China’s ‘Three Warfares’ Strategy and Panda Diplomacy Explained: Piero Tozzi

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, we dive into China’s influence and the communist regime’s propaganda efforts worldwide. Joining us is Piero Tozzi, a longtime China expert and staff director of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

What are some key misconceptions we have about China and the Chinese regime? And are we finally seeing a real “pivot to Asia” as the Trump administration signals a dramatic reduction in U.S. military presence in Europe and demands that NATO allies pitch in more for Europe’s defense?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Piero Tozzi, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Piero Tozzi:
Very good to be here, Jan. Thank you for inviting me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Vice President J.D. Vance recently at the Munich Security Conference gave a speech. Some people hailed it. Others find it incredibly controversial and criticize it. A lot of focus on free speech, but that wasn’t the only focus. And how do you read it?

Mr. Tozzi:
Germane to our conversation today, I think we’re seeing a pivot to Asia. That’s something that’s been talked about for some time. President Obama spoke about it as well. And with this administration, we’re seeing a realization, a reprioritization of where America needs to put its assets. that the People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping, is not simply a strategic rival. We’re not simply competing with them on economics, even militarily, but rather they’re what I would call a systemic rival. In other words, they seek to be hegemon.

And as part of that, they seek to undo the entire rules-based international order and supplant it with one of their own devising, which I think accounts for their not just military aggressiveness, but also you see this effort to set standards. It’s the hegemon that sets the standards, whether it’s in technology, whether it’s seeking to undermine the dollar as the reserve
currency.

And that’s you see that, I think, with BRICS and issues like the petro-yen. But you also see it in the area of human rights. You see the CCP, the PRC, putting forward this notion of a shared common destiny for mankind, a changing of rights as we think of it as principally about protecting individuals, individual freedoms, and transforming into collective rights, a right to development.

And if you look at the Universal Periodic Review of China last year, January of 2024, we had a number of countries that lined up to praise China as a rights leader, whereas the U.S. and like-minded countries, including our East Asian allies like Japan. South Korea was pretty vocal too, criticizing China’s human rights record. So I think there’s an attempt to, as the PRC seeks hegemony as the CCP, and I think here it’s important to make that distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese nation, the Chinese people.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want you to comment on where systems that have adopted the idea of collective rights as guidance, where have they taken us?

Mr. Tozzi:
You saw that with the Soviet Union. It’s inherent in communism, the. And it’s based really on the notion of the individual creating the image and likeness of God. That’s really where it begins. So it is this Judeo-Christian notion.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is this inherent value to each individual.

Mr. Tozzi:
To each individual life. We can maybe talk a little bit more about this notion that rights are alien to the Chinese tradition, which was something that was a Communist Party talking point that you’re probably familiar with in Document No. 9, the 2013 document that circulated internally among Chinese Communist Party leadership. It’s coterminous with the rise of Xi Jinping to power, which attacked the notion of universality of rights as something that’s alien to the Chinese tradition. It is not.

And it also attacked, for example, the notion of constitutional government, separation of power, direct election and democracy, saying that this is alien. It’s contrary to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, but it’s not contrary to the Chinese tradition. It’s framed a little bit differently, but that has very deep roots. Mencius talks about the interest of the people being paramount. Second come the grains and altars, the functions of the state, and lastly comes the emperor. You see in Confucian thought a notion of individual dignity and also a law above the law. It is this idea of heaven seeing with the eyes of the people and hearing with the ears of the people, which is a very ancient notion.

Mr. Jekielek:
Again, so many things we could jump off of here. This is a good moment to talk about how the Chinese Communist Party has been explaining America to the Chinese people under communism, in contrast to how it talks to the Americans.

Mr. Tozzi:
Right, well that’s I think something that’s always very interesting. What are they saying to their own people using Chinese language? And that’s I think one of the reasons why the study of Chinese is important, so that we can understand what is being said in the Chinese media, what messages are being delivered. There’s the Middle East Media Research Institute and their media, MEMRI. We really need something along those lines for understanding what is being said about America.

One very important figure, I think, in formulating the strategy at the highest levels is a fellow named Wang Huning, who had studied in the United States and had a very negative opinion of the United States and Wrote a book that was Actually translated into English, America against America. It was interesting about him too, he’s been a survivor. He’s had the ear of Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi Jinping, so the last three general secretaries of the Communist Party. I don’t like to call them president.

