Former deputy national security adviser Kathleen Troia McFarland says China’s Communist Party is ramping up its propaganda on alleged U.S. weaknesses. (Video screenshot)
Former deputy national security adviser Kathleen Troia McFarland says China’s Communist Party believes it is unassailable and is ramping up its propaganda on alleged U.S. weaknesses in order to become the next dominant world power.
In an interview with the Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, McFarland said, “They [the CCP] look at the rest of the world and say, ‘OK, America, you stay in your place, but we want to lead the next world order. We want to be the leader of the non-white world, the leader of Asia, Central America, Latin America, the subcontinent and Africa.”
According to McFarland, the Chinese Communist Party manipulates public opinion to report what is good for them, uses the controversy surrounding racism to smear the United States, uses economic weapons to punish those who “cross the line,” thwarts legitimate criticism and sows the seeds of division among democratic nations.
“China [the Communist Party] plans to remake the world in its own image – at our expense, no doubt,” she said. She said.
“There’s no scruples.”
One need only review the recent diplomatic spat in Alaska to see that Beijing’s plan is “very straightforward,” McFarlane said.
“Nothing was negotiated, but it was significant because it showed what the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions were.”
McFarland said that while Biden’s officials have often claimed that they are “taking a tough stance” with the Communist Party, the meeting sent the opposite signal.
“It shows that the United States, or at least the Biden administration, is in a very weak position, and that’s going to reverberate around the world, to our detriment.” “The United States is taking a knife to a gunfight.”
“The Chinese (Communist Party of China) …… want to criticize America and humiliate us on our own soil. And in doing so, they use the American media and the pseudo-righteous media and the culture of sequestration and all that ‘America is a racist country’ and ‘America was birthed in evil’ and all that kind of rhetoric. The Chinese Communist Party quoted those words to the American leadership.”
“It’s a humiliation.” But, she said, “instead of Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying, ‘This is intolerable,’ and then turning around and walking away,” his message was instead, “We’re not We’re not perfect, we’ll be perfect someday,” she said.
She said, “It’s completely black and white.” She called it “an all-around humiliation.
Yang Jiechi (right), director of the Foreign Affairs Committee Office of the CPC Central Committee, and Wang Yi (left), CPC State Councilor and Foreign Minister, at the opening of high-level U.S.-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska, March 18, 2021.
For McFarlane, the CCP’s actions in Alaska “represent a real shift in China’s [the CCP’s] approach.”
“They’ve really laid down the gauntlet.”
It’s a new Cold War, Cold War 2.0,” she said — unlike the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, the Chinese (CCP) have made it clear that they will “have no qualms. .
“It seems to me that the Chinese (CCP) have now concluded that their rise is inevitable and that the decline of the United States is inevitable. They believe they are, or at least soon will be, in a more dominant position in the world than the United States in every aspect of the economy, technology, diplomacy, military, etc.”
Exploiting U.S. democracy
McFarlane said that while the United States sees its democratic framework as a powerful advantage, “the Chinese understand that this can be a weakness” and they seize on any argument that fits their advantage to undermine the West.
“It’s easy to be an authoritarian state because you just say something and then everybody has to follow; whereas in a democracy, we debate, we discuss over and over again, we have winners and we have losers, and the Chinese understand that.”
“That’s why their disinformation campaigns are so harmful and, frankly, so effective,” she said, “because they allow us to turn on each other to some extent.”
Beijing’s recent influence campaigns have included mechanical retellings that portray the United States as a racist nation, touting its own vaccine successes while disparaging U.S. vaccines and touting the Alaska conflict as a diplomatic victory.
“I don’t think they care if the U.S. is racist, but they want to portray the U.S. as morally flawed as they try to ascend to diplomatic dominance in the world,” McFarlane said.
McFarlane was a graduate student at Oxford University, studying communism and revolution. She warned that she sees a trend where “useful idiots” – a Cold War-era term for people who are manipulated to advance a political agenda – buy into this narrative and are destroying free societies from within.
“If the Chinese Communist Party is going to rule the world, I hope they don’t …… but if they are going to rule the world, the first people they get rid of are the useful idiots.” She said. They “will not have any of the rights that …… we have in the United States, just like the Chinese people do.”
No Crossing the Red Line
McFarlane said the Communist regime is such a formidable enemy because they have mobilized “all governmental means” to silence Western dissent in an authoritarian model.
After the West united to sanction Communist Party officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Beijing unleashed a storm of nationalism to punish Western brands that refuse to use Xinjiang cotton. Under intense online pressure, singers, celebrities and models quickly came forward and severed ties with these companies for fear of a potentially strong boycott.
Farmers pick cotton in a field in Hami, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, Sept. 20, 2015.
Similarly, Beijing retaliated against Australia after it demanded an independent investigation into the origins of the CCP virus, imposing a year of economic sanctions on Australia and banning imports of coal, barley, wine and other staples from Australia.
McFarlane said the Chinese Communist Party was “very clever in choosing the weapons they are using” and described trade and investment as one of the “most powerful” tools.
“From their [the regime’s] perspective, they think they’re in the driver’s seat, so they’re not going to make any concessions,” she said.
“What country, especially in a democracy, would let its people suffer economically just to make their point?”
According to McFarlane, the Communist regime’s long-term plan is to “take us out one by one – take out Japan, take out South Korea” and “use the weapon of economics to make these countries do the Communist Party’s bidding “.
This is a threat, she said, that requires “the unity of democracies around the world” and that “unity wins, division loses.
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