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March 4, 2021 - Epoch Times

17:04

Communist China’s No. 1 Goal; India China Standoff; Fall of Hong Kong—Cleo Paskal | CPAC 2021

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	This is the goal of the Chinese Communist Party, and it's in all the think tanks.
	If you read their literature, the goal is to have China as the number one country in terms of comprehensive national power.
	So once you understand the psychology of comprehensive national power, the competitive aspect of it, and how comprehensive it is, you realize that you can't just fight back with guns and ships, although they're very important.
	You also need to block it.
	Block TikTok, block WeChat, block money going into their stock market, block their market access.
	It's very comprehensive.
	I'm here with Cleo Pascal at CPAC 2021.
	You were one of the panelists talking about actually the region around China.
	We're talking about India.
	We're talking about Japan.
	We're talking about the South China Sea.
	Of course, we're talking about Taiwan.
	And we're also going to talk today, and this is most interesting, is how this is all incredibly relevant to America and Canada, which is both of our home nation.
	Go Habs!
	So let's start there.
	So the countries that are around China, they know China the best.
	They've been dealing with it for the longest.
	So if you talk to Vietnam, for example, yes, they beat the Americans, yes, they beat the French, but what they care about is they beat China twice.
	They know these countries.
	These countries have been dealing with Chinese political warfare, economic warfare, and Well, no, and that's really interesting because I think India is the only country that's actually fought China, right, way up in the mountains, and not so long ago even, right?
	June, June 2020.
	Yeah.
	The Chinese soldiers did a very interesting thing which told us a lot about them, which is there's a contested border area.
	They pushed through the border area.
	Long story short, they created an ambush situation and they killed the commanding officer of the Indian grouping.
	And they thought that if you cut off the head of the chicken, that's it.
	It's finished.
	That wasn't what happened.
	The Indian soldiers fought back very, very hard with clubs and sticks and killed a lot of PLA soldiers.
	They're not admitting how many, but at the same time, 20 Indian soldiers died.
	And so everybody in India after that knows the name of the soldiers, knows what China is, and is completely unified behind dealing with China in very comprehensive ways.
	Banning apps, blocking FDI, all sorts of comprehensive ways that are actually effective at blocking China's political, economic and actual warfare.
	Okay, so a couple of quick things.
	First of all, just for the benefits of our audience, there were no guns up there, right?
	Both sides basically had whatever weapons they could...
	I mean, the whole thing is a very interesting situation and hidden, and I'd love to dig into that a bit more.
	But the other piece, I think it's even more important, is that America, I think, and other countries like Canada, we have a lot to learn from India here.
	I think so.
	I think because what they understood was that China has this approach of comprehensive national power, which is that this is the goal of the Chinese Communist Party.
	And it's in all the think tanks.
	If you read their literature, the goal is to have China as the number one country in terms of comprehensive national power.
	And it's an empirical calculation.
	And what goes into that calculation is things like access to natural resources, yours or somebody else's, if you can control them.
	Intellectual property, foreign direct investment, human capital, all these things that we disaggregate into different categories, they combine into one category and the goal is to be number one globally.
	So you can do that two ways.
	One is you get better.
	The other is you knock everybody else down.
	So if you have an epidemic going through your country and you think it's going to affect you, under the logic of comprehensive national power, it makes sense to let people get on flights and turn it into a pandemic so everybody else gets hit as well.
	So once you understand the psychology of comprehensive national power, the competitive aspect of it, and how comprehensive it is, you realize that you can't just fight back with guns and ships, although they're very important.
	You also need to block You know, I saw a tweet earlier this morning.
	Gavin Newsom posts a TikTok of XYZ. They're criticizing him for being in a restaurant.
	I was looking at this and I was going, what's Gavin Newsom doing using TikTok?
	What?
	Really?
	Yeah.
	So the thing about TikTok is one of the reasons why they blocked it, why the Indians blocked it, was it sucks up enormous amounts of metadata, and they're using the metadata to refine their weaponized AI systems.
	So if you block TikTok and WeChat, what you're blocking is their ability to refine their AI, which is a high priority for China in many different sectors.
	You're restricting their ability to get Compromising information on you, so blackmail or influence operations become more difficult.
	If you're using WeChat, all the companies that are outside of China that do business in China have to use WeChat, which means they know all of your business secrets so they can out-compete you.
	They know what you're bidding and how much you're paying for stuff.