That’s a mistranslation. You know, the Chinese word is not zong tong, which we would talk about President Lai Ching-de of Taiwan, a democratically elected leader. The Chinese Communist Party is Marxist-Leninist. Maoist and Xi Jinping thought has had a tremendous influence. But in some ways, it’s also Chinese legalist. We had two competing philosophies in ancient China. Legalism, which was proto-totalitarianism, and it’s this concept of rule by law as opposed to rule of law, and we can talk about that with Xi Jinping as well. Then the contrast is Confucianism, which is proto-democratic as a concept, somewhat akin to human rights and having human dignity inherent in it. This ideology is also manifest in the Chinese state.

In some ways, it’s a legalist regime onto which you’ve glommed onto it, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Xiism. Wang Kuning, in some ways, is a nationalist. He’s in some ways a legalist. He’s someone very highly placed who does make criticisms of Marxism, but from within the Chinese tradition. What’s interesting is that Confucianism gives legitimacy to the state. So there’s always been an effort by the Chinese state to co-opt Confucianism. You see that in the labeling of Confucius Institutes.

There’s a TV show there, When Marx Met Confucius. But the Confucian tradition is actually very antithetical to this totalitarian rule to tyranny. It’s legalism, and sometimes people conflate the two. Chinese legalism extols the state. When Xi Jinping came to power back in 2013, they saw him as someone committed to rule of law. The word in Chinese, fa zhi, can be translated as rule of law or rule by law.

What has become apparent is that Xi Jinping uses anti-corruption law to purge rivals. It’s not a consistent standard. You look at his own family, there’s a lot of corruption there, and that runs throughout the leadership of the CCP. That is probably one of the reasons why they are afraid that this report that’s supposed to be made and that they are lobbying against. There is a statute that was passed that said the director of national intelligence should issue both a confidential report and also a public-facing one that discusses the wealth of senior Chinese Communist Party officials. That has been delayed.

I would hope that the Trump administration releases it, because I think that will also impact public opinion in China. So, you know, that also goes two ways, too. And what we want to see, I think, is that free flow of information. To go back to a point you made at the beginning about J.D. Vance’s speech, that idea of free speech as being important, that I think is really important in the China sphere. So evading the great firewall of China, and making information available to the Chinese people is very important.

Mr. Jekielek:
How does the Chinese regime teach the Chinese people about America and its role in the world vs. how it communicates to Americans or to the American leadership?

Mr. Tozzi:
That’s a very interesting question. You know, post-Tiananmen, when the Chinese people as an expression of popular will demanded democracy, demanded freedom, the CCP did a couple of things. One was that they made this grand bargain with the Chinese people to say that, you know, as we develop economically, you know, you’ll be enriched and just don’t challenge our rule, that of the CCP. And that was sort of the promise, you know, during the so-called reform era when it attracted a lot of direct foreign investment.

They also suppressed any discussion of Tiananmen, which is why it goes to that issue of the Great Firewall and things that you can’t Google these ideas in China. We see that with artificial intelligence. There are certain subjects that are verboten, they’re forbidden. But the other thing that they did is they really cultivated this sense of nationalistic grievance against the United States, but also against other countries.

We’ve seen Japan vilified and demonized. And we’ve seen a series of really horrific knife attacks against Japanese citizens in China, including a little child there who was attacked. But we’ve seen it also, knife attacks against Americans. There was an Israeli diplomat, I think, who was also attacked as well. Where does that come from?

Under the guise of patriotic education, but really fanning nationalistic anti-Americanism, it’s this whole series of grievances, that century of shame, the opium wars and the like. We do know that the PRC supplies fentanyl to the U.S. And that, I think, is by design by the CCP. Part of that, in their minds, is asymmetric warfare. Everything is a multi-front battlefield. But its justification is the opium war. Now, that was really Great Britain and not the United States, yet that all becomes conflated. So if Americans are dying from fentanyl overdoses, I think in the mind of the CCP, it’s deserved. And that is part of that extreme nationalism.

And I think what also carries over here, we see with even some of the Chinese students who come over here that they harbor these extreme nationalistic views, but who do they target? Oftentimes, they target other Chinese students that are studying in the United States and that are, you know, kind of breathe that freedom and want to speak freely and are developing their own thoughts.

So you see things like the Chinese Students and Scholars Association that works in conjunction with Chinese embassies, the embassy and consulates here that essentially suppress and oppress other Chinese students there, and also Tibetans and Uyghurs. I think if you want to sum up, you know, what is this nationalistic education and inculcation of this extreme nationalism about?

Ultimately, everything is about the Chinese Communist Party maintaining power. And to do that, they need to externalize an enemy, especially now as the economy is failing. We talked about, you know, part of that grand bargain post-Hinomen would be, you know, you would prosper and you would not challenge the Communist Party’s rule. The economy is failing under Xi Jinping. It’s sputtering. So what they, I think as an alternative there, you direct your animus away from the party towards external targets, and that would be the United States.

