Beware China and its backdoor strategies for exporting its ultra-authoritarian political system to the West

We often fear the wrong things. The latest horrific news out of China, that the authorities seem to be using their “social credit” and Covid-19 tracking apps to squelch public protests, is something we should worry about here in the US and other Western nations because there are powerful forces seeking to impose Chinese-style authoritarianism in the US and other Western countries.

Michael Senger’s book, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World, is a must-read and an extensively-documented argument that China’s ultra-authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, has been using public health policy as a backdoor strategy to import authoritarian policies into the West and to ultimately weaken the West through self-inflicted wounds.

I fully agree with this analysis. I have been learning Mandarin for 8 years now, have read a number of books on China’s history, foreign policy, and cultural strategies, and it has become clear to me that we are currently engaged in a widespread cultural and economic war with China and have been for many years now. China’s people and history are magnificent, but its current political system is an abomination.

I’ve been extremely critical of US foreign policy for decades, but as bad as the US has been China would be far far worse if it occupied the same position the US currently enjoys.

China is using pandemic public health policies to squelch any possibility of protest within its borders and these policies are steadily being exported to the West by would-be authoritarians here in the West.

At this point, as a matter of course, I reject any and all attempts to extract my personal information, to assist in data collection, to allow tracking of my online activity, etc.

These are serious issues and I hope that all thinking people are paying attention.

Here’s a good video overview of some of these developments from Russell Brand.

And I also highly recommend, for a very in-depth look at these issues, both Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and Michael Pillsbury’s book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.