“Warfare is daily. It never ends. There’s no beginning and end like there is here in the West.”
In this two-part episode, I sit down with retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding, author of the new book, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination.
Gen. Spalding is an expert in the Chinese regime’s strategy of unrestricted warfare—in which any and all tools are allowed, from flooding our streets with fentanyl to stealing intellectual property to exploiting a global pandemic.
The goal? To dominate the world without firing a single shot.
What explains the Chinese regime’s draconian lockdowns? Is it really about achieving “zero COVID”?
How is the Chinese regime systematically destroying the economies of free societies?
And what does the Chinese Communist Party see as the greatest threat to its rule?
Watch PART 2: Behind China’s Lockdown Madness
Jan Jekielek: General Robert Spalding, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
General Robert Spalding: Great to be back. Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, you have written a new book. You actually took a very, very important piece of what you describe as military doctrine, of Chinese Communist Party military doctrine, and made it accessible to Western readers. And your book is War Without Rules. And it’s really about, the book, Unrestricted Warfare, which was written 20 years ago. And you call it the manual that the CCP has used to achieve dominance in many areas. What is unrestricted warfare?
Gen. Spalding: Well, first of all, when I read it the second time, first time I read it in 1999, when it came out and it was kind of esoteric, a little bit complicated, really sounding crazy, but I really didn’t get it in 1999. And so when I came back to the Pentagon, working for the chairman, as his advisor on China, I started to get back into documents like Unrestricted Warfare, and I read it again. And when you read it in the context of 2014, when I go back to the Pentagon, and not in 1999, when you have the benefit of all those, almost 20 years of history that has allowed some of the ideas to actually come to fruition, it’s a completely different thing.
And so Unrestricted Warfare is really essentially what they were putting forth was a set of principles for a doctrine for warfare that was fundamentally unlike anything that the West has. And so I wanted to basically take Unrestricted Warfare and make it so that people could read it, and then to be able to anticipate how China might react. And so when you’re thinking, there’s a situation here, how China might react, understanding their doctrine is incredibly powerful.
Mr. Jekielek: And so you use the way the Chinese Communist Party weaponized the pandemic as a way to explain, how one of these unrestricted warfare strategies could work. So why don’t you lay that out for me?
Gen. Spalding: Well, I didn’t know this in January of 2020, when the pandemic essentially erupted, it came to me through somebody else that had really looked at this quite deeply, a year later. I did not know that Xi Jinping had gone to Imperial College of London in 2015. I did not know that the Chinese Communist Party was paying tens of millions of dollars to the Imperial College of London. But what I did know, in the spring of 2020, was that the numbers coming out of their epidemiology models were nowhere near what we were seeing in Italy, and Italy was bad. And if you remember that model said, “Over two million Americans would die.”
And I remember looking at the numbers and looking at the model, I’m like, “This doesn’t make any sense.” And essentially when you put that fact together with the fact that we had these videos coming out of Wuhan of people collapsing, and you started seeing that be picked up by the media and social media and kind of regurgitated, what you had was the creation of this massive fear empire.
It was all designed to create enormous fear within populations all around the globe. Now, the first step of gaining control of any population is to create some kind of fear. You’re willing to give up your freedoms, because you seek safety. And so in Unrestricted Warfare, they talk about this idea of how do you create fear? And how do you take advantage of fear? The speed with which the internet has become so central to our lives, not just in terms of the good, but then also able to be used to undermine the social cohesion, the political independence, a sovereignty of a nation. I mean, airplanes can be used for good, and they can be used for bad. The internet, within less than 20 years, was turned to the dark side, in a way that, I think, far surpasses any other weapon system that’s ever been deployed in warfare.
Mr. Jekielek: All right, are you suggesting that the CCP went and told the Imperial College of London or told these media? Or is it more of a subtle kind of relationship?