On the one hand, while they will present a friendly face to us and they’ll send us cute panda bears to the Washington National Zoo, they’re telling their people that America is the enemy. They’ve been doing that for decades, since 1949. What happens right after that? The Korean War. And America is the enemy. You did have a bit of the rapprochement in the Nixon era, but definitely post-Tiananmen, that idea of America as the enemy has been inculcated, too. Again, it’s that extreme nationalism.

Mr. Jekielek:
It can be very hard to imagine because basically since Tiananmen, you know, Americans have been hand over fist trying to get into China, do anything, transfer all the necessary IP, offer all the technology voluntarily, invest insane amounts into places where it didn’t look like a quick return was coming. How do you explain this?

Mr. Tozzi:
That goes to the whole mistake of engagement theory. And if you talk a little about the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, how did we come about? If you look at post-Tiananmen, we came about from a realization that the regime was brutal. China’s most favored nation status in terms of trade was up for annual review. They had to show that they were making improvements in human rights, and then it was reauthorized.

Now, Bill Clinton, when he was candidate Bill Clinton, rightfully criticized George H.W. Bush. After Tiananmen and the massacre there, George H.W. Bush sent Brent Scowcroft to Beijing to reassure them that everything will be alright. Clinton had that famous phrase, he’s coddling butchers from Beijing to Baghdad. But in 1994, Bill Clinton delinked that annual review process and human rights and basically gave them permanent normal trade relation status.

There were a number of voices that criticized that, including Chris Smith. He very presciently said that this is a mistake. We’re mistaking the nature of the regime. Nancy Pelosi was another critic at that time. Anyway, over the decade of the 1990s, you had this lead up towards the PRC’s accession to the World Trade Organization, which is, I think, in many ways how we really started to give up the store then.
The idea that you could take a regime that is mercantilist, it’s a communist command economy that’s able to devote resources to particular, not just industries, but particular companies. It’s able to subsidize low prices through the use of forced slave labor and also steals intellectual property to give it an upper hand. You can look at the Canadian company Nortel and its demise.

Mr. Jekielek:
That is how Huawei was constructed at the beginning.

Mr. Tozzi:
Correct. Yes, that was Huawei’s rise to power. It cannibalized another telecom company that was so eager to get into the China market. So that was a mistake that was made. As part of that WTO accession, the Congressional Executive Commission on China was created to monitor China’s human rights record. And ironically, part of it was to kind of map its progress towards a rule of law society, which again, kind of shows that heady optimism at the time, but also to maintain a political prisoner database and to keep Congress informed. What people thought would be progress is now very clearly a regression. The abuse of human rights is ongoing and systematic.

Mr. Jekielek:
Piero, all along through this, the Chinese regime was teaching the Chinese people over generations that America is the enemy and the cause of the Chinese people’s problems, not the CCP, right? Of the Chinese people’s problems, not the CCP, right? As you said, to externalize the enemy for all the terrible things the party had done, right? So my point is, again, like we just didn’t notice that somehow.

Mr. Tozzi:
Again, I think they present one face to the rest of the world. And that was especially true during the reform era, you know, when they wanted to attract foreign foreign direct investment. And so they present one face to the rest of the world, and then it’s a very different message to their own people. I think one thing we can be very grateful to Xi Jinping about is that the mask is off, whether it’s the wolf warrior diplomacy, whether it’s the aggression towards Taiwan, towards the Philippines, we call it the South China Sea, maybe we should start calling it the West Philippine Sea, that aggressiveness towards India on its border, I think the mask is off. Its intentions are much clearer for those that want to see.

We’re also seeing a withdrawal of Western companies and law firms that have realized that this was a bad bargain that was made. However, it’s still difficult to extricate yourself. If you’re a company like Microsoft or Apple, not only is a great deal of your production in China, but also that’s where your research and development is. We’ve outsourced so much to a country, again, that seeks to be the hegemon and also seeks to foster this spirit of grievance and hostility towards the United States, too.

Mr. Jekielek:
Are you telling me that you’re going to be submitting a recommendation to the White House for the renaming of another body of water?

Mr. Tozzi:
They don’t need my input to do that. But it’s funny, it’s not even called the South China Sea in Chinese. It’s Nanhai, the South Sea. Yet we do oftentimes adopt this terminology that favors them. We talked about calling Xi Jinping president when the word in Chinese is not president. We should give him his party title. We also adopt language like the South China Sea. In some ways, we’re doing their own propaganda for them, which raises an interesting role.

Mr. Jekielek:
A very prominent example in the other direction was the renaming of Wuhan virus to something else.

Mr. Tozzi:
Right. Traditionally, you would call it the Spanish flu. You would talk about the point of origin.

