The Invisible War: Cyber Warfare Between China and the West

As many, although not necessarily most, people know, China is at war with the so-called Western nations. In the Chinese nationalist fantasy, the various Western nations are ground into a fine dust by Chinese might and forced to acknowledge Chinese superiority in everything and then beg China to allow their economic and physical existence to continue.

This seems like a somewhat plausible fantasy, given that China has most of the world by the short hairs already, which must make it excruciatingly annoying to the Chinese that the West refuses to do the acknowledgement part and keeps blathering on about shit like ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy.’

The problem, for both sides, is trade. China cannot exactly grind the Western nations into a fine dust just yet, because it likes Western money, brands, and goods. And the Western nations can blather all they want about human rights and democracy but they also have to suck up to China because they need Chinese money and goods. The West is also not willing to get pretty fed up with China just yet, because China is kinda scary. Its foreign policy has gotten aggressive, and its military capabilities keep getting larger.

So China, and its de facto dictator, seething with hurt feelings over being insufficiently admired, wages quiet hybrid war against its Western targets. It steals commercial and military secrets. It cleverly expands its military and economic influence in non-Western regions that the West also cannot be bothered to admire, assist, pay attention to, or acknowledge. And it engages in disinformation techniques both subtle and not-so-subtle.

It sneers at the idiocy and vulnerability of societies that consider themselves ‘free’, ‘democratic’, and upholders of the ‘rules-based international order.’ In China’s view, that’s all bullshit. The rule of the rules-based international order has always been that might makes right, with one set of rules for rich-ass countries like the US, another set of rules for the lesser beings in lesser nations like Iraq.

In fact, you could argue that China grabbed the US by the short hairs right around the time the US was invading Iraq on a pretense so flimsy that it could accurately be called a complete lie. The US went through the motions of going to the UN and whatnot to make its case for mysterious hoards of Iraq-based weapons of mass destruction, but anyone with a moderate degree of clearheadedness could see it was an excuse for naked invasion of another country for no good reason whatsoever.

The World Gets Pretty Fed Up with the US

The US invasion of Iraq was a gift to China that keeps on giving. Not only did the rest of the world get pretty darn fed up with the US in the wake of the invasion, but the US, panicked by 9/11, took its eye off the economic ball and allowed China to get an economic foothold into the US that has thus far proven impossible to reverse. So China learned a) that the US cannot be trusted in the international arena and b) that its people will buy any and all kind of cheap shit that China exports to it, even if it means that the US middle class gets completely hollowed out by stagnating (and often declining) wages and c) that supposedly American brands will happily manufacture everything in China instead of the US (yeah, Apple, that’s you).

That’s partly some Republican shit right there but let’s not leave out the Democrats! Obama showed China (and Russia) that the Democrats can’t be trusted either and will do bizarre stuff like whatever the fuck went down with Libya and Gaddafi. And don’t forget Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street-friendly enthusiasm for untrammeled global ‘free’ trade. Globalism enmeshed nations in ways they didn’t truly understand (because it was driven by private enterprise), although the global pandemic of 2020 opened a few eyes as to how almost every physical good is entangled in a web of international logistics.

2016 didn’t help. Trump might have adored Xi Jinping’s absolute-ruler ethos, but he also helped China see how fragile and easy to manipulate the US system is – and if he didn’t exactly make China-bashing great again, at least he made it both bi-partisan and popular. Nowadays, almost all your Western nations itch to take a few bashing swings at China and the threat they all agree it poses, although sometimes the bashing turns into whimpers of mild discontent wrapped in eagerness not to offend (yeah Macron, that’s you).

The result of the last couple decades of American decline (the 21st is not America’s century), is that both China and Russia know how to manipulate American media (social, journalistic, and opinion-mongering) to make Americans believe wholeheartedly that other Americans suck and can’t be trusted and that the whole nation ought to loathe almost everyone who lives in it, and that everyone in it would be better off if it was something entirely different from what they think it is. In other words, China and Russia are turning the natural American talent for enthusiasm against it, by persuading it to enthusiastically undermine itself.

All of these are disturbing trends, but none are the end of the world as we know it – yet. A physical rather than cyber-influence war with China could occur, of course, presumably over Taiwan. If China decides it loves war more than money – well, that wouldn’t be good. I don’t know if that would be the end of the world as we know it, but all in all I’d prefer not to find out.

But the other, and even creepier, front for a world-as-we-know-it-ending-war with China is technological. China is pretty damn good at hacking. And big business (yeah, that’s you Amazon) is, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, enamored of ‘smart’ shit and the ‘internet of things’. Internet of things is a code phrase for making everything in your entire life hackable by malign actors and punk-ass hotshot Chinese hackers. It’s a code-phrase for someone who is not you knowing every single thing about every single thing you do and where you do it.

Which brings me, of course, to The Walt Disney Company. For some reason, as I write this, certain Americans are in a panic that The Walt Disney Company is grooming their children to appear in drag shows, declare themselves trans, and go full-on into ‘I hate you stupid perverted white supremacist bigots’ to their innocently stupid, perverted, and white supremacist bigot parents. Granted, if I were one of these people, I too would wonder uneasily how quickly my children could come to see me as perverted and wrong. So there may be legitimate underlying reasons for their desire to keep their children from interacting with anything in the world that is not them. The odd thing is that these people conflate their uneasiness with a desire for liberty (by which they mean the liberty to be suck-ass defective humanoids).

China Pretty Fed Up with US Ideas of ‘Liberty’

But hellfire and damnation! If you think you lack ‘liberty’ now, just wait until technology that can and will spy on everything you do takes over your fucking life, tells you not to eat cheese because your cholesterol is too high, and then runs your car off the road into an electrical substation leaving you dead in a pretty shower of sparks and an entire neighborhood without electricity as retribution because someone said something mean about the Chinese. Or the police. Or the government. Or the company that made your car.

If the Chinese are clever (and they are) they will let big business innovate us into an even worse dystopia than the one we live in now (for the sake of convenience, you know), while simultaneously refining their instruments of social control (e.g., facial recognition technology), waiting for our propensity for income inequality push us all the way into something resembling the zombie apocalypse, and then they’ll pounce. They’ll sell, deploy, and monitor their technology into complete control of the US population and try to lull us into accepting it with non-stop TikTok videos and apps that sell sunglasses for 15 cents. Or something like that.

Living in America is pretty bad for many. Living in China is even worse from a ‘liberty’ point of view. Living in a Chinese-style America might be the worst of both worlds. Of course, the people in America who proclaim that they are concerned about liberty aren’t concerned about anything close to freedom. They might even like living under Chinese technological overlords. So maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we currently know it, given that true freedoms are already under assault right here right now.

Of course – we, the cheap-Chinese-shit-loving people of America, could decide to get, you know, pretty fed up with both the US and China, and demand that both nations cut out the jerk stunts, settle down, and start acting like normal countries, not power-hungry, hypocritical, whiny, cyberhacking, lying asshole nations with a thirst for admiration, dominance, and trampling the people that live within and beyond their borders. That could happen. I guess. Maybe. If we were completely different from what I think we are.

And now, finally, it’s time for a snap poll –