World War 3 is here

But it’s not being fought with nuclear weapons

It’s being fought with influence.
Welcome back to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
World War 3 isn’t some far off nightmare.
It’s been waged by China for decades.
China is the only country fighting
a truly 21st century war.
Their weapons aren’t guns or bullets,
or even nuclear warheads.
Their weapon is influence being bought
with money and technology.
And in this war,
we’re all soldiers.
How close is China to winning?
And when will the United States
realize it’s already at war?
Joining me today is retired Air Force Brigadier,
General Robert Spalding.
He recently wrote this book,
Stealth War: How China Took Over
While America's Elite Slept.
It's basically the playbook
of how China waged an unrestricted war
against the United States.
Great to be back.
So, for decades now,
the US and China have been involved
in this strategic cooperation.
And as promised,
China's become a liberal democracy.
Correct?
Oh, that's so true.
And that's why the people of Hong Kong
are protesting right now,
so that they can actually move into the mainland China,
and join this wonderful free
and great society that she's [crosstalk].
I believe Taiwan is trying to do the same thing.
The same thing.
In fact, they're pushing Hong Kongese out of the way,
so they can get into mainland faster.
Hand over feet.
So, tell us a bit about your book.
So, the whole idea behind the book was to get out
as fast as I could,
everything I had learned working
in the Defense Department,
and the State Department,
and the White House,
over the last five or six years,
understanding what the Chinese Communist Party
was doing to our country,
because quite frankly,
now within DC the government gets the joke.
So, within the Executive Branch,
we understand the challenge
that the Chinese Communist Party has,
not just for our economy,
but also for our democracy,
and in the Hill on both sides of the aisle,
Democrats and Republicans,
they understand that.
Who doesn't understand it quite frankly,
because most Americans don't really understand
what China is,
in terms of Chinese Communist Party's power
to control the entire society,
is the American people.
And so, the idea was to get this information
to the American people,
so they could understand not only
what was going on in terms of the Chinese Communist Party,
but why there was this essentially unspecified angst
about what's going on with our own society,
in terms of the ability to deliver
on the promise of a more perfect union.
Well, so my question is,
is this just an issue of China out
competing the US on an even playing field,
or is something else going on?
No, first of all, there's no even playing field.
When we talk about international economics,
the word we use is free trade.
Well actually,
that's based on an idea of market-based
approaches to economics,
and China is anything from a market based economy.
In fact, they have done, especially since Xi Jinping
has come into control of the Chinese Communist Party,
they've slowly consolidated the power
of the state owned enterprises within China,
so that the Chinese Communist Party
actually had more power over the economy.
Not only they've done that,
but they've essentially decapitated the leadership
of a lot of the private companies within China.
So HNA, Anbang, Alibaba,
they've taken out the billionaires
that had founded those companies,
and essentially so that the Chinese Communist Party
could retake control of those companies, as well.
Recently, they just sent a bunch of government officials
to work in companies,
so they had even more control over
what was going on in the economy.
So, everything that they said that
they were going to do, the WTO,
everything that we believe in
in terms of free trade and a level playing field,
they don't absolutely agree with at all.
So, the Chinese Communist Party,
isn't into the free markets?
Well, of course Xi Jinping will go to Davos,
where everybody will gently clap, when he says,
"We need to keep globalization going,
we need to collaborate."
But in fact, no,
they're into continuously growing the Chinese economy,
for the purpose of maintaining legitimacy,
so the Chinese people don't overthrow them,
for being despotic totalitarians.
Well so, I know there are people who will say,
"Is this really just an issue of the United States
losing its position of global dominance?"
And they would say,
"They don't really care
whether it's the United States or China,
that's the global superpower."
Well, I think the NBA offers a good example
of what that means for a democratic society,
and that is the institutions of your society,
whether they be political,
academic, corporate or financial,
are in league with the Chinese Communist Party.
So, if the NBA can basically
come very close to firing the General Manager
for tweeting something like,
"Support democracy in Hong Kong,"
then you understand the power
that Chinese Communist Party has
over the entire system.
When I was at the White House,
I would call lawyers, think tanks, and say,
"Hey, I need help either exposing
what the Chinese are doing,
or come up with the policy options
that we can actually use,
to stop what they're doing."
