Military expert warns China is waging low-level war on America

Editor’s Note: This piece by Bill Gertz is based on CSP Senior Fellow Grant Newsham’s new book, When China Attacks.

The United States urgently needs to counter an ongoing, undeclared political war being waged by China, according to a new book by a retired Marine colonel and China expert.

“America and Americans need to realize that they are, in fact, already at war with China. It may not be ‘war’ by American standards, but to the People’s Republic of China it certainly is,” retired Col. Grant Newsham said.

Col. Newsham, who was also a former Foreign Service officer in Asia, told The Washington Times in an interview that U.S. elites need to understand that they are at risk of losing the conflict to Communist China.

“If the United States — or better said, Wall Street and our business class — don’t stop funding the Chinese economy, and by extension the People’s Liberation Army, we really can’t expect to prevail,” he said.

The United States must counter the threat posed by China using similar methods to those employed by Beijing — aggressively defending the U.S. democratic system and exploiting vulnerabilities in the ruling Chinese Communist Party through a coordinated political warfare campaign.

“If we do not respond intelligently, before we realize it, we will become the United States with Chinese characteristics,” Col. Newsham writes in the book “When China Attacks.”

Col. Newsham is a former intelligence officer who spent 40 years in the military and government. He argues that the ruling Chinese Communist Party does not distinguish between peacetime and wartime. Instead, China’s leaders and government see themselves as engaged in a constant state of conflict with enemies, with the United States as the main adversary.

The goal of Chinese President Xi Jinping is to replace the United States as the world’s sole superpower, and a key to that goal is building up China’s military strength. The People’s Liberation Army has been rapidly expanding both conventional and nuclear forces in preparation for a future confrontation with the United States.

The PLA, once a large ground force with obsolete weapons, has been retooled for modern warfare as China has grown wealthier and its technology sector has advanced.

Col. Newsham writes that the PLA is working toward creating military forces capable of defeating the U.S. military and protecting China’s global assets — ports, factories and farmland abroad.

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