Mr. Jekielek:
But it works in both directions, right? Things that are beneficial and things that are harmful, that also seems to get renamed.

Mr. Tozzi:
There’s the Confucian concept of jianming, the rectification of names, and it’s a very important principle. You should call things by their accurate name, and that’s a very important starting point. Because if the premise is mistaken, the conclusion is going to be mistaken. So it’s very important to get those names accurate.

Mr. Jekielek:
And yet another reason why it would be very valuable to have some more traditional Chinese thought basically adopted by the powers that be in China. But here, the thing that you’re really getting me thinking about is these two faces being shown, one internally, one externally. I mean, there’s this whole approach, I mean, since officially, I guess, since I think it’s 2013, of the use of the three warfares, psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare to attack the West.

Mr. Tozzi:
The roots of that are very deep. Another Chinese thinker, Sun Tzu, that people are familiar with. You want to defeat an enemy ideally without combat, without any casualties. So that’s the roots of it. If you look at United Front activities, since the inception of the Chinese Communist Party, they have attempted to influence and infiltrate the Kuomintang, and find sectors of society and media that they could influence.

You have movements like the May 4th movement in 1919, which is this nationalistic student movement that preceded the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. That movement, though, was also co-opted. So this United Front mentality is something that is ingrained in the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party. And it’s not so much about intelligence gathering or taking what’s in your mind and there, but putting thoughts in your mind, putting good feelings about China in your mind.

Fast forward, there was a book that was written in 1999 by two Chinese colonels, Colonel Wang and Colonel Diao, who called for unrestricted warfare. If you look at its more formal articulation in the three warfares, you’ll see the strategy there. Everything short of kinetic is a battlefield. We talked about fentanyl earlier. Fentanyl is an effort at asymmetric warfare. But part of it is that the media and communications present a benign view of China and the CCP and its intentions to the world in order to lull them and to compromise them and to weaken resistance.

Mr. Jekielek:
Earlier, you were talking about the United Front and these efforts to infiltrate, subvert, influence, first of all, early movement, sort of proto-democratic movement or the nationalist party in China. What is the
United Front?

Mr. Tozzi:
It’s part of China’s propaganda efforts. Mao talked about it as his secret weapon. In many ways he attributed it to what allowed them to defeat the Kuomintang, the KMT, the Chiang Kai-shek’s party in mainland China, and to come to power. If you want to personify it, it was Mao Zedong vs. Chiang Kai-shek. But it really was more than just a clash of titans. It was the very alternative vision of what China’s future would look like. And the Kuomintang in 1949 fled to Taiwan.

To give an example of United Front activity, just very recent here in Washington, DC, two examples. There were two United Front operatives who were welcomed with open arms here in Washington just a few weeks ago. They were two panda bears, these cute and wonderful panda bears full of praise and a gift of the People’s Republic of China, a little bit of irony there. Baoli and Qingbao, we see their pinyin, romanized words. Chinese love puns. A lot of Chinese dissidents use puns to kind of express their criticism of the Chinese Communist Party leadership.

However, it goes two ways. Bao Li is a homonym for violence, explosive violence. Qing Bao can mean intelligence in the sense of spy craft and intelligence gathering. So one wonders if sort of the joke is on us there. The other example of the United Front trying to create goodwill towards China was the Kennedy Center, which is a taxpayer-funded venue hosting the National Ballet of China. Chris Smith led a letter along with Congressman Molinar from the Select Committee.

Chris Smith is the chairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, wrote to the Kennedy Center and called attention to the fact that the CCP suppresses artists at home and also abroad. Now, you know, we do want to, we’re all in favor of artistic expression and we don’t want to be censorious here. But I think what the letter called for is like, will you let your audiences know that there are artists that are repressed in China, but also here, you know, this long arm of transnational repression.

To give an example, Chen Weiming is a Chinese sculptor who had a sculpture in California. There’s this Liberty Sculpture Park that contains a lot of his artwork, and one of them was the CCP virus. It showed Xi Jinping as a CCP virus, essentially. A month after it was opened, it was burned down.

The FBI investigated, and it turns out there were agents of the Chinese Communist Party that did that and attacked that form of artistic expression.
Another example is the Chinese artist who lives in Australia now, Badiucao. He does these cartoon posters that show how repressive the CCP is. His artwork has been attacked. This is actually a very interesting example, I think, of the confluence of Chinese Communist Party efforts to suppress freedom of expression on campus and also to tap into something that.

There was an incident at George Washington University a couple of years ago where Badiucao’s posters were put up to show the repressiveness of the regime against the Chinese people and Uyghurs and others.
The Chinese Students and Scholars Association claimed that this was racist against Chinese students, that we were being oppressed. The initial reaction of the university was to ban the posters. This was ironic because they were calling attention to the oppressive actions of the CCP against the Chinese people who were oppressed, against also Tibetans and Uyghurs,
these oppressed minorities, but also Han Chinese as well.