And they would all come back and say,
"Sorry, we can't help,
because we don't want to anger our Chinese funders,
or customers."
And so, it's pervasive throughout our society.
And quite frankly,
the leaders of these institutions know it.
But, they're under the mistaken belief
that embracing the Chinese Communist Party,
will somehow unlock this magical move towards democracy.
So, the idea of open markets leading wealth to wealth,
and wealth leading to democracy,
drives them to say,
"Okay, I'm going to have
the same worldview as Xi Jinping.
Only, the world view that he has,
and the world view that our leaders have,
are completely counter to each other.
Because, if you read document number nine,
which I know you have,
you understand that rather than the Bill of Rights,
they believe in the anti Bill of Rights,
and in fact,
they want to suppress and destroy the Bill of Rights,
because they see it as a challenge to their continued rule.
So basically, these American companies is,
and think tanks are, their idea is,
"We will make China more free and democratic
by imposing self-censorship in the United States."
Well, they've been told that.
And so, what we do,
is we incentivize them to do that kind of behavior.
So for instance,
with MSCI World Index going from 0 to 20%
weighting in Chinese equities, what that does,
is take our retirement funds over to China
to help invest in the Belt and Road Initiative,
or Made in China 2025.
You're talking about US pensions being vested in China.
US pensions funds.
But, at the same time,
the Securities and Exchange Commission,
who's responsible for ensuring
that there's a level playing field
for the US stock holder,
allows Chinese companies
not to abideby audit requirements,
or transparency requirements.
Now, why is that?
Why does Intel have to have a 10Q and a 10K,
a quarterly statement, and an annual statement?
Because SEC forces them to.
But why doesn't Ali Baba,
who's really a Cayman Island company...
And you don't know who owns the assets.
Why aren't they required to do the same thing?
Well, because there's this belief,
that if we just gave them a little bit of a good deal,
or a benefit, that they will again,
open up and become democracies.
But of course, all the Chinese Communist Party does
is take this policy, and say,
"Let's take as much money out of the system as we can,
so that we can keep this thing going."
Sort of the idea of the China's
this poor developing country,
and as Joe Biden said,
"They're not a competition for the United States."
They're not a problem, folks.
So, how widespread is Chinese money,
in the United States?
So, it's in the university system.
So what's happened since essentially
since the National Security Strategy in 2017,
we've started to focus
more on foreign agent registration.
So, FAR registrations.
You're starting to see now,
if you go and look at those online,
you can see literally,
tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of dollars pouring in from China
to pay former congressman, former senators,
that are essentially lobbying on Capitol Hill.
All of these Chinese media,
Chinese language media companies
that are delivering Chinese media,
language media content in the United States,
are having to register as foreign agents.
And you started to get a real idea
of how entrenched they are in our system.
Of course, you can also look at the think tanks today,
like the major think tanks in Washington, DC.
Look on the boards of those think tanks,
and look at their relationships
to the Chinese Communist Party,
and you realize that nearly every major institution
that we would count on
to uphold the democratic principles of our free society,
have essentially created these a economic
and financial relationships with China.
Now, did they go out and seek these out,
or did China come...
There's a little bit of both, quite frankly.
I see there's a desire on the part of business
in the United States to prevent conflict,
and they think that if they're over talking
to the Chinese Communist Party,
that somehow they will create this connection,
that will make them not aggressive,
or want to have conflict.
But, of course,
it just shows a lack of knowledge
of how the Chinese Communist Party
thinks about competition,
thinks about warfare,
thinks about warfare in ways that
are completely different from the United States.
I think it's very interesting in your book how you frame it.
China is the only country fighting a 21st century war.
Yeah.
We talk about World War 3.
And, when is it going to happen?
What's going to be the catalyst,
and how's it going to play out?
Nuclear bombs flying.
Nuclear bombs flying,
and it's going to start with a biological agent
that's released in some city,
or there's all kinds of these scenarios
that we have war games in the military,
and talk about, and try to think about how war
is going to change in the future.
Meanwhile, it's being waged
for decades in our neighborhoods.