Gen. Spalding: You have to understand what the Chinese Communist Party was doing. They were obfuscating. So scientists need data, the Chinese were obfuscating the data. Well, if you don’t have data and you don’t want to be wrong to the low side of casualties, because you want to be prepared for the worst. So plan for the worst, hope for the best, that’s what you’re thinking as an epidemiologist. And I know a lot of people that were talking to people in China, okay? And people in the one house we’re calling people in China. And what were their colleagues in China telling them? “This is bad. This is really, really bad.”
So within China, the message was, “This is really, really bad.” But there’s no data, no data forthcoming. Okay, well, what are you going to do? You’re going to basically spike those numbers so that you make sure you don’t underestimate it. Models always depend on the assumptions. So did the Chinese, essentially, get Neil Ferguson to spike the numbers, because they were paying him money? That’s what we, logically, want to come to in the West. I want the smoking gun, show me how somebody is getting paid to do something bad. That’s not the way the Chinese Communist Party works. To this day, there’s no data forthcoming out of China.
But to the extent that we made decisions with regard to PCR tests, how many cycles do you use to call a PCR test valid? Where does that come from? China. Where did any of the sequenced DNA come from for any of the vaccines? It came from China. Where did any of the recommendations come for things like lockdowns? Or what policies should you adopt to slow or stop the spread of the virus? China. What is one of the beautiful pieces of information that the press would always hold up about why we should look to China as how you deal with the coronavirus? Well, they only had 4,600 people die. They stopped counting numbers in April of 2020. And up to that point, they’d only counted 4600 deaths, in a population of one point four billion.
So when it all comes around to it, one of the things that you learn in US/China relations, it’s one of the things that I was taught as a military diplomat, the Chinese Communist Party will never come out and say anything, if there’s a crisis. They’re going to seclude themselves. And what that allows them to do is watch. Watch the situation, see how it develops. And what they’re very good at is figuring out a way to take advantage of how this thing is developing. And so I think that’s the way you have to think about the problem. You can’t think of it like you’re going to find a smoking gun where Xi Jinping told so and so to pay somebody to do something. That’s not the way it works.
Mr. Jekielek: To your point, there’s an incredible amount of credulity that all sorts of organizations, probably, Imperial College, definitely, the WHO, basically offered the Chinese Communist Party, despite incredible amounts of evidence to suggest you should not offer such credulity, right?
Gen. Spalding: Well, yeah, and then think of Tedros, right? Holy smokes, we’ve got this pandemic, and it’s spreading globally. And the Chinese Communist Party instituted these policies, and boom, we’ve shut it down. You guys are… Because I guarantee you his phone’s ringing off the hook, “What do we do about this thing? It’s spreading everywhere. How do we stop it?” “The Chinese have a solution. Thank God. They gave me a solution.” So unfortunately, if you’re investing in China, talk to big investors, they never believe the GDP numbers that come out of China. They look to things like how many lights are turned on in the country? Or different things, where you can collect information to try to extrapolate from that what the actual GDP is.
But you can’t trust the numbers, because the Chinese Communist Party lies about everything. But here is the most kind of consequential thing to happen to Western civilization since the Cold War, and yet, because of the fear and because of the worry that we had engendered in our own populations, we need to give them an answer. And the Chinese magically had an answer that we could adopt.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, and because of the influence that the CCP over these years has created in all of these organizations, right?
Gen. Spalding: It’s not just what the Chinese have been able to accomplish, it’s what we’ve given them. We’ve given them entree into nearly every institution. And we did it with the belief that they would embrace our principles and values, human rights, civil liberties, rule of law, human dignity. Those things that we hold dear, we expected if we brought them in, they would embrace those. And so it’s not just that they were able to do it. They didn’t do it of their own volition. They were basically brought in.
And this is a brilliance that the two PLA Colonel really brought forth in Unrestricted Warfare, is the Americans are bringing us in. We’re the bad guys. We know we’re the bad guys, because we know they’re our enemy. But wouldn’t you know it, they’re going to bring us right into the house. They’re going to give us run of the place, and what could we do with that?
