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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with you up next. Bradley Thayer one of two authors James Fanelle is the other, who wrote the book Embracing Communist China. Bradley is a PhD, founding member of the Committee on Present Danger China and a former visiting fellow at the Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bradley one of the most important books I've read in a long time. Welcome to the program.
Well, thank you very much, and it's a great time to join you today.
How did China get to be so strong since they took over in nineteen forty nine.
Well, that's one of the key questions that we ask in the book is how did this happen? And the answer that we examined, particularly after the communist leader Dumshell Pig executed a deliberate strategy of deception directed against the United States in the wake of the nineteen eighty nine Tenemen massacre, where he felt quite rightly that there was the end of history moment, George, that you may recall where there was the belief that democracy and free market
governments were the wave of the future. He felt under direct threat. So what he did is devise a strategy of deception, what's often called the hide and bide strategy, where he recognized he could reach out to American manufacturers and investors and have them invest in communist China, and manufacturing then would shift from the United States, of course to communist China, and he would make Wall Street, if you will, the US Chamber of Commerce partners with the
Chinese Communist Party. And what Jim Fanel and I do in our book is really firstly explain how that happened, and then how Dung as well as of course the greed of American of Wall Street, of course, the avarice, and of course what they would say their sound business sense, shifted American manufacturing and investment directly into China, greatly increasing its economic might so that it rose from nineteen ninety when it was about zero point six percent, so not
even one percent of world gross domestic product, to twenty and nineteen when it's about nineteen percent, or about one fifth of all world gross domestic product. So in thirty years it rose from being a less developed country to becoming an economic powerhouse, of course, and they use that economic might, of course, to convert it into military power. Is why we see the rise of this great threat,
existential threat to the United States today. So it took one of a genius strategists like Dungshallping, the communist leader, but he also took the United States investment, manufacturing, and then ultimately the Clinton administration in the nineteen nineties put communist China on the path to intrigue into the World Trade Organization, and that just added rocket fuel to communist China's growth, and the result is what we see today. Embracing communist China led to its rapid rise to the
point where it's this threat today. And we examine in the book additionally what we call the engagement school. Right, there was not only that economic exchange with China, but that converted into if you will, political power. China and US business communities, Wall Street and then ultimately media universities, even the military became invested in engaging with China, not seeing it as an existential enemy of the United States, but seeing it as a partner, and thus fundamentally became
a co optive We call this term threat deflation. Year after year, the US military, the intelligence community, and even national security strategists threat deflated the China threat. And again, that is the story of the book in terms of how we came to where we are, and then of course we explore what we need to do about it.
We have to admit, too, Bradley, that the growth of China over this period was absolutely stunning, wasn't it.
It was? Indeed, again, it moved from just a less developed nation status, right for a country of about a billion people in nineteen ninety, to where it is today one point four billion people approximately and one fifth of the world's economy.
Right.
It went from less than one percent of the world's economy to one fifth of the world's economy in thirty years. That's a remarkable rise, and that happens very rarely in international politics. What's fundamentally remarkable, what's unique is that the US didn't do anything about it, to balance it, or to try to check its rise. In fact, it it's reverse, right. It continued to invest, it continued to trade, It continued to if you will, add this rocket fuel to China's growth.
And that's a very strange thing to happen in the international politics and the big part of what we do in the book. Again, the engagement school is so powerful from the Clinton administration, even in George W. Bush's administration, the Obama administration, and only President Trump did anything to
reverse that. Before we see what we term a neo engagement under President Joe Biden again, where Biden is attempting to return to the Clinton, Bush and Obama strategies of engagement with communist China, and we argue, of course, that's disastros. That's exactly what the United States should not do is
a work to engage communist China. But instead, what we need to do is formulate a strategy of victory over communist China, as Ronald Reagan developed very famously the remarks he gave in March of nineteen eighty three in Orlando, where he said that the United States saw that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the centered evil in the modern world, and what we were going to do as the United States and more broadly the West was defeat the Soviet Union. Right, we were going to
have victory over the Soviet Union. Well, that's what we need to return to today.
It was truly remarkable, Brad the way China has grown, and we, as you have so accurately mentioned, played a big part of it. Back in nineteen seventy one, I was a young reporter in Detroit for radio station, and I remember President Nixon at the time opening up the doors with what was called Ping Pong diplomacy, where we sent a ping pong team to China and it kind of opened up relations. Was that a smart move or a dumb move?
Well, in the context of the Cold War, that was a smart move because what Nixon was trying to do was balanced the Soviet Union. He was trying to use the power of communist China, the military mind of communist China, and exploit the tensions that existed between the two major communist superpowers, the Soviet Union of course in Moscow, and then of course Chinese the People's Republic of China and Beijing. So what Nixon was trying to do was to use
those powers against one another. That's classic balance of power reasoning. It makes a lot of sense to do that. What we've seen in the book, of course, is that well, the Cold War ended, didn't mint right? The Cold War ended by nineteen eighty nine, and certainly by the death of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one, but the United States never recognized Communist China as the threat that it was, and we, of course, in the book explored
why that was so. So Nixon's strategy he made a lot of sense in the context of the Cold War, but once the Cold War was ended, what the United States should have done is say, hey, look, international politics doesn't stop, right, You never get a time out in this and if we help Communist China's rise, what we're doing is just facilitating the rise of this new communist superpower, having just defeated the communist superpower of the Soviet Union. So that's a big part of the book is explaining
how that happened and the gross mistakes that we made. Right, America's greatest strategic failure was to embrace communists China, leading to the situation we have today where China's military, of course, has grown so significantly and threatens the Americans. The spy balloon that we saw in January of last year, it floated over of course the United States, the American military institutions.
The ongoing hacking of our resources. They're hacking like crazy, aren't they.
Yes, said Director Ray has warned, Right said that this is they've been doing that for a long time and it's gotten a lot worse. And Director FBI Director Ray warned that well hacked, these guys are in our infrastructure and could turn out the lights literally at any time, as well as turning off the water supply. And they're a tremendous danger to our interests globally but also to
Americans at home. And that takes an economic form, right, that was lost jobs that left from Ohio, that left from Pennsylvania, Illinois to communist China, but also the pandemic. Of course, we all remember COVID nineteen and what happened with that and what did we find, George Right, We found that well, our personal protective equipment was made in China, exactly tiny cut that off, Uh, we don't have it.
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