, that a lot of the business that was situated, the whole mammoth ivory business, was situated in Hong Kong.
Yeah, well, there's two or three big players, and they're being over.
I talked to my guy that makes stuff for me over there, and he said that the demand, the Siberian ivory, the people from mainland China know buying it, and it's driven the price just out of sight.
And he said, and it is just like Rob was just saying, the demand is not outside the country.
It's the people in China that are making money now that want a piece of jade and nice ivory carving.
And so is the hope for somebody in the United States to do business with just raw materials like what I deal in?
Well, certainly what happens is countries like Canada and the United States that do have raw materials will be able to sell to China.
On the other hand, that's kind of a lowdown on the value-added chain.
It doesn't do a lot for keeping our people in work.
And that's one of the things that troubles me about the situation in America with all the electronics factories going to China.
They also find that all the support engineers and the research and development is going to China.
And even a couple of my classmates from IT who were big players in the IT game, you know, they're at the age of 60, they're sitting around on their hands unemployed right now.
So how much of that can the United States afford to lose to China?
And you're going to see a lot of the innovation occurring in China.
So these are points where our lead that we've historically enjoyed, innovation, industrial base, realization, et cetera, et cetera, is being eroded or given away deliberately in some cases.
And that will kind of turn us back to being a nation of raw material suppliers.
There are, I believe, some people who are making money in China, but nine cases out of ten that I know of are not.
And I know of many cases where people have asked me after the fact to come in and try to help persuade their partners, their distributors, or whatever, to adhere to the terms of the original contract.
So there are a lot of things happening there.
The rule of law does not prevail.
It's talked about the improvements in the legal system, but even if you sue your partners and you can manage to get the case heard in court, by the time you get a judgment, if you get a judgment, or if your opponent pays off the judge, well, you won't get a judgment, there probably won't be anything there.
So doing business in China is fraught with difficulty.
I think if you're a huge player like General Electric or somebody like that, you have a possibility of success, particularly where the Chinese government wants your products in China and is willing to facilitate them.
Well, my opinion is that we're kind of in the last days of Rome.
Yes.
And we do not have any, and this is sort of one of my favorite issues.
It has nothing to do with China.
We have never had a kind of debate on what our national self-interest is here.
We're too busy being divisive and flagellating each other.
At some point, we should have sat down and said, certain policies are in the United States' best interest.
We shouldn't allow the export of certain technologies or proprietary processes.
It's one thing if your shoe factories, which are kind of a dirty, polluting industry, goes overseas.
It's another thing when your television manufacturers and then your computer manufacturers and all your high-tech applications, your fiber optic manufacturers, and now all your research and development is starting to go overseas.
And as you say, we are becoming a service industry.
The only people who are going to be making money are developers doing property, and everybody else is going to be working in McDonald's.
If Congress passed a law tomorrow stating that no American business could either export to or import from China anymore, making it illegal to do business with China, how badly would that hurt the Chinese economy minus our business alone?
Well, I think this is where the question of a consensus or a debate on our national policy is required.
The cost to the American economy, of course, would be all of a sudden shoes and everything else.
If you could get them, it would be extremely expensive.
On the other hand, what's the imbalance of trade running right now?
$160 billion or something a year in favor of China?
Obviously, probably 40% of the factories in China would come to a screeching halt.
This would cause a great deal of unrest and dissatisfaction.
The people suddenly wouldn't have any wages.
They wouldn't have anything to eat.
And it could have a catastrophic impact.
Europe, of course, takes a significant amount of production, and the rest of the world takes the remaining 20% or so.
So I think you make a good point here.
And there are a couple of people in Congress who have talked about putting punitive tariffs on 27.5% or something on Chinese goods in order to get them to revaluate the UN to make their currency somewhat more expensive.
The flip side of that is that people want to keep inflation down in the United States.
And a pair of pants for children coming out of China is, whatever, $9 or something.
I don't have children at that age, so I don't buy pants.