Mr. Jekielek: And I guess the answer is according to Unrestricted Warfare, whatever we can. And so there’s also other elements here, for example, this idea that Xi Jinping, at the time, when the pandemic was launching, prevented internal flights from spreading the virus internally in China, but the Chinese media would scream racism at any suggestion that there would be any kind of stoppage of flights around the world. So this is this combination part of the doctrine, where there’s this fear, but there’s a lot more than just the fear that was affected.
Gen. Spalding: And I think there again, you would get China apologist to say that, “Well, those people needed to return to their home countries.” In terms of the Chinese nationals that were leaving the borders, that’s really hard to explain. If you’re the Chinese Communist Party, if you’re saying, domestically, you’re not going to allow Chinese nationals to fly in country, but you are going to allow them to fly internationally. Not only are you going to allow them to fly, if a country says, “Don’t fly to our nation,” you’re going to say that they’re essentially being racist.
You’ve really got to think hard about that. What’s the motivation behind that? And here again, the Chinese Communist Party, they have a system that really is perfectly made for these situations, because we’ll never know. It is the most secretive organization in the history of the world, and they fight very hard for that secrecy.
And so when you have a situation where you have to intuit what another side has in terms of motivations, you’re left kind of grasping at straws. For me, Unrestricted Warfare was that thing that I could like put form to the substance. I could begin to anticipate how the Chinese would react, because it showed how everything that you saw in the world, you would want to see, how can I use it to my advantage? And so Unrestricted Warfare, it makes perfect sense that you would shut down domestic travel and allow international travel.
Why? Because you want to take advantage of… You don’t want to suffer the pandemic on your own. I mean, that’s what we would expect. We would expect, no, if it happened in America, let’s keep it here. Let’s don’t let it break out internationally. Well, now you’re not thinking like the Chinese Communist Party, where warfare is day daily, it never ends. There’s no beginning and end like there is here in the West, it is continuous. And why would we suffer the pandemic by ourselves? That doesn’t make any sense.
Everybody needs to suffer the pandemic, because if we all suffer the pandemic, then we’ll be able to take advantage of that fact. What do we have? We own the supply chain. What are they going to need? PPE and masks and everything else. So how do we take advantage of that? I mean, this is the way the Chinese Communist Party thinks. And unfortunately when you’re in these cocktail parties, where the elites from China intermingle with the elites from America, and they talk about this shared order, this shared destiny for humanity. She talks about this all the time. You’re rolled into this false sense of, “Hey, you have a shared vision for how humans should treat other humans.” And the Chinese Communist Party just is not that type of organization.
And so if you don’t have that understanding, and again, this is where War Without Rules comes in, it allows you to begin to think differently. And for us, and I think it’s for any society, you tend to be biased by your context, you tend to be biased by the culture that you were raised in, by the environment you grew up in. We think a certain way. And if you’re not open to embracing how others may think, and Sun Tzu says this brilliantly, “Know thy self, know the enemy.” If you don’t know thy self and know thy enemy, then how can you ever hope to successful?
And so it’s brilliant, but when I look at the way we think about warfare, and then I compare that to the way the Chinese Communist Party thinks about warfare, I don’t think that we’re being very introspective. And I don’t think that we’re knowing thy self and knowing thy enemy. And that’s what that’s what Unrestricted Warfare is about.
Mr. Jekielek: The two colonels make it really clear in 1999 that the US is the enemy of China. Now, why is the US the focus of the Chinese military at that time already?
Gen. Spalding: China is a Marxist/Leninist system. So the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist/Leninist organization. The Chinese Communist Party studied the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin’s worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. And in particular, in 1989, during Tiananmen Square, they recognized that what had happened to the Soviet Union, the dismantling of the Soviet Union was going to happen in China. And the reason it was happening in China is because America was trying to [inaudible 00:17:56] a color revolution in China. The students in Tiananmen Square. It wasn’t just about the students, it was about the United States, basically convincing the students, louring them with this dream of freedom. The goddess of democracy that they had in Tiananmen Square was one visual example of that.