	Additionally, you're increasing the value of their companies.
	When India blocked TikTok, it knocked about $6 billion off the valuation of ByteDance.
	That's like a nice, strong economic hit.
	So these things that seem like small things banning TikTok...
	We actually are extremely effective for fighting back against this comprehensive national power.
	It's so interesting that you describe it this way, because first of all, maybe people still don't realize that the Chinese Communist Party or its apparatus has full access to the data in these apps, right?
	And why are they still here?
	Okay, so this is another component of a comprehensive national power.
	So there's also, under that, one of the mechanisms they use to advance power are the three warfares.
	So then this is, again, this is all overt Chinese Communist Party doctrine.
	So you've got psychological warfare, media warfare, but also law warfare.
	So what happened in the case of WeChat was the U.S., under the previous administration, said they were going to block it or ban it.
	And then this grassroots organization came out of nowhere of WeChat users to launch a legal case to say their First Amendment rights were being restricted if you block WeChat.
	So they're using our legal systems, the West's legal systems, in a lawfare case to push the comprehensive national power push of access to our information through things like WeChat.
	So our open systems, which what makes the West great, is a tool that's very effective for political warfare for the PRC, unless we call it out, unless we acknowledge it and say, this isn't a grassroots organization, let's track the funding of this organization.
	So let's jump actually to, because I know we don't have a lot of time right now.
	There's so many things I want to talk to you about.
	But, you know, not only the U.S., but a number of countries now have been sending naval fleets through basically the South China Sea, presumably to establish the fact that it's not Chinese.
	This is becoming a kind of a hot area, right?
	We have Taiwan, we have all these kind of military encroachments by China.
	What is happening here?
	Is there danger of a war right now?
	What's happening?
	Freedom of navigation operations, which basically say that these are international waters.
	And it's to the benefit not only just of the Western countries, but of the other countries in the region, of Taiwan and the Philippines, you know, all the other countries that also say these are not Chinese waters.
	They've claimed something that is them.
	We all have the right to transit through there.
	And it's a region where there's an enormous amount of trade that goes through.
	And China is trying to gain control over it, first of all, so it can use it as a jumping-off base for military power projection beyond what's called the first island chain, which would be beyond Taiwan, but also so that it can control commercial traffic through the region.
	It's important to continue those freedom of navigation operations.
	But ultimately, the question is what happens if China shoots or takes one of those small islands, like they did with Scarborough Shoal?
	What happens if they go for the Senkakus in Japan?
	What happens when they start to move?
	Well, but they've actually built some islands, right?
	They have, yeah.
	I mean, that's incredible.
	And saying, well, no, these are here.
	So it's our area.
	They took reefs and turned them into military bases and then claimed them.
	And one of them was contested with the Philippines.
	And the Philippines brought them to the court of arbitration of the Inconventional Law of the Sea.
	And China lost and isn't moving off.
	So this is another thing to understand is that there's a lot of talk about working with China on various international treaties.
	We did research in China and asked them whether they're think tank people and policy people, whether they thought the UN Conventional Law of the Sea would still be in effect in 2024.
	None of them said yes.
	There is no commitment to these agreements that we're bending over backwards to get them to sign.
	So they're getting the concessions from us, but they're not going to be following through on their commitments.
	You know, I have to say, you know, this sounds like the strategy for what, the last 40 years or something?
	I mean, I don't know how many it's been, but, like, how many times have, you know, eager U.S.-Canadian administrations, negotiators come, gotten some great arrangement, okay, China's going to reduce this, China's going to do that, and it absolutely means nothing on the other side.
	But we take it really seriously.
	I mean, at what point do we realize that this isn't going to happen?
	These things aren't going to work?
	When they start killing American soldiers and Canadian soldiers and they take over Taiwan, we're going to realize it.
	But the question is, are we going to be in a position to do anything about it?
	So it's coming.
	A situation where China shows its hand overtly.
	And that's why the allies in the region are so interesting.
	India knows this.
	They're not going to be making any concessions to China.
	They know that they don't follow through.
	Japan's a little bit more complicated, but they definitely know what China is.
	So Vietnam certainly knows what China is.
	Australia is learning what China is.
	The closer you are, the clearer it is.
	So we'll see it, but...
	Hopefully it won't be too late to do something about it by then.
	Well, the U.S. is obligated to defend Taiwan, as I understand it.
	It was obligated by treaty to defend Philippines' territory, and Scarborough Shoal went to China.
