Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy

Preface to the Paperback Edition

A few months after the first publication of Deceiving the Sky in September 2019 came a momentous event in the global awakening to the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China and its ruling Communist Party. The pandemic emanating from Wuhan should have dispelled any remaining doubts about the truly evil nature of the totalitarian system now imposed over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

This book exposed the systematic dissembling by China’s ruling regime following the Chinese military’s antisatellite missile test in 2007, which triggered a new space arms race and left dangerous debris that will continue orbiting for decades. The pathology of dissembling was again seen clearly in Beijing’s egregious mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak. The Chinese Communist Party and its supreme leader, Xi Jinping, deceived the world about a deadly disease that has killed well over a million people worldwide and precipitated a global economic disaster that so far has cost an estimated $15 trillion in damage. This catastrophe cries out for the international community of nations to take severe punitive action against the CCP.

The Chinese Communist Party and especially its leadership caused one of the worst plagues in human history, despite denials typical of those that have long been employed by communist regimes seeking to evade responsibility for misdeeds. As of this writing, the regime in Beijing refuses to disclose vital information on questions that need to be answered: How did the viral outbreak begin? What caused the virus to jump from a bat to an intermediate animal host before infecting the first human? Most importantly, was this disease caused by a virus that escaped from one of two Wuhan laboratories known to be engaged in extensive virus research and development? The world demands answers. Beijing has only stonewalled.

The Party rulers certainly know the answers but will not provide them to the American and international disease experts who continue to search for the truth on the pandemic’s origins. Key scientific facts about the virus are urgently needed to prevent or mitigate Chinese-origin pandemics that many believe will happen in the future, but those facts are out of reach to anyone lacking access to Chinese civilian and military laboratories.

The first person revealed by Chinese scientists to have contracted Wuhan pneumonia, as the disease was initially labeled by the Chinese government, was diagnosed at a hospital in the city on December 1, 2019, though some reports have said the virus began infecting people weeks earlier. For at least thirty days after the first case was discovered, the CCP took no action to alert other countries about a deadly new disease. The world learned that Chinese doctors who tried to sound the alarm were silenced by the regime and forced to say they had been spreading rumors. It is also known that Party leaders ordered laboratories in China to destroy samples of the virus, impeding efforts to develop treatments and vaccines.

Beijing told the World Health Organization in mid-January that the virus could not be transmitted between humans, despite evidence that it was in fact spreading wildly. On the basis of Beijing’s claim, the agency issued false and extremely damaging information during the early weeks of the outbreak. The WHO, apparently at the Chinese government’s urging, refused for weeks to declare a global health emergency. Instead, the agency whose highest priority was supposed to be responding to pandemics stated in a directive on January 10 that international travel did not need to be restricted. This feeble response facilitated an expanding global outbreak.

Perhaps the deadliest mistake was the decision by China’s government to permit travel from the Wuhan epicenter during the Lunar New Year celebrations. Each year, in what is considered the largest mass migration in the world, Chinese people make an estimated 3 billion trips over the seven-day holiday period, including 5 million from Wuhan. Unrestricted travel in the week of January 24–30 greatly magnified the disease outbreak. Suspiciously, the only travel restriction imposed was prohibiting travel between Wuhan and Beijing—apparently to protect the ruling elite in the capital city. No restrictions were placed on travel from Wuhan to other parts of China or the rest of the world.

The flow of infected travelers out of Wuhan was the crucial failure by the CCP and the chief cause of the devastating pandemic. Large numbers of Chinese migrant workers travel from Wuhan for jobs in faraway countries, and some of these people brought the virus to places like Italy, where its impact was especially severe, and to New York City, where Governor Andrew Cuomo made things worse by sending infected New Yorkers to nursing homes, causing the deaths of thousands of elderly people.

In a masterstroke of strategic deflection to tamp down growing global anger, the Chinese regime convinced the world to change the name of the disease from Wuhan pneumonia to coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19. The name change was put in place by the WHO, an organization that had been targeted and infiltrated by the Chinese government after the 2003 outbreak in China of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The new virus is called SARS-CoV-2.