So when you read in Tiananmen papers where the Chinese Communist Party basically realizes this ideology that’s kind of baked into the constitution, it’s called the pocket constitution, because it’s a very basic document. And one of the things that says is you have rights given to you by God. They’re not manmade rights or man given rights, they’re given to you by God. And that the government ought to be subservient to the people, not the other way around. Now, that’s a very powerful set of ideas. And it led to, after the American Revolution, a change in the world, fundamentally.
That thing can be so invasive, that mind virus of freedom can be so invasive and can lead to the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party is what they believed in 1989, that it becomes something that has to be suppressed. In the beginning, we’re going to have to keep our distance from it, so China kept their distance. And then eventually it needed the providence of America, the technology, the talent, the capital, the innovation, and it had to embrace it.
But what they found out during the Tiananmen massacre is that it would come with all of these ideas that they had to filter out. And so they basically built a very sophisticated filter for keeping that out. And what these two PLA colonels were looking at, and they were seeing this play out and they were saying, “Hey, we can do this. We can filter out those ideas, that mind virus. But we can still get the innovation technology, talent and capital, because the Americans believe that they can embrace us and have us change.”
Mr. Jekielek: And so that itself was the unrestricted warfare doctrine in play. Basically, using the false assumptions of the enemy against them, I suppose. So that makes me think, you describe the relationship up of the CCP to the US as a parasitic one, explain that.
Gen. Spalding: And by the way, I don’t ascribe everything to the brilliance of the Chinese Communist Party. I also ascribe a lot of it to our own kind of lazy thinking or not following the logic. When we come out of World War II, we are the most powerful industrial power in the world. And we use that industrial power to rebuild Western Europe, Japan, Korea. We have the Marshall Plan. We use that economic power to really help build the international order around this concept of democracy. And then eventually we use that to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Well, coming out of the Cold War, we’re like, “Hey, the competition, the war has been decided, we win. There’s nobody left to challenge us. We’ll take off our coat of arms and we’ll go out, and we’ll try to keep the peace and grow the peace.” And there was no understanding that there could be other ideas and other systems. And that’s really where I think, when you look at China and their ability to take advantage of our system, we also have to look at our own selves and say, “We didn’t see China for what it was.”
And China, the signs were there. In many ways, probably one of the biggest challenges we had is that, when we were looking at China, particularly when Nixon went to China in ’72 and Kissinger was his chief China advisor. Kissinger was not an Asian scholar, he was a European scholar. So Kissinger was using kind of his concepts of Europe in trying to place those on China. And it’s an alien way of thinking. If you think like a Chinese Communist Party member, part of it has to do with Marxist/Leninism, but part of it also has to do with the cultural and history of that region and how they think.
And it’s very much wrapped up in this idea of war is risky. And if you start a war, you could lose a war. And when you lose a war, you could possibly lose everything. And so this idea of understanding that war is very risky, and that should only be used as a last result, but be forewarned that if you do that, you could end up losing your head, your kingdom, everything. And so throughout, if you listen, or if you read ancient Chinese literature, if you look at Sun Tzu and if you think about Mao, who was himself a scholar of ancient Chinese literature, and that tradition of how do we get what we want without creating the risks that we lose everything, then you start to understand the allure of this way of thinking.
And because it is that way, and we think of there’s peace time, there’s war time. We have a disagreement, meaning, my state has a disagreement with your state, good example is Kosovo. We, the United States, President Clinton believe that you, Serbia, should stop killing Kosovars, committing genocide. We believe that Serbia should give up Milosevic to be tried for war crimes. Well, the Serbians think differently, they’re not going to give up easily. So how do you get them to capitulate? Well, it turned out you start taking away assets of the elites in Serbia. And pretty soon they capitulate.