I'm not sure.
But let's say it's $9, and if suddenly you put on these punitive tariffs, it's going to be $12 or $13.
That will impact a significant segment of our society on a daily basis.
So I think that's where the balance comes, and that's where you need the debate.
To the extent that I saw the shoe factories, the textile factories, the plastic factories, et cetera, all close in the United States and go overseas, we say, well, this is a wonderful deal because you buy the products inexpensively, but what are the other costs?
Unemployment, retraining of people, families shattered, et cetera, et cetera.
And of course, I have absolutely no expertise in this area whatsoever, so I should just shut my mouth.
Yes, first of all, Mr. Bell, I've been listening ever since my good friend Alvie turned me on to you in the 80s, and I've enjoyed it immensely.
Mr. Sawyer, is it?
Yes, sir.
I have a couple questions for you.
One, I heard a figure thrown out that 70% of China's gross national product is represented in Walmart.
And the other question I had for you, and I'll listen on the air, is what can we do as Americans, I mean, besides not going to Walmart, which I don't do for that particular reason, what can we do as Americans to have any effect on all this?
I read the same stories in the Wall Street Journal that everybody else does.
They are a significant factor, but I would think it's more around 10 or 15, 12%, something like that.
Of course, a lot of people are buying products and then reselling them to Walmart, branded products, and you'd have to count that in indirectly.
I mean, if they're, for example, carrying RCA TVs, they're not buying those directly from China.
They're buying them through the RCA Chinese subsidiary, which is usually marketing through the U.S. subsidiary.
And to some extent, some of China's productivity and gross national product is illusory because a lot of component parts are being imported and then assembly processes are going on and then the product is re-exported.
Well, as I've written in a couple of position papers, one of which is available on the web at jmss.org, just was recently posted, I think the Chinese will become increasingly belligerent, and there are some hardliners.
There are some voices that have been publicly heard over the last 10 years advocating very aggressive policies towards the United States and even against Canada, including the Minister of Defense a couple of years ago.
Well, the Minister of Defense is hardly an insignificant person.
When he starts talking about aggressive use of nuclear weapons against the United States, I think we have to pay a little bit of attention.
Of course, the reaction in Washington immediately is, oh, well, it's just a fringe remark, or the fellow's a lunatic, or he's unimportant.
Hey, wait a minute.
He's the Minister of Defense.
And there have been certain thoretical writings that have come out which substantiate the need to conduct warfare in an unrestricted manner against the United States.
And for your audience that's interested, my latest book on unorthodox warfare just out last week.
We get the plug-in here or the publisher will be mad at this.
This discusses unorthodox warfare and the way in which the Chinese are perhaps planning to subvert and sabotage the United States in case of a conflict with Taiwan or just in general terms.
And there's a variety of methods that they can use to attack our nodes of vulnerability.
So as long as you have people consciously formulating these things and openly expressing them, I mean, I have a stack of the latest military manuals right here.
And you can find in every issue articles of this type.
This is not an anomaly.
Someone one time in 2004 said at some obscure conference that, oh, why don't we attack the U.S.?
Or why don't we disable the U.S. by, you know, cutting the rivers or something like that.
No, no.
This is something that's ongoing, is part of the conscious dialogue.
It's usually dismissed as the wishful thinking of hardliners to achieve a greater, more grandiose posture for China and the world before they get too old to see it, something like that.
And basically, the government is no longer communist.
There are a couple of voices you hear here and there that are calling for a return to real Marxism, just like you're hearing the Communist Party advocate and bring back and revitalize Confucius, because society is getting so out of control with drugs and hedonism and undisciplined youth and all that kind of stuff,
that they think that Confucius, who was the great class enemy, the feudal paragon, his thinking is being brought back because they need some kind of ethical basis, something to sort of beat the younger generation over the head with and say, here, you have to be righteous, you have to be moral, you have to be upstanding, you have to be humane.
These are basic Confucian values.
So this kind of internal struggle is clearly going on.