And so, we're programmed in the military
to fight abroad,
to fight outside the borders because we think,
"Well, if we protect America from abroad,
then we don't have to worry about it being at home."
But what we fail to recognize,
is a globalization and the internet,
brought the adversary right into our television,
in our [inaudible].
Or the internet,
we don't want to see [inaudible].
The internet.
And so, we're off defending our families,
and our families are slowly
being influenced by these economic,
financial, and informational ties.
Well, so in the book,
you really make it out that China
has it in for the United States.
Why is that?
Well, they have it in for the constitution,
because if you read Document Number Nine,
it really talks about those ideas of freedom of speech,
and freedom of religion, freedom from oppression.
This real idea that you can make your own future,
is antithetical to the desires
of the Chinese Communist Party,
which is to maintain
its totalitarian rule over China.
And so, one of the things they recognize
during the Tiananmen Massacre,
is this is a very viral idea.
Once it gets instantiated, you can't stop it.
And so, you have to inoculate the society.
The way you inoculate the society,
is you teach them from kindergarten,
every single grade level,
about the importance of the Chinese Communist Party,
how the West is evil,
how the Japanese are evil,
and how we've had the century of humiliation.
And then, you bombard them.
First of all,
you protect him with a great firewall,
then you bombard them with media,
and social media-
Patriotic education.
Patriotic education.
You've got an app now that that watches you,
while you watch it.
And you have to learn everything you can
about the Chinese Communist Party.
Meanwhile, all that's been curated
to take out any sort of history,
that would give you some kind of counter narrative
that says, "Hey Mao killed tens of millions of people.
And, we had this thing called the Cultural Revolution,
where we broke all ties with the past,
and history has been rewritten."
None of this that the Chinese people know.
Take that back.
The ones that know,
are the ones that are tasked to sensor
the people on social media.
So, it's interesting to see those people
when they learn about the Tiananmen Square.
Some people interviewed them and they said,
"Well, did you go home and tell your family?"
"Oh no, no.
I don't want to start rumors."
So, it's really interesting how...
By the way, that model of teaching the censors
what to censor, is exactly replicated in Facebook.
It's replicated in Twitter.
So the business models,
of the open data system,
are replicated in the West and in China.
In the West, they're for profit ostensibly,
but in China they're for profit and control.
And what's happening,
is there's a convergence in these two models.
And particularly, that's what 5G is about.
It's about converging these two models,
and about the China's model,
becoming ascendant in that competition.
Because the 4G world was about the smart phone,
the 5G world's really about the internet, as thing.
So, rather than saying,
"Hey, I want to get on my phone and get an Uber,"
you walk out the front door of this building,
and you say, "Uber."
And it shows up,
because the camera picked up your face.
Now, all of that data of everything
that you do walking around the city,
is going to be controlled by,
perhaps an American tech company,
but I would venture to say,
it may be Baidu, Ali Baba or Tencent,
that is taking that back to China.
Now, you might say,
"Oh, this is complete bogus stuff
made up by a general that wants
to get everybody worked up.
I was going to say it was Uber terrifying.
Well, it is Uber terrifying,
but the fact is Samantha Hoffman,
a researcher at Australian Strategic Policy Institute,
recently came out with a paper called,
Engineering Global Consent.
And it talks about Global Tone Communication Corporation,
GTCOM for short.
Now, what does GTCOM do?
It does translation services in 65 different languages.
It labels itself, a big data and AI company.
And in order to do translation in 65 languages,
it collects two to three petabytes of data per year.
Now, the interesting thing about
Global Tone Communication Corporation,
is it's jointly owned by the Ministry of Finance,
and the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
Oh, my God.
So, the two to three petabytes of data,
and this is by the way on their own website,
goes to the intelligence arm of
the People's Liberation Army,
and the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
So, this is what we face in the 5G world.
The Chinese Communist Party really was smart about this,
because they saw the United States dominate the 4G world,
by coming up with a platform, the smartphone,
and being the second country in the world
to build the network.
The 5G network is the platform itself.
So the smartphone goes away.
The camera that you talk into
when you go out the front door,
and all of these machines,
the Internet of Things,
becomes the things that collect data about you,
to make your life more convenient,
but also makes it very easy
to know exactly who you are,
and what you do.