So when we have this disagreement, we put pressure on the political system. This is the fundamental premise behind war. And that’s why I said, Clausewitz said, “War is politics by other means.” But in Mao’s perspective, there are so many other ways that I can put pressure on that elite system. And it doesn’t even have to be negative pressure, it can be positive pressure. Like if we have a relationship where if I do something you are enriched by it, then when I need you to do something for me, what are you likely to do? You’re likely to reciprocate. Particularly, Americans, we want to reciprocate.
Well, if I create a system where you are tied to me financially and economically, and that your wealth is tied to our relationship, then just like I was using B-2s in Kosovo to take out the assets of the elites, I can use these economic relationships to motivate you just as easily. And so I think having that ability to use other tools, nonviolent tools, tools that will not involve any bloodshed, but yet still have the same outcomes, is what’s baked into unrestricted warfare.
Mr. Jekielek: And so what are some examples where this has manifest as this kind of parasitic relationship as you describe?
Gen. Spalding: Well, for example, let’s see, I know, and I’ve talked to people that had factories here in the United States that were picked up brick by brick and moved to China. Over time that has a net effect of sapping the nation of its productive capacity. So what does that look like today? One of the things that we’re very happy to talk about is the Fed. The Fed has created this enormous inflation in our country. But if we no longer have these ability to produce things, in other words, we no longer have control over the supply chain, and you have a constriction of that supply, that can also be a cause of inflation. In fact, we saw this during the ’70s with OPEC. We had a constriction in the supply of oil, and we had high gas prices. So we had stagflation, we had a stagnant economy and inflation, something that shouldn’t happen.
And one of the things that economists think about here or talk about is monetary theory, that it all has to do with the money supply. Well, it actually has to do, also, with the physical ability to purchase whatever product we’re talking about. And so if you can constrain the supply, because the United States no longer owns a supply chain, that can be a feature of inflation. And so that parasitic nature of China is on one part industrial, but because it’s industrial, the money that would’ve gone in to build the infrastructure that supported that industrial base, rather than being poured in America over the last 30 years was poured into China.
So cities, roads, fiber optic cables, all of the infrastructure that powers the machinery of China’s industrial base, that was money that wasn’t invested in the United States, it was invested in China. So our industrial base, our manufacturing, and then we just had this hypersonic system go around the world, drop off a weapon near the islands in the South China Sea to the amazement of all the scientists and engineers in America that worked in hypersonics. How could the Chinese do that? How could they possibly do that?
Well, because they we’re using our scientists and engineers to teach them how to make hypersonics. So it doesn’t matter where you’re at, whether you’re talking about capital, capital’s poured into China, our industrial based is poured into China, our knowhow poured into China. And so when all of that happens over the course of 30 years, and it’s not reinvested in that society, well, then you have this decline in prosperity. You have this decline in economic performance. You have this decline in your ability to actually provide for your own future.
So that is this drain, this parasitic drain that I’m talking about. It is literally the vitality of America. You look at us and compare us to the end of World war II, and then now you look at us 30 years after the end of the Cold War, and we are the opposite of what we were. We’re a shell of who we were, from an economic prosperity perspective. And guess what? Where the Soviet Union was a shell, now we are a shell and a China is this great gleaming city on a hill, where everybody goes to worship to their economic model.
Mr. Jekielek: But it’s not really that gleaming and shiny. I mean, you talk about this in the book as well. There was certainly massive growth and so forth, but it was, you argue, based on this unsustainable kind of parasitic model, right?
Gen. Spalding: Well, Dr. Seuss talks about it in Yertle the Turtle. Yertle was powerful because of all the turtles below him, and in the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist communist model is not a more efficient model. You take any state-owned enterprise and you compare it against a private enterprise in a free country, and the efficiency is probably 25% less in the state-owned enterprise. There’s corruption, there’s graft, it’s just not the way that you organize an economy. Any economist would tell you that. But 75% of the Chinese economy is state-owned enterprises, so how is it that they continue to grow?
