I have said this, but now someone of importance is saying it too, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding.
“The coronavirus pandemic is part of the “stealth war” that the Chinese Communist Party has been waging against the United States by infiltrating its democratic institutions and undermining its political and social culture, a retired U.S Air Force general and China expert warned.
“The coronavirus revealed an entirely new threat to Americans for the first time,” retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding told a virtual summit on the pandemic last month.
“It’s a very subtle and it’s a completely different kind of threat to our national security,” Spalding said during the Truth Over Fear Summit, organized by Catholic broadcaster Patrick Coffin.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views the United States as its “main adversary,” not because of its nuclear arms but because “we have a constitution … designed to separate power in the United States to ensure no one person, group or party could gain ultimate power, and to recognize that the highest form of tyranny in the world is totalitarianism,” he pointed out.
Beijing fears that the Chinese people will “someday awaken to the potential of humanity as defined by our Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, our system of institutions and rules and protections for civil liberties,” and so is actively seeking to “erode our nation from within.”
The way in which Beijing is using the coronavirus pandemic to gain advantage over the West is of a piece with this campaign, which Spalding detailed in his 2019 book: Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elites Slept.
While America developed a strong military to defend its national interests and regards war, in the words of Prussian general and military theorist Claus von Clausewitz, as “the continuation of politics by other means,” the CCP “looks at politics as the method of war. In other words, war is politics; politics is war,” said Spalding, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Mao Zedong referred to this as the “people’s war,” and it is how the CCP “came to power in China: by using political warfare, psychological warfare, ideological warfare, economic warfare, many other capacities to motivate … the population and the society to essentially gain legitimacy and eventually overthrow the nationalist party.”
The CCP’s ability to control the narrative within China has been “primarily increased through the use of Western technology,” which has also, along with its increased ties with the West, allowed Beijing to exert control over the narrative in the outside world.
“After the end of the Cold War, and certainly when China was brought into the World Trade Organization, their ability to use business, finance, and information to extend this influence and control beyond their borders is what we are dealing with today in the coronavirus,” Spalding said.
As with the swine flu and SARS outbreaks, Beijing’s story was that a local official was at fault for not informing CCP higher-ups of the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, and was then fired.
But while the West interprets this as “incompetence,” the East’s interpretation is that the CCP “deliberately obfuscates things.”
That’s why Taiwan sent researchers to China in December, who reported back that the virus was spreading through human-to-human contact. Taiwan then slammed shut its border to China while the United States hesitated, Spalding said.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping shut down domestic travel on January 7, even as six million people traveled from China to other countries. Xi then shut down Wuhan on January 23, Spalding said.
America later learned that the CCP was “putting pressure on the World Health Organization not to talk about human-to-human transmission.”
Moreover, China changed “overnight” from being a lead exporter of PPE (personal protective equipment) and masks, to a lead importer of these items, noted Spalding.
“Then subsequently, the Chinese Communist Party talks about taking advantage of the way that they’ve handled the coronavirus to advance their economy,” he told Coffin in a virtual Q&A.
Other clues that the CCP used the pandemic “as a mechanism to weaken the West and really increase its relative strength” were the “disinformation campaigns” Beijing orchestrated in the aftermath of the pandemic, the retired general said.
These included “social media campaigns” that claimed the coronavirus did not start in China, and those that stoked fear and panic and “certainly encouraged countries to lock down their economies,” Spalding observed.
“These are all components of a social media campaign that saw 40 percent of social media posts surrounding the coronavirus as bots, basically automated algorithms, that were designed to essentially throw gasoline on the fire, which was panic,” he said.
The pandemic was followed by “riots and looting” with “again, social media coming from bots that was antagonizing and adding to fuel to that fire,” he contended.
“If you go back and study the method of warfare of the Chinese Communist Party and recognize that it’s political, it’s psychological, it uses media, it uses all elements of connectedness to essentially control the narrative, then you realize that we created the perfect society, global society, to enable the spread of that narrative,” he said.
He elaborated on the “stealth war” China has been waging against America for years.
“There has been a determined effort on the part of the Chinese Communist Party and the Russians to diminish the attractiveness of liberal democratic principles and democratic societies, and this has been very effective,” Spalding said.
The West now faces its greatest battle, the final fight against communism. Lose this, and humanity as we know it disappears.