Military vehicles carrying DF-21D intermediate-range anti-ship ballistic missiles participate in a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sept. 3, 2015. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) styled itself a mythical phoenix in a 1959 propaganda poster. The phoenix rises from a sheaf of wheat to govern China, depicted as a dragon emerging from the smelting pot of industrialization.
That phoenix now boasts a formidable nuclear arsenal.
The CCP’s rapid military buildup could make it, like the eternal phoenix, a near-permanent fixture of the future. Nuclear weapons will deter the CCP’s foreign adversaries, and its techno-totalitarianism can quash internal dissent. No dictatorship as powerful as the CCP, or as technologically sophisticated, was ever defeated in war or by internal enemies.
The mythic phoenix was red and gold, like the CCP’s flag. Like Beijing’s state-owned mouthpieces, including Phoenix TV, the regime attempts a melodious cry that, to free ears, sounds more like the siren song of an ideologue.
Unlike the phoenix, however, the CCP seeks to speed the process of its “rejuvenation” by destroying, rather than just replacing, its predecessor. Like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to vanquish democratic Ukraine, Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants to demolish democracy not only in Taiwan but also globally.
The CCP is obviously beguiling to Beijing’s leadership, which controls its fearsome power. But for the rest of us, the CCP is a threat to our freedoms, liberties, and diverse cultures.
To save ourselves, we must be able to defend against China’s growing military, about which languid democracies in North America and Europe are finally becoming educated.
On April 19, The New York Times published an article about China’s emergence as the third nuclear superpower, with the United States and Russia. The NY Times reported that the CCP appears to be lying about its new breeder reactors, which produce plutonium. Although Beijing claims that the reactors are purely civilian, the NY Times quotes an expert saying, “Breeder reactors are plutonium, and plutonium is for weapons.”
On April 18, we learned not only that Beijing has hypersonic missiles that successfully circumnavigated the world, but also that its surveillance capabilities are deployed on supersonic vehicles that evade our best defenses by flying at Mach 3 and at 100,000 feet.
A Long March 5B rocket lifts off from the Wenchang launch site on China's southern Hainan Island on May 5, 2020. Another variant of the Long March rocket was used to get China's hypersonic missile into orbit in July. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing feels comfortable deepening its defense cooperation with Moscow, including through military exercises. On April 16, Putin met with China’s sanctioned defense minister, and the two hailed their growing military ties.
April 19 brought news of China’s first policy to increase military recruitment of veterans and the better educated during wartime. The policy appears to form part of Beijing’s future war planning.
On April 16, we learned that China is apparently building an air and naval base in the Bay of Bengal, giving Beijing a critical link in what is developing into a string of military bases from its coast through the South China Sea and onward to the Cambodian coast, Burma’s Great Coco Island, Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, Gwadar port in Pakistan, and the already-completed People’s Liberation Army base in Djibouti, Africa.
The Biden administration’s weak reaction to China’s military buildup is apparently to beg for more cooperation and assure Beijing publicly that despite all their transgressions, we aren’t targeting the CCP as a whole.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has long bemoaned repeated rebuffs by his counterpart in Beijing, including after the United States shot down China’s spy balloon. The Pentagon has for years attempted to increase talks with its counterpart in China, to no avail.
NATO seeks an agreement with Beijing on limiting military uses of artificial intelligence, despite the CCP’s repeated violation of its international agreements, including, most recently, the 2020 Trump trade agreement and, most spectacularly, the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong’s autonomy.
The CCP has proven time and again that it is an unreliable partner. What remains is a threat to the world, with which negotiations are untenable.
In Islamic mythology, the phoenix (anqa or simurgh) was perfection, as communism claims to be. But the anqa became a bane to humanity and had to be defeated.
The CCP, as brightly colored its plumage and mellifluous its cry, follows the same path.
The United States has, for the past five years, attempted a trade war with China to rectify its trajectory. But that failed to defeat the CCP, which is only growing stronger. Perhaps the sanctions and tariffs need to be more thorough and more widely adopted by our allies. Perhaps that can’t be achieved before the CCP attacks Taiwan and pulls the world toward another major military conflict. In which case, we'd better get ready.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Anders Corr has a bachelor's/master's in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea" (2018).