With the United Front, remember, these are Marxists, so they understand the dialect, they understand that notion of oppressor vs. oppressed. They tap into this current that you see in the American left, but you also see, especially in academia, the whole intersectionality, this kind of cultural Marxist construct. Look, these are legitimate conversations to have about race and racism and whatever. But this mindset that you have oppressors and oppressed, what the oppressor was doing, the Chinese Communist Party, was they were claiming the mantle of oppressed and seeking to squelch voices that called attention to that.

The actual oppressed are Chinese students who dare to think differently. There are those that seek to practice religion, like Falun Gong, for example. Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and it’s the CCP that oppresses it. So you see, for example, most egregiously at the APEC conference in San Francisco last year, how demonstrators against Xi Jinping were beaten by pro-CCP demonstrators.

These demonstrators were exercising their First Amendment freedoms and had a permit. The CECC and Chairman Smith held a press conference of some of the victims who were beaten, along with representatives from Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Kong groups, and Chinese dissidents. There was a lack of responsiveness by the San Francisco police and the San Francisco authorities. We’ve also seen this on college campuses.

We had a hearing in conjunction with June 4th, the Tiananmen anniversary last year, where we had a student from Columbia University who testified incognito because her and her friends were beaten for speaking up for human rights. In Massachusetts, there was a Berkeley College of Music student who was attacked by another student. That student who attacked the dissident student was arrested and jailed.

We had a hearing on American prisoners in China that fortunately led to the release of Pastor David Lin just in advance of the hearing. Then Mark Swidan was released, whose mother provided a video testimony at our hearing. Harrison Li’s father, one of our witnesses at that hearing, was also released, which was great. That was a great accomplishment. But I believe the CCP student who had attacked the other Chinese student was also released in exchange. That’s how that cultivation of extreme nationalism was directed not just at the U.S., but also Chinese who dare dissent.

Mr. Jekielek:
In another prominent example, I’m just thinking, because I’ve been covering it quite a bit recently, there was two Chinese agents that were actually found guilty of trying to bribe IRS agents to revoke Shen Yun performing as art, art’s tax-exempt status, and then never mind the bomb threats and death threats and they things they do to theaters, since we’re talking about the arts at the Kennedy Center.

Mr. Tozzi:
Again, the United Front activities, it really, you see the long arm of that. You see these Chinese police stations, illicit police stations in major American cities. We also see examples of how they try to infiltrate our political system. Linda Sun, who was arrested, had been an advisor to Governor Hochul, and sought to curate information that the governor received and also block Taiwan’s representatives from having a voice there. Fang Fang targeted Eric Swalwell even before he became a congressman. So you see this targeting in order to influence, whether it’s the IRS there or whether it’s U.S. politicians. It is a broad base of United Front activities.

Mr. Jekielek:
The Chinese have a weird view of other people who are Chinese. It doesn’t matter how many generations they’ve actually been American or if they are even more recent immigrants.

Mr. Tozzi:
Yes, there’s this saying in Chinese, we’re all Chinese. And in some countries, you have citizenship by the soil or citizenship by blood. It very much is this kind of racialist idea that your identity, regardless of whether you’re a citizen of another country, that you’re Chinese and therefore that the party has rights on you. Again, who is victimized by the CCP? It is primarily other Chinese.

They’re the targets, the dissidents who speak out. The artists like Chen Weiming, who dare to raise their voices in opposition. There are dissidents like Rowena He who have done so much great work on that idea of preservation of memory and capturing the voice of the Tiananmen generation.

Communism is a totalitarian ideology, legalism, a totalitarian ideology. It seeks to control the mind and what you think, and it seeks to control everyone, and that is the CCP. And I think many Americans are very naive about that. They don’t understand the nature of communism. They don’t understand the nature of Chinese communism, which again has these deep legalist roots as well. They don’t understand the distinction between rule of law and rule by law, where law is an instrument by which the emperor or the supreme ruler can control people.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re just also reminding me, years ago I went on a sales call, actually a few sales calls with Chinese Epoch Times. For those that might not know that Chinese Epoch Times is the most widely distributed independent Chinese language media in the world and all over. And so they would go on sales calls, I think this was in New York City, and what they figured out was, especially when they were going to a national advertiser, they would go and say, well, we’ve got 60% of the Chinese market. And so anybody that wanted the Chinese market, where do I sign? It’s a very easy pitch.