Chinese influence at the WHO can be seen in its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a biologist and member of the Ethiopian Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement that was aligned with the Soviet Union before its demise. The front merged with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front in 2019. Tedros offered effusive praise for Beijing and avoided any criticism of China’s missteps in the early weeks of the outbreak.

President Donald Trump refused to adopt the politically correct name for the disease and continued referring to the Chinese virus, prompting outrage from woke urbanites and others who claimed that the term was racist. He also reflected the widespread anger over the WHO’s failure by ending U.S. funding and participation in the organization in May 2020. Chinese officials ignored their reporting obligations to the World Health Organization and pressured the World Health Organization to mislead the world when the virus was first discovered by Chinese authorities, Trump said. Countless lives have been taken and profound economic hardship has been inflicted all around the globe.

The Chinese regime also spread disinformation about where the disease originated. Beijing initially claimed that it began at a market that sold wild animals for food in Wuhan, but after questions were raised about this claim, Chinese officials began asserting that the virus originated outside of China. The disinformation machine disseminated a claim that the European pandemic originated in Europe itself, when all scientific evidence shows that the virus began in Wuhan. In March, a senior Chinese foreign ministry official, Zhao Lijian, began pointing a finger at the United States. It’s possible that the U.S. military brought the virus to Wuhan, Zhao stated in a tweet. Other Chinese propaganda outlets magnified the lie.

It was an outrageous libel calculated to deflect international anger, but it did not work. A Pew Research Center poll in the fall of 2020 found that record majorities of populations around the world were angry at China for its deception about the pandemic. A year after the virus began sowing mass sickness and death globally, as well as severe economic dislocation, the origins of the disease remain shrouded in secrecy and deception. Chinese soft power influenced the international scientific community to play down or ignore significant data pointing to laboratory origins. Credible voices linking the virus to the Chinese military have been ignored or dismissed as unscientific.

Yan Li-meng, an infectious disease expert and formerly a researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, fled to the United States in April 2020 fearing arrest for revealing what she knew. Yan later exposed alarming new facts showing that the virus could not have emerged naturally.

Using information obtained from China’s Center for Disease Control and from doctors who treated COVID patients, Yan and three other virus experts produced a paper stating that the virus behind the pandemic bears all the hallmarks of a genetically modified pathogen. Additionally, its genomic features strongly suggest that the virus was engineered in a laboratory starting from a backbone virus with properties very similar to SARS-CoV-2 that Yan and her team said was stored at a People’s Liberation Army laboratory.

The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has likely undergone genetic engineering, through which the virus has gained the ability to target humans with enhanced virulence and infectivity, the study says. The result is a pathogen with a destructive power like no other.

This paper provides a scientific basis for rejecting the Chinese government’s claims—echoed by sympathizers in the scientific community in the United States and elsewhere—that the virus appeared naturally, jumping mysteriously from bats to an intermediate animal host and finally to humans in Wuhan, who then started spreading it outward. Yan told me, In this report, we are the first to describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory. Building upon the evidence, for the first time, we further reconstruct a very possible and convenient route for laboratory-creation of SARS-CoV-2.

Dr. Robert G. Darling, a former White House physician who was involved in biological defenses at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), said that this report by Yan and her colleagues appears very credible and should be taken seriously by the scientific community.

Dr. Mark Kortepeter, a biodefense expert who also worked at USAMRIID, likewise said that the report merits serious attention and that its claims about the virus’s origin should be investigated further. There really needs to be an unbiased international assessment to trace the origins as far back as feasible to the initial index case or cases, in addition to a search for potential intermediate animal hosts, said Dr. Kortepeter, author of Inside the Hot Zone: A Soldier on the Front Lines of Biological Warfare. As he noted, Understanding the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be an important step for reducing risk of such emerging pathogens in the future.

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A major turning point toward a better international understanding of the China threat came in January 2020, when Michael Pompeo, the secretary of state, gave a speech in London in which he declared that communist-ruled China represents the central threat of our times. Echoing information contained in Deceiving the Sky, Secretary Pompeo recognized the despised Communist Party of China—not the Chinese people—as the force behind Beijing’s aggressive efforts to achieve global dominance. His speech announced a strategically significant shift that set in motion an ambitious new policy toward China for the first time in decades.

