There is a meme that depicts George Soros, the billionaire investor, as Emperor Palpatine—the villain in Star Wars. Whether Mr. Soros is on the Dark Side or the Light is not the subject of this article, but I must confess it is rare for me to find common ground with him. However, in a recent speech before the Hoover Institution, he warned of a danger to world freedom that I most definitely agree with—the ambition of the authoritarian Chinese president Xi Jinping.
On January 31 of this year, Mr. Soros gave a short speech at the opening of a Hoover Institution panel titled: China on the Eve of the Winter Olympics: Hard Choices for the World’s Democracies. In his remarks, Mr. Soros described China as, “the world’s most powerful authoritarian state,” and he warned that the regime would use the hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics like Nazi Germany used the 1936 Olympics: as an “attempt to use spectacle to score a propaganda victory for its system of strict controls.”
According to Mr. Soros, the Chinese government developed vaccines to deal with the original Wuhan strain of COVID-19 but has no vaccines to deal with the Delta and Omicron variants. To hide this fact from his people and to ensure a smooth Olympics, Mr. Soros claims that President Xi has imposed a “zero Covid policy” including “severe lockdowns at the slightest sign of an outbreak,” which is “inflicting severe hardship on the people” and further damaging an already unstable economy.
“Omicron,” Mr. Soros told the panel, “threatens to be Xi Jinping’s undoing,” as his failure to fight it “is bound to be revealed either during the Winter Olympics or soon thereafter.” Mr. Soros speculates that President Xi’s grip on power is tenuous, and he may see resistance to his rule from China’s 20th Communist Party Congress when they meet in October of this year to decide whether or not Xi will remain General Secretary of the party for a third term.
This is good news to Mr. Soros, and I agree. As Mr. Soros points out, and anyone who has been paying attention knows, President Xi idolizes the brutal Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Mao’s great dream, a dream he fortunately never achieved, was Chinese domination of the world. According to authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their bestselling biography, Mao: The Unknown Story (Anchor Books, 2005), Mao’s obsession with dominating the world is the reason he starved tens of millions of his own people to death. While his own people starved, Mao traded their food to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries for modern weapons and technology. “Over 22 million people died of starvation in 1960 alone,” the authors tell us.
Mao’s determination to dominate the globe was not a secret confined to the dark rooms of China’s politburo. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once remarked that Mao “was bursting with an impatient desire to rule the world.” Though Mao has been dead for over 45 years, his dream of Chinese dominance lives on through his acolyte Xi Jinping, whom Mr. Soros labels a “true believer in Communism.”
But President Xi is smart. Despite his faith in Communism, he has used the insatiable greed of so many capitalists in the West to advance his global control. As investigative journalist Peter Schweizer has revealed in his new book, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win (Harper, 2022), China has successfully bribed American politicians, business leaders, celebrities, and tech giants to work as propagandists for its global takeover and to achieve technological supremacy over the world. That is why corporations such as the NBA and Facebook will turn a blind eye to Chinese slave factories and ethnic genocide while accusing free societies, such as the United States, of unbridled oppression.
American Elites are terrified of upsetting China, which explains why Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta had to distance his team from a tweet by General Manager Daryl Morey that dared to encourage people to “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong.” It explains why actor and former pro wrestler John Cena issued a groveling apology in Chinese for having the audacity to refer to Taiwan as a country. “Taiwan is the first country to watch Fast and Furious 9,” the actor had told a Taiwanese broadcaster, igniting a firestorm from China. And it explains why, just a few weeks ago, former Facebook executive and current co-owner of the Golden State Warriors Chamath Palihapitiya felt comfortable asserting that, “nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs,” in reference to the Chinese genocide of Uyghur Muslims.
But China’s financial tentacles have a much more dangerous reach than just actors and sports leagues. The New York Post recently reported that, “Silicon Valley elites are helping Communist China achieve their ultimate goal: ‘Technology supremacy’ over the West.” Citing Schweizer’s book, the article tells us that to achieve this goal China has bought the cooperation of multiple American tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Tesla. While these companies are ostensibly working with the civilian side of the Chinese markets, the Post points out that through Beijing’s “civilian-military fusion,” the Chinese government applies all technological advancements produced on the civilian side “directly to the military sphere.” In other words, our own companies are creating the technology that the Chinese Communists will use to defeat us.
So why hasn’t more been done by the government to stop this? It could be because U.S. politicians are not immune from Chinese financial influence. According to Red Handed, not only have the families of powerful politicians such as President Joe Biden, former President George Bush, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made lots of money from Chinese investments and relationships, but as Breitbart recently reported, large numbers of bi-partisan former politicians and government power players have been hired by lobbying firms with close ties to Chinese military and intelligence agencies.
And it isn’t just the United States where China has bought influence. Through bribery, business deals, and their extensive Belt and Road initiative, China has become an extremely influential force. But not all influence can be purchased. Sometimes it comes through intimidation.
Mr. Soros is right to compare the 2022 Olympics in Beijing with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. And it is terrifying to consider that it was just a few years later that Hitler began his annexation and later conquest of much of Europe. And we might be facing a similar situation with President Xi.
The Chinese government has not been quiet about their desire to return Taiwan to their control, by force if necessary. This would be a disastrous turn of events for the Unites States and the rest of the free world. Not only would it remove the last bastion of Chinese freedom, but as The Wall Street Journal points out, Taiwan makes “92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips,” and “as much as 60% of the less-sophisticated micro-controllers.” Without these chips, we cannot use most of the technology we now depend on in our daily lives—from smartphones, to cars, to missile guidance systems.
China’s conquest of Taiwan, and its subsequent control of the world’s chip manufacturing, would give it a much greater advantage than was achieved by Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia, which provided much of the armor used in Hitler’s blitzkrieg. Until other countries could construct greater chip manufacturing plants, as Intel announced last month it is doing in Ohio, the world would be at the mercy of the Communist Chinese and the Maoist dictator Xi Jinping.
Mr. Soros is right to be scared of Xi Jinping. The Chinese President has ambitions of world domination that would crush freedom globally. The world must unite to stop this threat. But most especially, American elites must stop kowtowing to China no matter how great the financial windfall. And the rest of us should pray that China does not invade Taiwan; and that Xi Jinping will be removed as General Secretary at the Communist Party Congress in October and replaced with a much more moderate leader who prefers the liberation of the Chinese people and peace and stability to brutal subjugation, genocide, and conquest.
[Photo Credit: Anthony Wallace/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
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