Over the past two months, the Chinese Communist Party’s military threat to neighboring countries and maritime confrontation with the U.S. military has entered a new and dangerous phase, with the escalation of the Sino-U.S. Cold War and naval maneuvers on both sides. Is the Chinese Communist Party’s belligerence a momentary error in judgment or a continuation of its tradition? Is the Chinese Communist Party’s nuclear threat to the United States true or false? This is an important question to ponder after the CCP ignited the Sino-U.S. Cold War.
I. The U.S. Military’s Massive Display of Military Power and the Authorities’ Military Expenditure Compression Actions
Since the first half of last year, the Chinese Communist Party has ignited the Sino-U.S. Cold War through a series of nuclear threatening actions against the United States. In the face of this complex and dangerous situation, two simplistic perceptions have emerged internationally. One believes that the Biden administration is unwilling to increase military spending and military readiness so that the CCP can do whatever it wants, while the other believes that the U.S. military is waiting in the wings so that other countries threatened by the CCP can rest easy. Both views ignore the other side of the issue, which is that the U.S. military is indeed trying to demonstrate its deterrent power against the CCP, and the Biden administration has sought to curb such efforts by the U.S. military.
The U.S. military’s preparedness and preventive deterrence against the CCP has been increasing so far this year, and the U.S. Navy has moved the vast majority of its existing carrier fleet and amphibious strike groups to East Asia to augment its defensive forces in the region. Most recently, the USS Roosevelt carrier group spent three months in the South China Sea exercising with the USS Nimitz carrier group from the Middle East; then the Roosevelt carrier group moved north to the Bus Strait, then south along the waters east of the Philippines to the southern waters of Indonesia in the southern hemisphere to deter ships surveying shipping lanes for Chinese Communist nuclear submarines in that area; and finally from the Indian Ocean area west of Indonesia through the Malacca Strait. Finally, it crossed the Strait of Malacca from the western part of Indonesia to the Indian Ocean, made a 360-degree circle, and returned to the South China Sea to conduct joint exercises with the Makin Island Amphibious Strike Group deployed from the Middle East to deter the Chinese navy from building naval bases in the international waters of the South China Sea. This display of military power against a nuclear power that provoked the Cold War has not been seen since World War II and is larger than the naval confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. This shows how wary the U.S. military is of the military threat from the Chinese Communist Party in the current U.S.-China Cold War state.
On the other hand, instead of encouraging the military’s efforts with practical actions, the administration is trying to “drag its feet”. The U.S. Navy’s official website reported on April 9 that the military budget proposed by the U.S. military for the next fiscal year is $753 billion, but the Biden administration has submitted to Congress only $715 billion for the Defense Department’s military budget, which is 2.3 percent less than the actual military spending of $731.6 billion for the current fiscal year; taking into account the rate of price increases, the reduction in military spending for the next year will actually reach more than 5 percent. . Considering that the Democratic-controlled federal House of Representatives may further cut the defense budget submitted by the administration, and that the Biden administration is spending heavily on illegal immigrants in Central and South America, it is clear that the administration is not so short of money as to cut military spending without regard for the national security of the United States. The root cause of the lack of military spending is that the Democratic Party and the Biden administration are clearly trying to appease the Chinese Communist Party.
Second, the internationalization of the Taiwan Strait crisis
The South China Sea is only one aspect of the Sino-U.S. military confrontation, and Taiwan is the first to bear the brunt of the Sino-U.S. Cold War. So how serious is the military threat Taiwan faces from the Chinese Communist Party?
In March of this year, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Institute for International Studies in Taiwan released a poll. This poll showed that 63% of the public believed that China would not attack Taiwan. This poll is undoubtedly flawed; it should have divided the question posed to respondents into two: whether the CCP wants to attack Taiwan, and whether the CCP will attack Taiwan. Obviously, motivated desire and realistic possibility are two different things, and the public’s perception of these two questions will certainly differ. Whether the CCP will attack Taiwan or not depends not on whether it wants to, but on whether it can.