Pompeo emphasized that America has a long-cherished tradition of friendship with the Chinese people, but the communist government in China today is not the same as the people of China. He described the Chinese Communist Party as the illegitimate usurper of Chinese history and culture since it seized power in 1949 under Mao Zedong, and identified it as the heart of the China threat. The Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist party focused on struggle and international domination, he said.

Secretary Pompeo also affirmed a central thesis of Deceiving the Sky: that the dangers from China were minimized and misunderstood for decades by successive U.S. presidential administrations and congresses, which foolishly encouraged China’s rise. This was done at the expense of American values, Western democracy and security and good common sense. Relations with the democratically governed island of Taiwan were downgraded, while China’s widespread human rights abuses were ignored or downplayed. Creeping military encroachments around the world were also shrugged off as inconsequential. Pompeo declared that U.S. and other Western political leaders who promoted closer trade relations with Beijing had been fooled, as the promised market reforms and adherence to international norms had never materialized in China.

Pompeo signaled a turn toward an American policy based on a clearer understanding of China under Communist Party rule and of the regime’s global ambitions. China is on a relentless quest to dominate the world and replace the global order built on democracy and free markets with a system of high-tech totalitarianism.

Much of the revolutionary new U.S. policy toward China was the work of Miles Yu, a professor of East Asian military history at the U.S. Naval Academy who was on loan to the State Department, where he became a key player on Pompeo’s policy planning staff. Yu was born in China and grew up during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao sent radical Red Guards throughout the country to expunge all vestiges of China’s past from the country and from the Communist Party itself. It is estimated that up to 7 million people died or were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and that more than 60 million Chinese perished under Communist Party rule overall.

Having grown up in communist China and now living my American dream, I think the world should be incalculably grateful to America because as President Reagan said, America represents ‘the last best hope of man on Earth,’ Yu told me. Undoubtedly, he became the most knowledgeable China expert in the world, and the most influential in the Trump administration. He will be remembered in history for his unparalleled contribution to dispelling myths about China under communism.

Yu understands the dynamics of the Chinese communist system better than most observers. He has a unique ability to reveal its hidden weaknesses, and can clearly translate and decode the Party-speak. For example, Beijing’s use of terms like win-win, mutual respect, and other Chinese bywords was often echoed by Americans eager to please China’s leader, but Yu revealed these terms to represent hackneyed Chinese expressions with no substance if you really know the Chinese language and culture.

China’s leaders had long exploited the open and often contentious nature of democratic political systems. Party functionaries were able to capture a significant portion of the American policy elite involved with China and influence them to do China’s bidding in the corridors of Western capitals and think tanks. In this way, the CCP formed an entire class of China experts in the West who dismiss those that seek to expose China’s crimes as uninformed.

Yu believes that China’s coopting of the American ruling class has blinded policymakers to vulnerabilities within the Chinese system. China was able to bluff its way into wide-ranging influence in the United States and significant control over policy. Deceived by Party sophistry, American policymakers for decades ended up appeasing Chinese sensitivities and failed to recognize the reputational and practical leverage that the United States can exercise over a dictatorship. The regime in Beijing at its core is fragile. Party leaders are fearful of their own people and paranoid about a future confrontation with the West, especially the United States, according to Yu.

This understanding is the foundation for a more robust China policy. While critics falsely claimed that the Trump administration had no policy toward China, only a vague attitude, Yu countered, We not only have the right policy but also the right attitude toward China based on principled realism.

He elaborated: Under the Trump administration and with Secretary Pompeo at the helm in the State Department, we don’t just manage the bilateral relations with China, we innovate and seek results and modify some basic precepts of the relationship that are dinosaurs not reflective of reality. President Trump and Secretary Pompeo ended the long-practiced ‘anger management–based’ China policy model—formulating our policy by calculating how not to make China [too] angry at us to save the constantly strained relationship—that had become a vicious cycle whereby the [Chinese Communist Party] essentially dictated much of our China policy and initiatives. President Trump came along and cut out the mumbo-jumbo.

