Steven Mosher: The Devil and Communist China

Why is China using this moment to help Russia with its war in Ukraine? Well, I think they realize that Russia, the outcome of this war, Russia against Ukraine, is critical for their own decisions with Taiwan and the Western Pacific.

This is all connected. Iran, Ukraine, China. The stock of Ukrainian ammunition is dwindling. They're going to run out of ammunition. Russia's capacity, we look at this all the time, is going up. With the help of China, Russia can win this.

If we support Ukraine, Ukraine can win. We passed an emergency supplemental two months ago. It's sitting on the Speaker's desk. He should bring that to the floor tomorrow night, get it passed. So that is Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat from Arizona, talking about the need to get some type of supplemental out there. You've got to do something in Congress. I mean, standalone aid for Ukraine, standalone aid for Israel, standalone for Thailand, whatever.

You've got to get it done. But yet you have people on the extreme right who say Ukraine shouldn't be funded because Eastern Europe is so far away. Even Senator J.D. Vance is out to lunch on this.

I don't know. And he keeps changing the reason why he's out. Now he says that's too far away. It's not of immediate concern for us, Ukraine. Israel is, we're much better friends. OK, so because the Middle East, in his view, is closer and means more than Eastern Europe.

So just give up Eastern Europe. Steve Mosher joins us now. President of the Research Institute, best selling author of his latest book is now out, The Devil and the Communist China, From Mao to Pertushi. Steve, welcome.

Good to be back with you, Brian. We warned China, don't provide armaments to Russia. Last week they said they did. They are. I mean, it's been revealed to the press that our intelligence says they're backing up Russia.

Your thoughts? Yeah, of course they are. I mean, look, China has been backing up Russia from the very beginning. They backed up Russia before the Ukrainian invasion by signing a half dozen trade and economic exchange agreements. They're building pipelines from Russia to China so that China can buy Russian natural gas and petroleum products. They've been sending spare parts for Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers and the rest from the very beginning.

And there's some evidence that even early on that they were sending munitions. And by the way, North Korea, which is a proxy, a puppet state of China, has been sending massive amounts of weapons from the very get-go on Beijing's orders, clearly. So you've got a kind of Eurasian superpower now coalescing China and Russia together. And we don't want that to happen. And one of the ways to stop that from happening is to stop Russian aggression and Chinese aggression for that matter against Taiwan and Iranian aggression against Israel. A lot of this is stoked by China itself. You understand, China is lighting fires around the world to deliberately disperse our forces and deplete our munitions.

And guess what? It's working. We're running out of bullets. Yeah, I mean, we've got to have a major commitment to a mass and military military base. And we're just not doing it.

I don't understand it. It would be a for-profit industry. I mean, Lithuania, Poland, Taiwan, they will pay for our stuff. So why don't we make more of our stuff? And that'll work as a deterrent to China. We have not made moves in that way. Does that surprise you?

Well, it does. And it also surprises me that only of late have we worried about some of the component parts on our weapons system coming from China. How can you be sourcing component parts from your principal adversary in the world, knowing in the event of a conflict that you won't have access to those parts? And maybe, who knows, they might contain, the chips might contain backdoors that allow remote access and on-off switches. So there are lots of vulnerabilities here about not having a robust defense industrial base, at least one that depends, if it depends on anything, it has to depend on allies like Japan to work together with, not source goods and parts in China itself, which wants to replace us as the dominant power in the world and is working across all domains to achieve that end.

Right. So put it in perspective, why do they want that? Why wouldn't they just compete, move up in the world, give their people a degree of freedom while staying communists where they were heading 10 years ago?

Why does this work better for them or does it? Well, a couple of reasons here. One is that Xi Jinping is modeling himself on the first Red Emperor, Mao Zedong. And like Mao, he is a committed socialist. He's taking China once more down the socialist road to ruin. He's crushing the private sector of the economy. He's expanding the public sector of the economy. That never ends well economically, but it does increase his power. And as a megalomaniac, that's what he wants.

He's getting older. And like Mao, he's becoming, I think, a little more paranoid in his old age. He's now demolished all the other factions within the Chinese Communist Party and reigns alone at the top of the power pyramid.

So there's really no one to check or block him within China. Our systems are fundamentally incompatible. I mean, you've written books about the American founding, brilliant books.

And we had a wonderful group of people, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, brilliant men, who struck the most remarkable documents off the mind of men that have perhaps ever been struck, the Declaration of Independence and so forth. And in China, the polar opposite has occurred. The Chinese Communist Party is based on a philosophy of not love, but hate. Mao himself said that.

Mao said communism is not love. Communism is a hammer we use to crush the enemy. And they're still crushing the enemy in China. They're crushing the Uyghurs, the Christians, Catholics, the Tibetan Buddhists, you name it. And of course, they'd like to crush their enemies abroad. They believe at the end of the day, that only one of our countries will be left standing.

And they intend for China to be the dominant power in the world. We have to wake up to this reality. And a lot of people are still not there. Well, a lot of people in this administration are not there. They think they can deal with them.

They're all proud. They have opened up a dialogue like they have a year ago. But I think in some degree, China would rather have Joe Biden win than Donald Trump win. And they're probably going to make sure that they don't do anything to cause that. Or am I thinking too much?