Whether the CCP wants to attack Taiwan or not is clear from its war preparations and military threats. When it sends an aircraft carrier formation to the east of Taiwan in a posture of encircling Taiwan, and when it keeps increasing its military strength in Fujian, it can make a clear judgment that those are moves to threaten Taiwan by force. If it judges that an attack on Taiwan does not pose a danger to itself after forceful preparations, its next step may be to enter actual war preparations. But today’s crisis in the Taiwan Strait is no longer a matter of cross-strait relations. For the United States, the peace in the Indo-Pacific region has been completely shattered by the Communist Party’s military expansion and foreign expansion in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War; in this context, the Taiwan Strait crisis is no longer a cross-strait issue, but is also relevant to U.S. national security. It can be said that since the second half of last year, for the first time in history, the United States has entered into a community of destiny with Taiwan, sharing the same fate and risk.
On a military level, once the Chinese Communist Party takes control of Taiwan, the U.S. military will no longer be able to effectively defend the first island chain and will have to retreat to the second and third island chains, which will make it impossible to effectively contain the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic attempts to use nuclear submarines to threaten the U.S. in the Central Pacific or East Pacific waters. On the economic level, once Taiwan is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the whole East Asia region may be caught in the military encirclement of the Chinese Communist Party, and the national security of Japan and South Korea will be lost. In the pattern of economic globalization, the global economy will be in great danger if East Asia is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, not only is the U.S. military now clearly stating that it will help the Republic of China maintain security, but Japan also sees this, and Prime Minister Kan’s visit to the United States has the important purpose of communicating and collaborating with the United States to assist in the defense of Taiwan. Because once Taiwan is conquered, Japan is in a serious predicament, and Japan is now a community of destiny with Taiwan and the United States, sharing the same fate and risk.
It is the internationalization of the Taiwan Strait crisis that has instead led most Taiwanese people to discover that Taiwan’s security is protected to a considerable degree internationally. 61.1% of respondents in the above-mentioned poll believe that the United States will defend and help Taiwan.
III. The Chinese Communist Party’s Tradition of Aggression
The CCP has never been a peace-loving regime; rather, it has actually wanted to use force to achieve its international ambitions. This ambition is not just to deal with Taiwan, which it considers an “internal affair” and not an international goal; its international ambition is to turn other countries into its sphere of influence, as the Soviet Union did. There are three types of foreign aggressions in which the CCP is involved: the first is the direct entry of CCP troops into foreign countries to participate in their internal wars, such as the Korean War; the second is the use of all means to arm and supply proxy armies of other countries to wage civil wars, such as the Vietnam War; and the third is direct warfare with neighboring countries, such as the Sino-Vietnamese War in the late 1970s.
The Chinese Communist Party began to intervene in the civil wars of neighboring countries before it established power, with the aim of supporting pro-communist forces and expanding the Communist Party’s sphere of influence, which was the reason for the outbreak of the Korean War. After the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, it first instigated a war of independence in Vietnam, and then promoted the Vietnamese Civil War in the 1960s. In addition to the Korean War and the Vietnam Civil War, the two wars that led to U.S. military involvement, the CCP also broke out border wars with India, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, as well as the massive shelling of Kinmen Island. It is fair to say that for China’s neighboring countries, a totalitarian communist regime has never been belligerent, and few countries in modern Asian history, with the exception of fascist regimes like the Great Japanese Empire, which launched World War II, have been as aggressive toward and have had repeated military conflicts with neighboring countries as China.
At the beginning of this century, the Chinese Communist Party did not just send volunteers to fight against the UN forces in the Korean War, but also sent Chinese Communist troops a year ahead of the outbreak of the Korean Civil War to serve as the main force in North Korea’s war of southern aggression. Without the Chinese Communist Party providing North Korea with an infantry main force with actual combat experience, North Korea simply did not have the combat capability for large-scale ground warfare, and at that time North Korea’s own infantry had never had actual combat experience or battlefield drills in tactics and combat. The Chinese Communist Party’s deployment of infantry to North Korea to help North Korea prepare for civil war occurred in 1949, one year before the outbreak of the Korean War.
The Summer 2000 issue of the Journal of Contemporary China Studies, which I edited, published a paper by Xu Zerong, a doctor of political science at Oxford University, entitled “China’s Role in the Korean War. In the paper, Lin Biao’s Four Wildernesses drew three divisions and two regiments (156th, 164th, and 166th Divisions) from the southward fighting forces in the summer of 1949, and entered North Korea fully loaded and integrated them into the North Korean army, accounting for 46.5% of the North Korean army. North Korea relied on these Chinese Communist troops and started the Korean War 1 year later.