The overall Trump policy from 2017 to 2020 extracted far more concessions from China and regained the policy initiative, to the point that we now dictate the terms of bilateral discourse based upon results, transparency, reciprocity and most importantly, our national interest and founding principles, Yu said. This policy stands in stark contrast to the appeasement of the past, as he emphasized. All in all, I would say the Trump administration is the only American administration in nearly seven decades that effectively holds the [Chinese] government accountable for its malign actions in a meaningful way, whether they are related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong, predatory trade and currency manipulations, industrial, military and cyber espionage against the U.S, Yu explained. We also began to robustly, without apology, uphold rules and laws governing the international commons, standing up against China’s bluffs and gaining more peace and security as a result.

In addition to its ongoing efforts to thwart Chinese espionage and technology theft, the administration pressed U.S. allies and friends around the world to fight against China’s attempt to dominate critical communications networks through government-linked companies like Huawei Technologies and cheap 5G equipment. The United States was also the only major nation in the world that actively exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s deception about the Wuhan virus.

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As the State Department policy planning expert on China, Miles Yu bolstered this book’s findings on the country’s current leader. Xi Jinping is a diehard Communist who believes in the ideology, he stressed.

The Chinese Communist Party’s fundamental philosophy of governance has not changed since 1954, when Mao Zedong declared that the Party was the essential force behind the communist cause and its theoretical foundation was Marxism-Leninism. Anyone in today’s China who openly challenges this precept will end up in jail or worse, Yu said. For many Americans, especially, and sadly, for many key U.S. policy makers who have spent a career on China affairs, this is completely unknown to them. He added, This remains also true in the China field—It is not that the CCP is not ideologically driven, it is that we refuse to see it that way.

It will be difficult if not impossible to fully comprehend the China threat without recognizing that the regime is still deeply ideological, driven by communist dogmas such as the belief in an epic struggle between socialism and capitalism, and Mao’s theory of continuous revolution. Without that foundation, the West will be unable to come to grips with Chinese global expansionism and halt its advance.

All the recent major initiatives by Beijing are based on Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure; the ruthless crackdown on all religions and especially the imprisoning of more than a million ethnic Uighurs; the campaign to paint the United States falsely as a black hand operating to promote democracy in Hong Kong, and the imposition of a draconian national security law in the former British colony—all this arises not from Chinese nationalism, but from Marxist-Leninist precepts.

More than any other in recent memory, the Trump administration has aggressively pursued policies to confront the China threat. The list of actions taken since the first edition of Deceiving the Sky is commendable and long. It includes:

•  Upgraded relations with democratic Taiwan by sending warships regularly through the Taiwan Strait, dispatching an undersecretary of state to visit the island, and authorizing the sale of $13 billion in new weapons, including F-16 jets, M1A1 tanks, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and advanced torpedoes for future indigenous submarines.

•  Signed several laws strengthening ties with Taiwan, including the Taiwan Travel Act, the Asia Reassurance Initiative, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, and the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative, known as the TAIPEI Act.

•  Declared China’s claims to own 90 percent of the South China Sea completely unlawful under a 2016 international ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

•  Ended Hong Kong’s special trade status with the United States after China effectively abrogated the 1997 Basic Law agreement that was supposed to allow the former colony to keep its democratic system until 2047.

•  Sanctioned Chinese government officials who were involved in the Hong Kong crackdown and the mass repression of Uighurs.

•  Blocked U.S. visas for Chinese students linked to the People’s Liberation Army, to curb American assistance of any efforts to modernize the PLA.

•  Helped initiate a new security alliance between the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, known as the Quad, which American officials expect to evolve into a NATO-style alliance.

•  Urged Hollywood to resist pressure to censor American films in exchange for gaining access to Chinese audiences.

•  Increased Navy warship passage and aircraft overflights through international waters claimed by China in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and Taiwan Strait.

•  Announced plans for building counterspace weapons for potential future use against growing Chinese space warfare capabilities.