Well, you made me laugh there. Of course, they want Joe Biden to win. Of course, they want feckless, helpless, hopeless, hapless Joe Biden in the White House who wakes up every morning not knowing what day it is.

My goodness, there's no question about who China would prefer. And so I think we're looking here at a period of vulnerability between now and next January. We're looking here, I think, from the Chinese point of view, Chinese Communist Party's point of view, at an opportunity over the next six months to strike in the South China Sea, to strike against Taiwan, to take other aggressive action overseas. Because that window, in their view, may close on January of next year, depending on the outcome of the election.

And you're right. I mean, we've still got toothless Janet Yellen, just spent five days in Beijing talking about telling the Chinese that they had to stop overproducing. And once again, I just had to chuckle because the whole Chinese approach to trade is mercantilistic. It's based on overproducing.

It's based on beggaring thy neighbor. It's based on producing so many goods at below market prices that you drive your competitors out of business. And then you can raise prices because you've got a monopoly. That's what China's go-to plan has been on trade from the very get-go, manipulating its currency, flooding the market with cheap goods. And it's worked. And we've never done anything in response.

Well, we did in 2018. Trump put tariffs on some Chinese goods. And to my great surprise, Biden has left those tariffs in place, but he hasn't increased them. And China has learned to work around that. So you can't go and jawbone China into compliance.

Anything you suggest has to have real teeth. And I don't see the Biden administration biting China anytime soon. But Steve, I did hear there's pushback to when things get bad, they dump all their products into markets like ours in Europe. And Europe and the US seem to be unified and saying you're not going to do it this time.

Yeah. Well, we'll see how that works out. We know that China's economy is in the tank. We know that the youth unemployment rate, the official youth unemployment rate is 16%. A few months ago it was 21%, but they redefined what unemployment was. Unemployment is no longer being at home without a job in China.

Anyway, so 16%. The real youth unemployment rate is about 40%, maybe closer to 50%. So the economy is going downhill. The domestic sector of the economy is literally bankrupt. The big property development companies have gone under. There are 65 million apartments that now stand empty because people can't afford to buy them. There aren't enough people actually in China to buy them because of the one child policy killing off half of the last two generations.

So tremendously overbuilt. The export sector of the economy is being forced back a step by the general economic downturn in the world at large. So China faces all kinds of headwinds. It faces demographic headwinds, a dying population. It faces economic headwinds. And quite frankly, it's going once more down the socialist road to ruin, thanks to Xi Jinping.

And that's kind of a trifecta of disasters. So do you think that if there wasn't a President Xi, that there'll be somebody else? Do you think he's a type of personality that's brought China the opposite direction we thought they were heading?

Or are they heading there and he just happens to be the leader? Yeah, I think the system, the Chinese Communist Party at Politburo is a boiling cauldron of factional warfare, obscure to the West, but vicious when you're inside it. And Xi Jinping is the kind of person who naturally emerges at the top of that factional warfare. And so I think this system produces Xi Jinping's and Mao Zedong's the same way that, you know, McDonald's produces hamburgers.

This is normally what you get. And the only reason we got a reformist like Deng Xiaoping, and remember, he was an economic reformist. He wasn't a political reformist. He wanted the Chinese Communist Party to stay in absolute control. But he realized that China, by the time that Mao had died, was in absolute dire straits that, you know, 50 million people had died in the Mao famine after the Great Leap Forward.

The Cultural Revolution had been a disaster. He had to do something. And he turned to America and said, help. And we did help. We opened our markets to Chinese goods. We invested billions and billions of dollars in China's startup factories. And we also sent over technology, cutting edge technology, on the assumption that China was going to go our way, that if we stretched out a helping hand that China would reciprocate, that political change would follow.

And it hasn't. China remains a brutal one-party dictatorship. It's really the world's first high-tech digital dictatorship where the state is watching everybody.

Steve, do you have an exit question? By the way, Sergeant Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, best-selling author, his newest book, The Devil in the Communist China, from Mao to President Xi. So, Steve, overall, do you believe that China needs to take Taiwan almost for their industrial base or they just want them out there? They want a communist Taiwan so no people realize that there is a better way than their way. I mean, they see right off their coast this threat, this democracy that's so productive that it gives people a quality of life that just doesn't exist in Red China. Is that the problem, the example it does, or do they need the economic engine? Oh, that's not an either-or question.

That's a both-and question. China would like to capture TSMC, the largest chip manufacturer in the world. Taiwan manufactures 97 percent of the world's chips.

China would like that manufacturing capability. But you also said, quite correctly, Taiwan is a beacon of freedom. There you've got 24 million Chinese who have successfully put in place a democracy where human rights are respected, where you have freedom of speech, assembly, association, all the other.

You have successful transitions of power, six presidential elections, passing the ultimate test of a democracy, the peaceful transition of power from one party to another. So, yeah, they'd like to kill that beacon of freedom, lest the virus of democracy spread to China itself. And Xi Jinping would like to fight the last battle of the Chinese Civil War. Chinese Civil War, yeah. Chiang Kai-shek is long gone, but his people are still running Taiwan. And it's now more than ever. It's not clear if Japan would defend them.

It's not clear if we're going to defend them. It depends on what day it is. It's ambiguity. Steve Mosher, congratulations on the book. Pick it up to get a perspective on what China really wants and what they're up to. The devil and communist China. Thanks, Steve. Thank you, Brian.