By Miles Yu
A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times.
OPINION:
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has projected an image of a “peace-loving” civilization wronged by imperialism and devoted to harmony. Yet from the Korean War to Ukraine, from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, the historical record exposes a very different truth.
The CCP, not the United States, has been the principal engine of global instability since the end of World War II, as today’s China is a revolutionary regime whose survival depends on perpetual struggle, conquest and deception.
Communism, by its very nature, is a militant ideology. It regards peace not as a moral good but as a temporary pause between battles. Mao Zedong built his regime on the doctrine of permanent revolution, declaring that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Like the Soviet Union before it, the CCP must continually demonstrate its vitality through conflict to preserve its myths of infallibility and invincibility. For the CCP, aggression is not an aberration but an existential requirement.
That imperative explains China’s unparalleled record of military adventurism.
Scarcely a year after its founding, the regime sent millions of Chinese “volunteers” into Korea and transformed a regional civil war into a global conflagration that claimed millions of lives.
In 1954 and again in 1958, it bombarded Taiwan’s offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, inaugurating decades of armed intimidation across the Taiwan Strait. In 1962, China invaded India and seized border territory under the false banner of “self-defense.”
Only a few years later, Chinese and Soviet troops clashed along the Ussuri River in bloody battles that nearly triggered nuclear war between the two communist powers. In 1979, Beijing invaded Vietnam, launching a monthlong campaign that killed tens of thousands on both sides.
No other major nation since World War II has initiated so many wars and border conflicts. Yet generations of Western apologists — from the so-called FOCs (Friends of China) such as Henry Kissinger to today’s loathsome clowns such as Jeffrey Sachs — have continued to parrot Beijing’spropaganda that China is uniquely “peaceful” and “non-expansionist.”
That claim collapses under even the briefest historical scrutiny. Each of the CCP’s wars, large or small, was not defensive but ideological, an assertion of revolutionary dominance designed to remind the world that the party could never be challenged without consequence. Unable to confront the United States directly, the CCP also devised a long-term strategy of proxy confrontation.
In every major global conflict since the founding of the communist state in 1949, Beijing has been the hidden hand sustaining America’s enemies and prolonging instability.
The Korean War was the prototype. Had China not intervened, the conflict would have ended within months and the Kim dynasty would have disappeared into history. Instead, Mao’s intervention created the modern North Korean regime, a hereditary dictatorship that has menaced Asia with nuclear weapons for decades, propped up by China’s economic lifeline.
The pattern repeated in Vietnam, where China supplied Hanoi with weapons, equipment and advisers throughout the 1960s and 1970s, turning a limited conflict into a quagmire that exhausted American resolve. The purpose was never Vietnam’s freedom but the weakening of the United States.
Today, the same strategy persists under new guises. Beijing’s “no-limits partnership” with Moscow has made China the primary enabler of Russia’s war on Ukraine, supplying roughly 90% of the dual-use components, electronics and machine tools that sustain Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
Read the rest of the article at Washington Times