•  Appealed to Silicon Valley technology executives to avoid helping China’s mass surveillance operations or contributing to strengthening the Chinese military.

•  Signed into law restrictions prohibiting U.S. telecommunications carriers from using Chinese equipment, and requiring future 5G infrastructure to be protected from Chinese electronic spying.

•  Blocked the sale to a Chinese front company of a radio station on the Mexican border that would have beamed propaganda into Southern California.

•  Pressed Russia to urge China to join strategic nuclear arms talks aimed at limiting Beijing’s nuclear buildup.

•  Identified companies linked to the Chinese military that operate directly or indirectly in the United States.

•  Imposed curbs on American pension funds’ investments in Chinese companies linked to the military or to human rights abuses.

•  Issued an executive order directing the federal government to prevent China from cornering the international market on rare-earth minerals that are vital for the military and for the technology industry.

•  Issued an executive order that barred U.S. investment in Chinese companies linked to the People’s Liberation Army—estimated to be at least $500 billion at the time—in an effort to prevent American capital from funding the Chinese military buildup.

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In the ongoing crackdown on Chinese espionage and technology theft, as of this writing, fifty-three people have been charged or indicted, pleaded guilty or been convicted for China-related illegal activities. Among them, Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, a former CIA officer, was charged with espionage for providing secrets to Chinese intelligence. Another former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, whom officials believe compromised the CIA’s agent network inside China, was sentenced to nineteen years in prison for passing secrets to China. Ron Rockwell Hansen, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, was sentenced to ten years in prison also as a Chinese spy.

It isn’t only former spies who have been caught up in the crackdown. Charles Lieber, chairman of the chemistry department at Harvard University, was indicted for making false statements about his work with China’s Thousand Talents program, a covert effort to steal or acquire American technology and expertise. Lieber was charged with lying to investigators about his covert work with Chinese institutes and payments from China.

On the technology front, the Chinese telecommunications conglomerate Huawei Technologies and several subsidiaries were charged with conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which was first used in the 1970s to indict mafia leaders. Now the law is being employed against a new organized crime threat: corrupt global corporations linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

Federal prosecutors revealed new details of the covert influence operation by China, first disclosed in Deceiving the Sky, to force the repatriation of Guo Wengui, a dissident Chinese billionaire. Court documents provided new information on the role of Elliott Broidy, a former Republican Party fundraiser, and his confederate Nicki Lum Davis. The charging documents stated that the two traveled to Shenzhen, China, in May 2017 for a meeting with Sun Lijun, vice minister of public security, and Low Taek Jho, a Malaysian fugitive. During the meeting, Sun explained how he wanted Guo returned to China and agreed to pay Broidy millions of dollars to use his influence with high-ranking United States government officials to advocate for [Guo’s] return to the PRC, one document said. Sun also asked the Americans to help him arrange meetings with high-level U.S. officials during a visit to Washington. Broidy was not indicted, only charged in a criminal information—a sign that he is cooperating with authorities. In October 2020 he pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act by lobbying the Trump administration to forcibly repatriate Guo and to halt the probe into Malaysian bank corruption.

In China, Sun Lijun was arrested and placed under investigation by Xi Jinping for what state media called severe violations of party discipline and law. In reality, it was punishment for his failure to repatriate or silence Guo.

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Impressive as the Trump administration’s actions and policies have been, the United States must do more to neutralize the growing China threat.

Asked about going beyond declaring China a strategic competitor and clearly identifying the communist state as an enemy, a senior White House official told me that China is both a competitor and an adversary. Some U.S. government documents have begun identifying China as an enemy. The Department of Energy, for example, had an executive order for the purposes of protecting our power grid, [saying] that it was necessary to recognize that there are adversarial dynamics here at play in the relationship, the official said. Chinese military intelligence agents have conducted probes into U.S. computer control networks for power grids—an indication that China is planning to use its formidable cyberwarfare capabilities to shut down American power grids during any future conflict.

American officials say that one serious impediment to the Trump administration’s efforts to deal effectively with Communist China has been the reluctance at the top of the Treasury Department. Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, has been fighting for Wall Street’s interests in addition to working for President Trump.