And the hardliners, as they get more military power, as they become more professional, as the armies increase their training, as the reserve forces are developed, logistics are provided for, and they increase the number of submarines with nuclear capabilities, which is, to my mind, the most troubling aspect, the submarines with ICBMs, which they can kind of ramp up off our coast and threaten our major cities.
As these things happen, there'll probably be less and less restraint on the military.
And it only takes one general with a handful of troops to completely eliminate the current administration.
Now, unscreened doesn't mean a license to say a bad word or a bad thing.
And it also doesn't mean that it'll get on the air because I have a little button here I can press and I can erase the last seven or eight seconds of time.
It's kind of like time travel, actually.
So if you say something bad, it simply disappears as though it never happened.
So we had one in the first hour who uttered a bad word and it just disappeared.
At any rate, anything you want to talk about other than that is absolutely fair game.
The more interesting you are, the more airtime you'll get.
That's the way it works, and it'll work that way in just a moment.
To the very best of my knowledge, there is nobody else In the U.S., doing a radio program and taking unscreened, a national radio program, taking unscreened open line calls.
We've got a lot of overcast here in the West right now.
In fact, it's overcast where I am, so we could have picked a better day, I suppose, from that point of view for the experiment.
But people have been actually seeing things through the overcast.
unidentified
I thought it might be the moon, but I've been following this, tracking this since your show began earlier tonight for three hours, in other words, and that glow persists, so it is not the moon.
Well, if you have the theory of everything solved, you should be able to tell us what these things are.
unidentified
I believe that it would be like a periodic table.
You would have your elements listed, in which case they would be more or less vision, hearing, smell, touch, and so on.
You know, up the ladder, up to the higher frequencies, which obviously I'm not going to be able to decipher or mention because I don't know myself, but this is just a working thesis here.
Well, it doesn't sound like you've got actually the theory of everything quite nailed down yet, because somebody who had that would actually be able to tell us what all these things are that mystify us.
It would answer everything.
And according to Michio Kaku and others, it might be a formula no longer than your thumb.
I believe several decades ago, America has got such a hand in this that when you see everything on the shelf virtually made in China, I don't understand, I guess, the cause for concern.
If it wasn't for us, I don't think that everything would be made in Japan or in China.
And by that, I mean that if American companies hadn't invested so much in all of this being done over in China, I think that it obviously could have been done here.
And for economics and whatever, it's done over there.
So at any time, can we not pull the plug?
Are we seriously concerned about them taking over economically?
I mean, do they own these companies or are they not American?
I think, you know, the markets go where the cheap labor is.
Right now, that's in China.
When that begins to get, you know, Ralph mentioned on the air, they're beginning to organize in China.
Well, when they organize, they're going to, you know, they're going to want bigger wages, better working conditions, all the things that people, as they begin to get a few bucks in their pocket, always want.
And when they do, will go to the next cheapest labor market.
Wildcardline, you're on the air.
unidentified
Yes, Art.
My question was, you talked to us several weeks ago about your interview with Malkai Martin, and he told you what the third secret was.
Well, I only know about the third secret, and he did impart to me some information that I absolutely swore I would keep to myself.
And I guess I have to keep that.
You know, if your word means anything, then you've got to keep it.
So there are some things I know about the third secret.
Not a lot.
I don't know it all.
But there are a few things that he mentioned to me in confidence.
And I'm almost sorry that I ever even uttered the words that that had occurred because now, obviously, there's pressure on me to divulge what it was, and I can't do that.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Oh, hello?
Yes, sir.
Yes.
Yeah, this is one of your ancient callers from 19 years back.
I've been trying to get a hold of you for 19 years.
If Matico wants to actually read my mind on a random subject and tell me, and you can then tell me what it is I'm thinking about, we're talking about impressed.
Well, I also suffer From abductions and that type of thing.
And I've experienced a lot of what he has on there.
And I'd like to elaborate on that a little bit if possible.