Except what they figured out is this is what they’d have to say. They’d have to say, well, if you do sign this deal, someone’s going to come to you, most likely, saying they somehow are affiliated with the Chinese government. And they’ll say that you’re hurting the feelings of the Chinese people by working with this media or essentially implying that you’re going to be on the wrong side of the Chinese government if you do this. So you can imagine a few of those deals were lost, but they figured out if they don’t tell people ahead of time that they won’t get any deals because that basically happens so often. This was years ago, but that was the level of interference.

Mr. Tozzi:
You use that phrase that we hear, hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. And that’s the attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to conflate the CCP with the Chinese people. And it’s important that we distinguish that. The CCP is not the Chinese people. It is the political party that seeks to control the destiny of the Chinese people, as we see with that long arm, even those of Chinese heritage who live abroad in the United States and elsewhere. But it is not the same.

And while we talk about this nationalism and that, there also is, I think, an undercurrent of dissent as well. And we’re seeing a couple of interesting phenomena in China, some more active dissent. We saw the white paper movement with regards to the Covid restrictions, but you also see the bicyclists in Henan that kind of did a protest there, just tens of thousands of people on bicycles protesting. You see in Shandong a road rage incident with a woman who was berating a veteran. She was alleged to be the mistress of the police chief. And all these veterans descended on this city in Shandong. There’s a lot of discontent there.

But the other aspect that you see, you know, we talked about Confucianism, legalism. Taoism is another way of thought in China. Any of you who’ve studied martial law know this Wu Wei principle, that if you have a superior force, you don’t necessarily confront it because you’ll get smashed. But rather you go with it and let that force dissipate. Xi Jinping calls for the China dream, this great rejuvenation of the Chinese people. At the same time, he’s really helped strangle the economy.

Mr. Jekielek:
But it’s not really a rejuvenation of the Chinese people, is it?

Mr. Tozzi:
No, it’s not. The response has been to lay flat, Tanping, this lay flat movement. You hear expressions like Bailan, to let it rot. They talk about the garbage time of history that we’ve entered. That’s another phrase. You have this 996 economy, working from nine in the morning till nine at night, six days a week. Some people ask, is it worth it?

The other thing that you’re seeing is in demographics, the Chinese people are failing to marry or opting not to marry. You also see that occurred in its wake to limit its population size. It realizes that while it’s almost on the cusp of achieving hegemony there, it engineered a demographic crisis and shortfall. So they’ve changed the one-child policy to a two-child policy to a three-child policy, and people are just not responding.

There is this societal malaise. There was a viral video a couple of years back when there was a police officer who was beating a protester and said, you’re going to be punished for three generations. You know, that was that three-generation punishment that not just the Maoists had, if your family was a landowner, that stigma attached with you, but also during the imperial period, if you were a rebel or whatever, you were punished for three generations.

The response of this person in the video, though, is, three generations, we’re the last generation. We’re not going to have children. And that is very, very jarring. There’s a lot more brittleness right now in China, and there’s this tremendous discontent with the government.

Mr. Jekielek:
With the event that you attended, the 20th anniversary of the Quit the CCP movement last year, I forget now how many, but 450 million people have quietly quit the Chinese Communist Party over this incredible period of time. So there are all these forces.

Mr. Tozzi:
Yes, you have a combination of forces. What we’re seeing are these centripetal forces, Xi Jinping getting this in the modern era, this unprecedented third term as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, but also these centrifugal forces as well. You know that opening line in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the great works of Chinese literature, begins by saying that the realm long divided must unite, long united must divide. That concept of coming together and pulling apart is one that you see as a recurring theme in Chinese history. Just as much as there have been dynasties in China, there’s also been periods of disunity as well. And there’s a lot that’s going on there.

I think that Xi Jinping does feel the pressure and does feel threatened. One very important incident that occurred the year before last, and that was the death of Li Keqiang. Li Keqiang was the premier, technically he was the number two person in China. He died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. There’s a tremendous amount of speculation that he was killed. He was found unconscious in a swimming pool. We don’t know for certainty. But why was Li Keqiang seen as a threat? Because he certainly was to Xi Jinping.

One was because of his views on the economy. He was critical of Xi Jinping’s running of the economy and wanted to return to that period of relative prosperity that you saw during the reform era. But gave a talk and he mentioned, men act and heaven watches. And that is an echo of a phrase that Mencius uses, heaven sees with the eyes of the people and hears with the ears of the people. And it comes from an older book, the Book of Documents. But that concept is wrapped up with the idea of the mandate of heaven and the legitimacy of rulership.

Mencius is asked a question, is it ever legitimate to overthrow a government and overthrow a king? And his answer is no, but it is legitimate to overthrow a tyranny and overthrow a tyrant, even kill a tyrant. And that’s where that idea, well, how do you know if someone is tyrannical? Well, does he oppress the people? Does he offend heaven, this idea of a law above the law, this concept of the Tao or heaven by which you can judge the actions of rulers? It’s interesting.

