Show Notes
“Watch a fire from across the river.” 隔河观火
China has been busy sowing and fanning social division in the Unted States. It is part of their war strategy to undermine America’s social fabric and there are several different fronts in that war. On the latest episode of The Drill Down, host Peter Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers take us through the battle plans and show us some of their tactics.
Watch a Fire from Across the River (in Mandarin)
“Their goal is to disintegrate or dissolve America,” Schweizer says. “There was a book written about it in 2010, highly influential in China. They adopted it as their strategy. And part of that is going after what they regard as America’s soft underbelly. That’s the word that they use. And the soft underbelly, are the divisions and the conflicts that we have in the United States.”
The Communist Chinese government has been at this for decades but has stepped up its activities in the past decade. Chinese operatives and their enablers feed the flames of violence here by sending illegal weapons, stoking division on social media, promoting fringe ideologies such as “trans” in the medical community, co-opting racial justice movements, and funding left-wing violent agitators who provoke riots at otherwise peaceful protests. They fan the flames then, as Peter Schweizer’s new book Blood Money calls it, they “Watch the fire from across the river.”
As Schweizer writes,
America is seemingly at war with itself, with violence, social division, and the resulting chaos on the rise. But there are important accelerants that are helping to turn sparks into an inferno. The Chinese strategy of unrestricted warfare involves using unconventional methods to weaken the United States, including, as we saw in Part I, drug warfare. But unrestricted warfare also involves undermining a country’s ‘national will, values, and cohesion.’ The ability to destabilize a rival country from within is a powerful weapon. This strategy has deep roots in Chinese history.
More recently, the Chinese government has adopted a strategy of wearing down its enemies from within by exploiting existing disagreements and divisions. This shocking notion has been well established by the Communist leadership. In 2013, a book produced by the Chinese military called The Science of Military Strategy noted that good strategy includes going after an enemy’s “‘soft underbelly’ in terms of politics, economics, and the spirit and psychology of his people.
“Disintegration warfare,” a term that came from a Chinese war strategy book, is the term for creating and stoking division in your enemy’s country, demoralizing the enemy by pitting them against each other, and persuading them through many ways to hate their history and destroy their national symbols. Like any other modern war, there is a “ground campaign” and an “air campaign.”
Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers discuss a few examples of both. In the summer of 2020 Twitter removed 170,000 bogus “bot” accounts that looked like Americans but were pushing the Beijing party line after noticing that all these accounts only tweeted from 9AM-5PM, Beijing time. The George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020 were stoked and turned into riots by China-backed radical left organizations called the “Freedom Road Socialist Organization” (FRSO) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). During that unrest, the US government ordered the closure of China’s “trade” consulate in Houston, Texas. Local media reported Chinese diplomats frantically burning papers in the yard of their consulate while police stood outside. Reporting subsequently showed China’s Houston consulate was fanning those violent protests. They were also engaged in espionage.
“If we are fractured, they are intentionally trying to make us so,” Schweizer says.
Back in 2014, there were violent riots in Ferguson, Missouri over the shooting death of Michael Brown by police. The head of the pro-Beijing FRSO bragged publicly about how he bussed 10,000 violent protesters into Ferguson to amp up what had been peaceful protest over the shooting. FRSO and PSL, as Schweizer shows in the book, regularly communicate with Beijing through a Chinese government agency located in (where else) Wuhan.
“You talk about what’s going on in the street, right?” Schweizer said. “The street protests, the street violence, the groups that are behind a lot of that in 2020 and today with Hamas. But then you also look at what’s going on in our national conversation, so much of which takes place in cyberspace and how they are trying to fan racial divisions in this country.”
The Chinese also use intermediaries, and Schweizer names two: an American born billionaire and longtime Maoist named Neville Roy Singham, and the Chinese-born billionaire Joe Tsai, co-founder of the Chinese online marketplace Alibaba.
Singham, who built a software company in the US and sold it to the Chinese, moved to China but has funded radical left causes including the FRSO and PSL to the tune of $161 million. The New York Times exposed his ties to the communist Chinese late last year. More recently, the New York Post ran stories on his support for pro-Hamas demonstrators in the US and elsewhere.
Blood Money is available everywhere fine books are sold.