And, you know, these aliens, they've been doing this since, well, you know, they talk about Roswell in the 1950s, that kind of thing, and so on and so forth.
But this may be going on for hundreds of years or something like that.
Firstly, I'd like to let everybody know not to mess with the Wheezy boy because that's where it started.
And I read multitudes of books, starting with the magic power of witchcraft from Santa Monica College of UCLA, and that was my secret.
And yes, I used the dark forces to gain money, property, and prestige.
And what happened was that I was let down, and I became possessed, and I found myself running up and down the streets fighting demons and hearing these voices.
I was physically hurt, and I seen him in demonic and human form, walking through a wall with a mistress.
He had a black robe.
40-year-old Caucasian man with a goatee with his mistress in an eglige.
They taught me how to, they forced me to position my fingers to shad to Satan.
And that's the problem with all these things that we talk about on Coast.
They work.
Or they really happen.
Unfortunately, they don't happen in a scientific, repeatable, documentable way.
And so scientists, of course, very much like the one we had on last weekend, simply reject the whole thing because they cannot prove it.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, Art.
How are you?
Good evening.
Good evening.
My name is Susan.
I'm from Tahanga.
Yes.
And I had a couple comments that I wanted to make in lieu of a lot of the things that have been said tonight about trade and war and shadow people and everything else.
I observe a lot as I walk through my world.
And I notice, for the most part, I know that you have a vast listening audience that is open and their consciousness is susceptible to learning about the things that happen on your program.
But there's a vast amount of people in the U.S. who look to me almost as if they're veiled, that they're hazed over.
And I don't believe in coincidences.
And I was thinking today about all the things from chemtrails to the things we talked about in the beginning of your show about the fish, the dead zones and everything else.
And I wondered about the huge raise in autistic children and everything else.
And it's very clear to me that our government, and I know you're not a conspiratist person and neither am I, but I started thinking about it and I really came to a conclusion that it is quite possible that something's going on because how is it that so much is going on in the world?
And, you know, we hear about Anna Nicole Smith.
We don't hear about with any kind of weight that we're about to go or thinking about going into war with Iran.
We have China.
We have this, we have that.
It's almost like we're dummied down.
And I wondered if anybody, any of the scientists are really looking at the real possibilities like HAARP, like chemtrails, that perhaps they really are connected and that there is a dumbing down of the population.
Are they acting in our best interest or their best interest?
And, you know, our inclination first is to say they're acting in their own best interest, probably.
On the other side of the coin would be the theory that if they are advanced enough to get here from either another dimension or through actual space, which is even harder to imagine, our physicists say it can't be done.
I don't know.
But if they can get here, that means they are so far advanced that socially they should be quite advanced.
So, you know, if you ever catch me out in public somewhere, I'm always happy to do that kind of thing for people.
But I remember once I said yes to somebody on something like that, and my God, I think it was about $1,000 in postage that it cost me, and it came out of my own pocket.
Literally, $1,000 in postage to, what the heck was it?
There was something or another I said I'd autograph if somebody sent it to me, and boy, what a mistake that was.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hello, Art.
Hi.
I have two issues.
One is I saw a black triangle, and the other is I used to work for SRI, and I have an issue to deal with Major Ed Dames.
Perhaps we should deal with the Black Triangle siding first, because what I saw with Major Ed Dames would blow your mind.
Since I can recall, since my earliest recollections, outside of the crib, and I can actually recall being in the crib, I was taking things apart.
I was interested in radio, how radio worked, how radio propagated.
Then I became interested in how to transmit radio.
And then, of course, 50 years went by, and here I am, the magic of radio.
It's still as magical as ever.
That we can send a signal from here to there, which now includes virtually everywhere with this program, is as magical today for me as it was the first day I picked something up.
I was thinking about that the other day, so it's interesting he asked me to comment on that.
Listen, that's a weekend, everybody.
Tomorrow, George resumes weekday duties, and I will see you next weekend from the high desert.