Well, first of all, if you don’t have to invest in R&D, because you’re stealing it from your competitor, that’s one. If you can take the capital that would typically go into your competitor’s industrial base and infrastructure, if you take that and use it to build your own, through this parasitic effect, you make up for the fact and more that you’re less efficient. And you can basically show the rest of the world that you’ve got a better system. But it’s not a better system because it’s actually more efficient, or it makes better sense in terms of how people should organize themselves.
It’s better because everything that’s coming out of these free countries, it’s not just the US, it’s EU, everywhere else is going into your country. And so in a lot of ways, it’s a false perception. But it’s a perception just like a Ponzi scheme, where, “Hey, I’m doing well. Why don’t you invest? Okay, great.” And what happens is at the very end, who ends up losing? Not the people in the beginning, they did great. It’s a people at the end left holding the bag.
And so, ultimately, I think the problem is the same problem that you get with a parasite. In other words, the parasite ends up killing the host. But in the case of the Chinese Communist Party, that’s their goal anyway. They want to kill the host. And if at the end, you end up with a less efficient society, that’s not as well-organized or efficiently, or I guess, self-actualizing to the people of that nation, but you’re better than everybody else, you’ve won.
You don’t care. You don’t care, if you have a less effective model, you’ve won. You’re on top. And because you’ve won and because you’re on top two, the victor go the spoils, and that’s essentially what you’re talking about. Their system has been alluring to the entire world, in such a way that’s invited the elites of free societies to basically invest in it, everything, their innovation, technology, talent, and capital. And as a result, they’ve been slowly draining their own societies of vitality.
The other thing that happens here is you have the unraveling of social cohesion within those nations. You have the undermining of the faith and confidence of the institutions of those nations and of the international order. Because everything seem to be, well, the Chinese can do whatever they want, and everybody else has to kind of deal with it. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, that by the end of it, they’re on top, we’re on the bottom. It’s a worse world, but we didn’t see it coming, because, to the two colonel’s point, it was part of the day-to-day.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s this other element of, of course, the West, especially the US, has done and continues to do massive investment, especially these index funds, and some of these big funds, invest a lot of money and communist China, despite genocide, despite crimes against humanity, despite all these types of things. But once that money’s invested, it’s a very different situation than in the typical, let’s say, World Trade Organization system, where you can get that money back. And I’m just wondering if you could explain that.
Gen. Spalding: Well, so when I was in the White House, I went to the treasury, and I said, “Hey, why don’t we change the accounting rules so that anybody that’s got funds invested in China that can’t actually extract those funds, we basically classify those as level three assets?” Which means they’re worthless. You can have money in a bank, yeah, that’s a level one asset. You can turn around and you can use it. In China, if you have money in the bank… There’s even a company, I remember, I can’t remember the name of the company, but one day they had six billion in cash on hand, and then the next day they had none.
Mr. Jekielek: Six billion?
Gen. Spalding: Six billion in cash on hand, and the next day they had none. And so that couldn’t happen here the United States, but that does and can happen in China. And so that’s the accounting system. And so I said, “Why don’t we change that so that if you own stock in a Chinese company, you can’t actually count it as part of your wealth.” If we did that, now, it would be horrible for the people that had stocks in China, because now their net worth would drop precipitously. But it would be great in the fact that the Chinese Communist Party couldn’t hold that over their head anymore. They couldn’t say, “If you do X, I will make sure that you never get any of your money out.” And so it becomes a sort of Damocles, to use a quote from Unrestricted Warfare, over the head of anybody that’s invested in China.
“Do you want your money out? Okay, well, you better do what we say. And if you don’t do what we say, then we’re going to make sure that you don’t get your money out. But if you do what we say, we’re going to make sure that you can still get your money out, at some point.” And so when you go and you report this to the IRS or on your 10-Ks or 10-Qs it becomes, “Hey, I can report this, because it hasn’t been taken away from me in China. But can I actually get it out? No, I can’t.”