In 1949 Stalin gave Mao Zedong the territory: Vietnam was too far away from the Soviet Union and unfamiliar to the Soviet Communist Party, while the Vietcong was historically close to the Chinese Communist Party, so the Indochina Peninsula was assigned to the old Mao to operate. France resumed colonial rule over Vietnam after the end of World War II. After the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Gung, a famous general in the Second Field, took command of the Viet Cong army, which had been trained by China, to fight against the French in early July 1950 as the chief military advisor. China provided Vietnam with a large amount of military aid, 116,000 guns of all kinds, 4,630 artillery pieces of all kinds, and a large amount of communication and engineering equipment and military supplies such as food, clothing and medicine. The Chinese Communist Party sent 23 detachments of air defense, engineering, railway, and logistics support troops, with 95 regiments and 83 battalions, totaling more than 320,000 men, the highest number being 170,000 a year. The strong support of the Chinese Communist Party enabled the Vietcong to defeat the French army and occupy North Vietnam.
IV. China’s Role in the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War from the 1950s to the 1970s was in fact entirely instigated by the Chinese Communist Party. At that time, the Republic of Vietnam in South Vietnam did not want to attack North Vietnam, but Mao Zedong wanted the Vietcong to occupy South Vietnam and used all of China’s power to arm and supply the Vietcong troops to fight a Vietnam War that shook the world with the U.S. troops assisting South Vietnam.
After Stalin’s death, Mao Zedong wanted to be the spiritual leader of the communist countries internationally, and for this reason had to compete with Moscow in the international strategy of communist regimes versus democratic states. At that time, the Soviet Communist Party proposed a foreign strategy of peace, not war; Mao wanted to create a proxy war in Vietnam to prove that his strategy of “armed seizure of power” could be applied to all countries in the world, thus overwhelming Moscow. Thus, the Indochina peninsula was turned into a second Korean peninsula by old Mao.
In his memoirs, written in secret after his downfall, Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, wrote: “I am sure of one thing about Mao. At least when I knew him, he broke out with an impatient desire to rule the world, and his plan was to rule first Asia and then other countries. His chauvinism and pride and arrogance sent shivers down my spine. I remember one time in Beijing when Mao and I were lying by the pool in our swimming trunks discussing the issue of war and peace. I said, “In the old days when fists and bayonets were used to settle disputes, the result was indeed different as to who had more men and bayonets …… Now with the atomic bomb, the number of troops on both sides is meaningless to the real comparison of power and the outcome of the war. The more troops either side has, the more cannon fodder it has.” And Mao said, “All you have to do is provoke the Americans to move, and we will give you as many divisions as you need to defeat them – 100, 200, 1,000, whatever.” I tried my best to explain to him that it would only take one or two missiles to blow the entire Chinese division to powder. But he wouldn’t even listen to my arguments.
Mao Zedong had exhausted his country’s resources to start the Vietnam War at the time of China’s three-year famine, and later brought the United States and the Soviet Union into this proxy war. The Vietnam War was entirely initiated and supported by the Chinese Communist Party, which could not have sustained the war without the arms and other huge aid provided by the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. military only became involved passively after the CCP started the Vietnam War, and in July 1964 Old Mao told the North Vietnamese ambassador: “If the Americans bomb North Vietnam or land in North Vietnam, we are going to fight, our troops want to fight. We will go to your place and take a step across the border.” Communist military assistance and troop training to North Vietnam began in the late 1950s, whereupon the North Vietnamese army was ordered to wage the Vietnamese Civil War; Communist assistance escalated to its zenith in December 1964, when the Communist Party signed a military agreement with the Viet Cong in which the Communist Party sent 300,000 troops (five infantry divisions and five anti-aircraft divisions) to North Vietnam to assume its defense in place of the North Vietnamese army, leaving the North Vietnamese army fully engaged in South Vietnam’s in South Vietnam.
In 1968 the Viet Cong committed most of its main forces in South Vietnam, only to be defeated by the U.S. forces and the Viet Cong had to hold bilateral talks with the U.S. in Paris. As recalled by Viet Cong General Secretary Le Phuoc: The Chinese Communist Party exerted pressure saying, “You cannot sit down and negotiate with the United States. You must bring U.S. troops to North Vietnam to fight them.” At the time, the Viet Cong army was fully supplied by the Chinese Communist Party in terms of arms and logistics, while the air defense of North Vietnam was undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union. According to official Communist data, for this Vietnam War, China provided Vietnam with huge amounts of weapons and combat supplies without compensation, including 179 aircraft, 145 ships, 1,044 tanks, armored vehicles, and tracked tractors, 16,333 automobiles, more than 37,500 artillery pieces, more than 2.16 million guns (jacks), 1.3 billion rounds of artillery ammunition, compressed dry rations and by-products, 153 More than 10,000 tons, as well as a large number of engineers, communications, chemical defense equipment, equipment parts, munitions and other items, with a total value of $20 billion.