In Western thought, St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the same question, comes up with a similar answer, that you don’t disturb a government that’s legitimate, but a tyranny, yes. So Li Keqiang uttered this phrase, and that was a direct challenge to Xi Jinping. And I think it was perceived as such. And again, it’s something that is rooted in this Confucian tradition, too. Again, this proto-democratic, proto-human rights tradition, as opposed to sort of this legalist tyranny.

Mr. Jekielek:
As we’re discussing all this, I think that deep down inside, the Chinese regime and its leadership understands that it’s illegitimate. And I think the thing that it fears the most of anything is actually accountability by its own people because of the terrible things it has done to them.

Mr. Tozzi:
Right. At the same time, however, we should not be subsidizing tyranny. U.S. companies that have forced labor in their supply chain, which is in violation of U.S. law, like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act or the Tariff Act, these companies have to be accountable for that. Or companies that partner with PLA companies. We saw it recently with the Chinese Battery Manufacturers, CATL. These are PLA entities. So what we should be doing is enforcing our laws there.

And I think with this greater awareness, you’re seeing this effort to move out of China, move your production out of China. You saw a company like Milwaukee Tool, for example, that was accused of having forced labor in its supply chain. It does its equipment manufacturing in the United States now, but it also moved, like it’s for work gloves and things like that, out of China to Cambodia in response to these allegations. You’re seeing American companies disengage because they realize that there’s a risk with doing business in China. There’s more that we can do.

One thing I would like to see is the Securities and Exchange Commission use existing laws. The 1934 Securities Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 that’s promulgated under that concerns any statement. Well, not just any statement by a publicly traded company. It prohibits material misstatements, but also material omission. So if you’re a publicly traded company and you’re not disclosing the instrument, you don’t even really that hasn’t been fully utilized. We should not be rewarding these companies.

But I’ll give you another example, U.S. government purchases. Ian Urbina, who testified at a CECC hearing, had that wonderful series in the New Yorker looking at the fish supply chain. You have forced labor on these fishing boats, these Chinese fishing boats, which oftentimes double as naval militia, by the way, and we see their actions in the West Philippine Sea, South China Sea, where they often swarm Filipino vessels. So there’s forced labor in the fishing, but there’s also forced labor in the fish processing. You have Uyghurs and North Korean women, mostly women, that are basically forced to process these fish.

This enters the U.S. supply chain, including our curement by our Defense Department, served on military bases, but also USDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases for prisons, federal prisons and school lunch programs. So what we should be doing is, you know, the U.S. government should be setting the example and cleansing our supply chains of products that are tainted by forced labor. So that should be a no-brainer there. Again, it’s done in violation of U.S. law.

Mr. Jekielek:
So you’re telling me that now this long story pivot to Asia is actually happening?

Mr. Tozzi:
Yes, I think so. There’s a recognition that the principal challenge to the United States, and hence the rest of the world, really comes from the Chinese Communist Party. Obviously, you see, you know, Russia is a threat, but who supports Russia? Who, you know, who is enabling the war in Ukraine to continue? And that’s, I think, the support that the CCP gives to Russia.

So if you want to go to the root cause of this, I think you have to focus your attention on the Chinese Communist Party. And so the Soviet Union was an existential threat, and that was recognized by most people in the United States. It was the Cold War there. The CCP now is an existential threat. What’s different between that and the Soviet Union is that they have the resources that the Soviet Union never had. It still has, despite their current economic problems under Xi Jinping, they still have devoted tremendous amounts of resources to spreading their influence and upgrading their military, building a navy.

The other thing that they have in their favor that the Soviet Union never had is the use of technology, artificial intelligence, the surveillance state. The technology that the Chinese government has at its disposal, including to hack us and to gain access to sensitive data,to telephone records is tremendous. And the Soviet Union never had that. So this is really, I think, where that threat is. And again, as I said, it’s not simply a strategic rival, it’s a systemic one. It wants to rule all under heaven, Tian Sha, and literally all under heaven, including the moon as part of their moon program as well.

That was one of the reasons, I think, why President Trump created the Space Force in his first administration, and the Biden administration continued it, because it’s really realizing that this is a multidimensional battlefield, too, and it’s going to continue in the future. So I think we’re going to see increasing resources and attention paid towards East Asia, in particular, to counter the CCP and its influence.

Mr. Jekielek:
Hence, the vice president talking about how the Europeans need to carry more of their own weight.