And so it becomes this thing where if you’re a corporate executive, or if you’re running a fund, that decoupling, that causes the fact that you can’t get that money out, you want that to happen to somebody else. You don’t want it happening on your watch. And because we think in such short term, if I can cash out before that happens, great, who’s going to be left holding the bag? Well, in addition to whoever’s the last kind of principle in that phone, it’s going to be the retirees, the American retirees that have to deal with it. But, ultimately, if you invest in China and there’s banks that have all kinds of real estate investments in China, you can’t get it out. There’s big corporations that have money there, they can’t get it out. It’s a non-convertible con currency with strict capital controls.
And by the way, if you read Unrestricted Warfare, one of their biggest evil villains is George Soros, right? George Soros.
Mr. Jekielek: Yeah.
Gen. Spalding: And why do they think George Soros is an evil villain? Well, because he’s a financial-
Mr. Jekielek: War monger, right?
Gen. Spalding: … war monger. He uses finance to destroy nations. That’s his goal is to destroy nations. And what the Chinese Communist Party learnt from that is, okay, how do I protect myself from these kinds of war mongers? Well, the way I do that is I don’t allow you to convert my currency. The People’s Bank of China is the only one that can convert. Now, here’s what happens. Technically, you should not be a part of the international financial system. You shouldn’t be a part of the IMF. You shouldn’t be a part of the World Bank. You don’t have a convertible currency. Why are you a part of it? Well, because it’s China. And time and again, you see these, these exclusions, or this is China. China gets a special pass. Everybody else you’ve got to play by the rules, but China gets a special pass.
Until Congress passed, you’re not going to continue to have your stocks listed on our stock exchange, unless you allow for the same type of audits that our corporations have. You’re going to be delisted. Until that, you didn’t hear a peep out of the Chinese, in terms of being willing to allow audits. Now, what are they saying? “We’re going to allow you to audit our books.” They’re finally starting to say that, but will they ever get over the point where they will actually allow you to audit their books? No, they’re not. They’ll say they will, but then it’ll never be forthcoming.
And you can never extract that from them. I mean, the brilliance of China is to give concessions by saying they’re going to give concessions, but not actually giving concessions. There’s a difference here. And they do this time and time and time… A good example of this is stop hacking into our systems, “Oh, okay. We’ll stop that.” But do they stop? No, they don’t stop.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, or the example that always comes to my mind. “Yes, we’ll stop taking organs from prisoners, prisoners of conscience. We’ll do it.” But they don’t stop.
Gen. Spalding: But they don’t stop. “We’ll stop sending fentanyl.” But they don’t stop.
Mr. Jekielek: You would think that we would’ve figured this out by now.
Gen. Spalding: Well, yeah, if you’re doing business with somebody and they rip you off the first time, do you go in for more? No, you don’t. But with China, we’re just, “I want more of that. Can I get some more of that, please?”
Mr. Jekielek: Why?
Gen. Spalding: What I’ve seen in the almost 10 years of working on this is, its greed, mostly greed. I mean, I’ve had people come up to either myself or people that work with me, and say, “I don’t really care long as I get my money.” And that’s the beauty of China’s system. If they can get you to have no other values or morality, except what it means to you in terms of money, they’ve got you. They’ve got you exactly where they want you. And you may have the best impression of yourself as a human being. But, ultimately, if you have that type of relationship with China, then you have to look yourself in the mirror, and say, “I’ve embraced what is the most heinous things that humans can do to other humans.” Because you’re in service, you’re in service to the party.
Part 2 preview
Mr. Jekielek: Coming up in part two.
Gen. Spalding: The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t do things willy nilly, it’s very deliberate.
Mr. Jekielek: Behind China’s draconian lockdowns, what’s really going on? Is it potentially related to Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan?
Gen. Spalding: They’re going to go element by element through their economy and see which of those is still open to attack from the West. To seal those up prior to invading Taiwan.
Mr. Jekielek: In part two, General Robert Spalding breaks down how the US can effectively counter the Chinese communist threat to the free world.
Gen. Spalding: When we brought China into this international order, we began to suppress the principles and values that made us free here in America.
