The Economist Appeals for U.S. Economic Warfare against China

The City of London’s The Economist this week escalated their campaign to get both Europe and the U.S. to launch full-scale economic warfare against China. The cover of the Sept. 23-29 issue pictures a mean-faced panda bear playing cards, with a card up his sleeve, under the title: “Does China Play Fair?” The editorial, in classic British style, writes: “Depictions of corporate China as just an undemocratic, state-run monster, thieving and cheating to get ahead, are crude and out of date.” We must be far more sophisticated in our war on China, they go on to explain.

China, they say, is fully guilty of “blatant theft of intellectual property” having gotten where they are by stealing our industrial and nuclear secrets. But the bigger problem, they say, and the “hardest to deal with,” is “unfair competition, sharp practice that breaks no global rules”! The obvious British solution: Change the rules. China has demanded that companies investing in China share their technology, and be subject to Chinese criminal law, while they have the gall to “restrict access to lucrative sectors.” This is “dangerous precisely because today’s rules offer no redress.”

This is followed by the subhead: “Don’t Get Angry. Get Even,” which calls on “America, Europe and big Asian countries” to come together to stop China, to “review their policies for screening investments” on so-called national security grounds.

Meanwhile, Fox News ran scurrilous attack on China under the title “Next Move in America’s ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign: Stress North Korean Atrocities and China’s Shameful Role.” The author, Anne Pierce, is a proud member of the Churchill Society and author of a book praising Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman as among our greatest presidents, writes: “China has worked long and hard to upend America’s post-World War II role as the guarantor of stability in Asia and has made tremendous strides in recent years in enhancing its geopolitical and military positions…. China’s aspirations are not just regional, but global. Its One Belt, One Road initiative — which entails building roads, railways and pipelines in Africa, the Middle East and beyond, and includes loans and poverty projects — is designed to gain access to raw materials, and gain economic and political leverage.”

Even the Confucian Institutes are devious, Pierce writes, “designed to disseminate Chinese history and culture in ways flattering to the Chinese government…. Massive information operations downplay its political system and territorial ambitions, and portray China as benevolent…. President Xi Jinping is positioning China as the only great power that can maintain world peace and stability and foster global cooperation and prosperity.”