So, if this technology is built by Chinese companies,
that's the Chinese Communist Party
having an all seeing eye, globally.
Well, that's the brilliance of what they did,
because now, companies like AT&T,
and Verizon who've not instituted,
or given one recommendation to 3GPP,
which is industry standard's making body, for 5G,
is completely dominated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Not only the standards for 5G,
but the underlying patented technology for 5G.
So, if you're Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, or ZTE,
it really doesn't matter if you're building a 3GPP network,
you're building a Chinese network.
So, if this works,
China will have successfully taken over the world,
without anybody knowing,
without a single shot being fired.
And it's really because we in the West,
stopped investing in ourselves.
We stopped investing in infrastructure,
we stopped investing in our industrial base,
we stopped investing in STEM education,
we stopped investing in basic science and research,
research and development.
We just stopped.
We stopped taking care of our own people.
So, how is it that you have figured out all of this,
and yet there's still the think tanks,
business leaders, politicians,
Democrats and Republicans,
how are you seeing this,
but they aren't?
So I had a team, and I was at a group of
fellow officers in the Pentagon from 2014 to 2016,
that really started to uncover this.
And frankly, the Defense Department
decided to put some resources to it,
and we started this office called
the Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis,
so that we could get analysis on what was going on.
And so, it's just spread.
Once you start to peel back the layers of the onion,
you start to realize that it's quite frankly,
pervasive across all society.
And so, once you start on that path,
I learn something every single day
about what the Chinese Communist Party is doing,
and how deep their infiltration
in democratic societies goes.
But, it's almost like the...
You remember the scene in The Matrix,
where are you going to take the red pill,
or are you going to take the blue pill?
I'm very familiar that with the Matrix.
Most people want the blue pill.
They don't want the red pill.
And because if you take the red pill,
you have to realize that it's time
to stand up and fight for the survival of freedom,
and the United States.
I'm slightly overwhelmed.
So, clearly Democrats and Republicans
have dropped the ball on this.
Is a solution going to take Democrats
and Republicans working together?
Oh, absolutely.
It's never going to happen.
We're screwed.
Just like, just like in the Soviet Union,
the good thing is,
I walk the halls of Congress,
and the one issue that you get
congressmen and senators agree on,
is we need to do something about
the Chinese Communist Party.
And so, I think once Americans understand...
We're a free country,
and people can think for themselves.
Once they're presented with logical,
fact-based arguments that aren't covered
with a smoke screen,
which is what this Stealth War is about.
It's about hiding everything that they do.
Then they can begin to make their own decisions.
They can say,
"Hey, we don't have to send our retirement funds to China.
We don't have to not have tariffs on Chinese products,
which are basically designed to balance a playing field.
We don't have to have our kids be censored
in our own universities,
because we have so many Chinese students
and we have these Confucius Institutes
and Chinese Student Associations,
which are designed to stifle speech
in our university system.
We can take back control of our country.
So, you say your book is not to sound an alarm,
but it's a call to arms.
What do you mean by that?
I mean that if America is to survive,
and what I mean by that is if it's going to continue
as a Democratic Constitutional Republic,
then Americans are going to have to stand up
and fight for it.
It's not going to be given to you free.
It's not going to be handed to your children,
and your grandchildren for free.
Our founding fathers had to fight for it.
Along the 240 plus years of our existence,
people had to stand up and fight.
The fight is just different this time,
and you don't have to go pick up a weapon
and go fight in some far away land.
You have to fight for democracy right here at home,
by recognizing that democracy here is under assault.
Look at what happened with the NBA.
It's clear as day,
if you choose to look at it.
So in a way, we're already in World War 3?
We are in World War 3,
and you are in the front lines.
I am now in the front lines.
When I had a uniform on,
I was working in the government.
I wasn't really paying attention.
But now, I'm fully woke
and I'm taking up the battle cry,
and this is one of the ways that I'm doing it.
Well, thank you so much for joining us,
and for writing an incredible book.
Once again, the book is Stealth War:
How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept.
We'll put a link in the description below.
Be sure to check it out.
It's a great book.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
Welcome to the battle.
Inglês