	So, you know, there's maneuvering room.
	And in the case of Article 5 in Japan, I think the U.S. is only required to consider also.
	So, now, the Japanese also need to work on their own interoperability and force development and make the profession of being in the military more attractive to its own people, as does Taiwan.
	You know, it would be good if they Treated their own military people with the respect they deserve, because they're on the front line of a world conflict.
	They're the ones that are going to pay for it, and they deserve the respect for being in that position.
	But when Scarborough Shoal happened in 2012, all sorts of excuses were found not to step up to the plate.
	So there's a lot of concern that the treaty won't trigger in the way that we hope it will or think it will.
	And if we're worried about it, then that means that China also isn't convinced.
	And if they're not convinced, they're more willing to push.
	We are seeing, and I don't know if this is entirely correct, but really a lot of Chinese military activity around Taiwan.
	What message is this sending?
	Who is this message going to?
	Some people are saying it's a very dire message.
	Absolutely.
	And it's one of the components of those three warfares is the psychological component where it's wearing them down.
	It's wearing down Taiwan and it's trying to create a psychology of kind of inevitability so that this stage is an important stage for what might come next.
	And I'm not so sure that initially they might take some of the small Taiwanese islands physically But there's a lot that can be done with cyber warfare and electronic warfare that would sort of soften up the state before you have an actual physical takeover.
	But if Taiwan falls, and this was something that was said here and it's absolutely accurate, The defence of Taiwan is the defence of the US because if Taiwan falls, then China has broken out of the first island chain and it has shown all of the countries in the region that the US won't defend even its closest allies.
	So if you're a leader in the Philippines or in Malaysia or in Indonesia and suddenly you're off on your own against a very aggressive China and you don't think the U.S. is going to be there, if Taiwan goes red, the rest of it goes pink very quickly.
	There's a very good report out on this by Colonel Grant Newsom from the Center for Security Policy that is called, you know, if Taiwan goes red, the rest goes pink.
	And it just goes.
	He goes through country by country by country how it all falls.
	Like, this is the absolute...
	The actual domino effect that we were worried about during the previous Cold War.
	So Taiwan is critical.
	Taiwan needs to be defended.
	We've lost Hong Kong.
	Lost Hong Kong.
	I know.
	Today, talking about Hong Kong, I'm thinking to myself, how can we not talk about Hong Kong?
	We have 47, as far as I understand it, people who are basically exercising democracy that are now in prison or indicted or basically removed from the political stage.
	And that's almost everybody.
	It's really heartbreaking because Hong Kong was one of the thriving, exciting, dynamic cities.
	It was a symbol of the potential of Chinese people and the innovation and the creativity and the energy.
	And it's going to be turned into just another medium-sized Chinese city.
	All of that, that light is going to go out.
	One positive, if you could say it, is it showed Taiwan what would happen if they're next.
	The people of Taiwan looking at what happened to Hong Kong know that their vibrancy, their creativity, all that is going to go if you let China come in the way that it wants to.
	Well, and there's this fear, actually, that Hong Kong, because the people of Hong Kong, of course, not only have tasted freedom, but have lived freedom, that it might not just be just another Chinese city.
	It might be much worse for them, because you've got to stamp that out.
	How else are you going to have the control, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah, and there's another interesting component to it, which shows how interconnected we are, which is we're Canadian, so there are 300,000 Canadians in Hong Kong, and there are potentially 3 million or more people in Hong Kong who are going to have the right to citizenship in the UK. So we might start to see a diaspora that creates governments in exile and brings the fight outside, including with their money, because a lot of them are middle class or whatever.
	So it affects countries like the UK in thinking about whether they're going to try to look for money from Beijing or they're going to try to get the money from the Hong Kong expats.
	So that tips their strategic calculus.
	If they're counting on money from Beijing, then they're going to be a lot softer on things like Huawei.
	If they're counting on the money from Hong Kong going into the city and doing an investment that way, then they're much more likely to be able to stand up to China.
	So the cascading interlinked economic component of what's happening in Hong Kong might create more strategic opportunities for those who are concerned about China.
	Fascinating.
	Well, Cleo Pascal, Senior Fellow at Foundation for Demensive Democracies, FDD, which, by the way, doesn't take any foreign money.
	I want to kind of highlight that for our viewers.
	It's such a pleasure to have you.
	We're going to have to have you back soon.
	It'd be a pleasure.
	Thank you.

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