Mr. Tozzi:
Right. And I think that’s true across the board. You have some that really led. The Poles, for example, have always been at the forefront of carrying their burden. You also have a few countries like Sweden too, which during the period of neutrality during the Cold War, still maintained healthy defense budgets. Then, you know, post the fall of the Berlin Wall, the peace dividend, you know, that declined.

Now Sweden, which has entered NATO, has also, I think, really sought to increase its expenditures as a percentage of GDP in the military. You know, the NATO threshold used to be 2% of the budget. Back in 2017, in the first year of the Trump administration, it was only two countries that met that threshold. And that increased to four the next year. And then I think it was at eight and then nine.

It dipped a little bit with the first part of the Biden presidency, but then with the invasion of Ukraine that shot up. Now what’s being called for is up to 5% of GDP. There’s a call for Taiwan to increase its own defense preparedness as well, since it is on the front line. So that’s something I think across the board, the importance of not just burden sharing, but also taking responsibility for one’s own security and defense is something that we’ll see more of.

Mr. Jekielek:
Talking about this idea of how the Chinese regime kind of believes it owns all Chinese, right? There was an estimate that in Silicon Valley alone, there’s 25,000, you know, basically people providing espionage support to the Chinese regime. I don’t know how accurate that is. But we did talk about Chinese students. And there’s several hundred thousand here in America. The reality quite simply is, under a totalitarian regime, as we discussed, that all of them can be leveraged in various ways. And at some level are, even by being able to come here in the first place. So how do you view that reality here in America, these hundreds of thousands of students?

Mr. Tozzi:
There have been proposals to ban Chinese students. I don’t support that. I think we have to be smart about it. If someone wants to come over to study advanced nuclear weapon ballistics or certain engineering fields, no, they shouldn’t.

Mr. Jekielek:
Or perhaps transplant surgery.

Mr. Tozzi:
If you get to the issue of organ harvesting, which we haven’t talked about, yes, there should be common sense limits. But we also need to engage the Chinese people. So if people want to come and study law or they want to study humanities, certainly it’s an opportunity to dialogue and to influence that. We talk about the United Front as trying to put things in our head, as it were. But that goes two ways.

Many of these people who come here, they’re very intelligent, too. And you see those that taste freedom. You see a lot of religious conversions, just anecdotally, you know, the students who encounter Christianity, for example, convert. And that’s, I think, one of what Xi Jinping fears, too, is that encounter. And that would account, again, for that document number nine, that real fear of ideological influence on the hearts, we want the Chinese people to prosper, to enjoy the freedoms that we have too.

And I think as a prerequisite to that, we always have to engage and engage them on ideas. There are others who are open to engagement with American ideas, Western ideas, democratic universal ideas, again. And there’s contribution that can be made too by an understanding of the Chinese tradition that’s so rich. Confucianism has had an influence on my thought. My kind of Catholic,Thomistic, Aristotelian worldview is very compatible with that of Confucian thought as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
So basically, we have to be much more judicious than we have been, but also remain open. That’s kind of what you’re saying.

Mr. Tozzi:
Yes, we have to have open eyes, but also open minds. That’s how I would phrase it.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m very heartened to see this increase in interest in free speech in America, especially on the side of the government, notably because I watch China so closely, and it’s sort of the antithesis, in China what we have is the antithesis of that. However, you know, the Epoch Times, we use a whole variety of technologies to help the Chinese people look at whatever they want, including the Epoch Times. Some of them are incredibly effective. Some people have argued that a relatively low cost way of helping China would be to get rid of that firewall.

Mr. Tozzi:
Right. As long as the Communist Party is there, they’re going to maintain control over that and they’re going to erect firewalls.

Mr. Jekielek:
Which is basically like a censorship system. I want to make sure people understand what this is.

Mr. Tozzi:
Sure. There are ways to evade it that are complicated, you know, VPNs and the like, but they restrict the flow of information that the Chinese people can access in an effort to control what it is that they’re exposed to and what opinions they can have. What’s very interesting is that with that short-lived ban on TikTok, you had these “TikTok refugees” that went to the Little Red Book app there and started to express their opinions freely on that. The CCP noted that and then began to restrict that because that was an avenue by which exposure to ideas that the government didn’t want Chinese people exposed to, that was a channel for that. So that became restricted as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
But what do you think of this idea to dedicate resources to breaking that censorship system?

Mr. Tozzi:
To break the Chinese firewall, we need to support RFA and VOA, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia and their Chinese language services, Tibetan services, Uyghur news services are accessed by people within China. It’s a source of information that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. So what we need is not restrictions on speech, but greater speech. We have to overcome that firewall and the censorship apparatus. That really, I think, needs to be at the forefront because I think our ideas are superior and that is the great fear of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Jekielek:
Piero Tozzi, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Tozzi:
Thank you, Jan. It’s good to see you.