As the U.S. began to contact the Chinese Communist Party in 1971, Lao Mao threw himself into the arms of the U.S. in order to cope with the Soviet military threat, and the Vietnam War ended with the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the occupation of South Vietnam by the Vietcong. Old Mao fell in love with the “head of imperialism”, which resulted in the shredding of Old Mao’s theory of “world revolution”, which became the laughing stock of other communist countries; and in In the minds of the extreme leftists in many Western countries, Mao went from being the “great hero” of the “world revolution” to a great traitor. The Chinese people sacrificed their own lives to provide huge amounts of aid to Vietnam, but in the end, Vietnam and China became enemies. Because the Chinese Communist Party regarded the Vietcong as a “puppet” in its hands, and let it go only when it was released, and took it back when it was withdrawn; and the head of the Vietcong had the same mind as the old Mao who was suppressed by Stalin, so instead of thanking the Chinese Communist Party for helping them to occupy South Vietnam, the Vietcong was full of hatred for the Chinese Communist Party for letting them be cannon fodder to fight the American army, and then turning around and colluding with the United States. So the Vietcong later joined with the Chinese Communist Party. So the Vietcong later turned against the Chinese Communist Party, and the Sino-Vietnamese War finally broke out in the late 1970s.
V. Is the Chinese Communist Party’s Nuclear Threat to the United States Real or False?
In an article published in the February issue of Proceedings, the U.S. Navy’s leading magazine, Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, called on U.S. military and federal leaders to find ways to deter China’s aggressive actions, including confronting the real possibility of nuclear war. He said there is a real possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and China, which has begun to aggressively challenge international norms in ways not seen since the height of the Cold War. Richard argued that China’s recent actions would increase the risk of a great power crisis or conflict if U.S. officials were to let it go.
The U.S. Strategic Command is the agency responsible for exercising nuclear deterrence against enemy nations in a Cold War state. It is one of the U.S. Army’s Integrated Commands (Joint Warfare Commands) and is responsible for the areas of space operations, information operations, missile defense, intelligence reconnaissance and surveillance, global strike, strategic deterrence, and weapons of mass destruction. It was formed in 1992, succeeding the U.S.-Soviet Cold War-era Strategic Air Command, and merged with U.S. Space Command in 2002. General Charles Richard commands the agency responsible for integrating and coordinating command and control capabilities to provide the most accurate and timely information to the President and Secretary of Defense. Because his agency combines traditional U.S. nuclear command and control missions with space missions, global strike, global missile defense, global command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), it is unlikely that anyone in the democratic world has more and more accurate information than he does about whether the Chinese Communist Party will use nuclear weapons; and only he knows that if the Chinese Communist Party might use nuclear weapons He is the only one who knows how the United States will guard against the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party will use nuclear weapons. Now that he has issued this warning, the situation is not optimistic.
The warning from the U.S. military authorities indicates that the Chinese Communist Party’s nuclear submarine activities have given the U.S. military the impression that these are not routine exercises, but rather preparatory or even operational exercises, i.e., preparations for the use of submarines to launch nuclear missiles. Such a nuclear threat would not be reported by the Chinese Communist Party, nor would it be reported by the U.S. military; however, just because it is not reported does not mean it is safe and sound. If the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command is a nuclear war commander, he is not going to make up his mind lightly; since he said so, it means that the U.S. military has accurate information and has made such a judgment; moreover, there is a consensus in the U.S. military hierarchy on this judgment, and if the military hierarchy has a difference of opinion on this, obviously the commander cannot write this article and publish it publicly.
This article itself is also the sternest warning to the Chinese Communist military. Under the Cold War, the United States will not initiate a nuclear attack against the Chinese Communist Party, but the United States will not turn a blind eye to the repeated attempts of the Chinese Communist Party’s nuclear submarines to enter the Central Pacific Ocean and threaten the United States with nuclear missiles, and will definitely take a series of preventive and monitoring measures, which will inevitably lead to repeated battles between the submarines and anti-submarine aircraft of the two navies.
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