I have said it often in my posts, and I will say it again. China is not our friend.

Far from it. In fact, China is our number one enemy, and the American people in general and our political leaders, in particular, had better wake up sooner than later to that reality.

With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi currently on a tour of Asia and a potential stop in Taiwan on her schedule, the Chinese Communist Party is beside itself dispensing angry threats and denunciations.

“If the US insists on taking its own course, the Chinese military will never sit idly by,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Defense threatened.

Does that mean China might shoot down Pelosi’s plane? What a concept!

During a two-hour telephone chinwag last Thursday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned President Biden not to “play with fire” when it comes to Taiwan.

“Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xi said. “It is hoped that the U.S. will be clear-eyed about this.”

Okay, enough of the political bluster, the threats, the warnings, etc.

During the 17 years I spent living and working in Asia as a foreign correspondent, I have heard dozens of Chinese threats. They are de rigueur when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party.

As for Taiwan, it is used to being threatened by China. Hardly a week goes by without a warning from a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official that China will “smash to smithereens” any moves toward independence by the democratically-governed island.

I first traveled to Taiwan in the late 1970s. It was just after The US ended formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1979 and then established official diplomatic relations with Beijing.

Under the “One China Policy,” which has been followed by successive US administrations for decades, the US does not support Taiwan’s independence. Instead, it recognizes Beijing’s position that there’s only one Chinese government—the so-called “one nation, two systems” principle.

But the US government still maintains a robust unofficial relationship with Taipei and is legally compelled to provide defensive arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. That pact is not a defense treaty, as some might think. The US is not bound to defend Taiwan in case of an attack by China.

But would we?

No doubt that’s the hope of the 23 million people who inhabit the tobacco-leaf-shaped nation that is about the same geographic size as New Hampshire.

As for China, I spent time there in the 1980s and was in Beijing on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese Communist Party sent troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square to massacre thousands of pro-democracy students and others protesting Chinese government corruption.

 

It was an appalling display of raw and visceral political power. Most estimates by the Chinese Red Cross and various diplomatic missions put the deaths in and around the square at between 4,000 and 10,000. I myself counted hundreds of dead in the square and stacked up in hospital corridors, but I could only see what was in front of me—a minimal portion of the carnage that brutal night.

After witnessing the implacable behavior of the Chinese government 33 years ago, my opinion of China changed dramatically.

I began to see China for what it is—a ruthless, inhumane nation motivated by political and military domination, not only of its own people but of large swaths of Asia.

And I haven’t even mentioned China’s responsibility for the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. China is the source of the pandemic that crushed world economies and killed millions of people. What Americans and the world should never forget is how indifferent, irresponsible, and self-centered China was in dealing with the pandemic.

China is NOT a country that the world can depend upon for altruistic, unselfish, and dependable leadership.

Chinese dictator and president for life Xi Jinping has one goal in mind—to replace the United States as the world’s dominant political and military power. The first step in that ambition is to establish Chinese hegemony in Asia—an objective China is well on the way to achieving.

Because the United States is hampered by feckless leadership and a senile president, we are allowing this to happen, much to the dismay of our East Asian allies such as Japan, Australia, South Korea, and, yes, Taiwan.

Chinese influence is expanding under something it calls its “One Belt, One Road” initiative—China’s 2022 version of Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930s.

In Imperial Japan’s case, it had visions of sitting atop a Pan-Asian empire that it thoroughly controlled.

In China’s case, it seeks to expand its military footprint via far-flung bases in compliant and cash-hungry nations such as Tonga, the Solomon Islands, East Timor, and the Republic of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. It also has been busy creating man-made islands in the international waters of the South China Sea—an area it illegitimately considers its own “maritime empire.”

Now, with the Chinese Communist Party threatening Joe Biden if he allows Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan, the United States is in the unenviable position of having to kowtow to Beijing.

If Washington does genuflect before Xi Jinping and his Communist cronies, it will signal to the world that the United States is on the way to becoming a second-rate power in much the same way that the old British Empire did in the early 20^th century.

If Biden and his spineless accomplices put the brakes on Nancy Pelosi because the Chinese demand it, we are telling the world that China is our master.

You have to wonder why Biden would even consider preventing Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Is he afraid of war with China? I doubt it. Is he afraid China will invade Taiwan? I doubt that also.

Then why?

Maybe it’s because the Chinese Communist Party has plenty of dirt on Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden crime family in the form of lucrative payoffs for political favors, dishonest and unlawful financial deals, etc.

Maybe Xi told Joe that if Pelosi goes to Taiwan, details of those illicit multi-million dollar deals and payoffs might just find their way into the public domain.

If that’s the case, poor old Xi may be engaged in an exercise of wishful thinking.

Doesn’t he know that America’s mainstream news media ALWAYS protects our mumbling, bumbling, stumbling president and his felonious family from such harmful exposés by refusing to report and publish them?

Hmmm. If the Chinese have overlooked that little detail, maybe they aren’t as wily and cunning as we think.

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