Those in power tell us that the largest single threat to the US is China.  By exploiting cheap labor, low-cost energy and a lack of regulation, developed nations, led by the United States, have made possible the Chinese production of goods at low cost.  By turning a blind eye towards the exploitation of the Chinese people and ignoring the environmental impact of Chinese industrial production, the western world proudly boasts of defeated slavery in one hemisphere by condoning it and tapping its benefit in another.

That doesn’t sound like much of a threat, right?  Sounds more like we’re complicit in the human rights violations we accuse them of.  Except that this over-reliance on what amounts to slave-labor and our own greed, has put China in the enviable position of controlling much of our means of production.

Might the outbreak of the Corona virus provided China with the excuse to brake-check their national industrial output in order to test the impact on the US economy?  Once the Chinese verified that shutting down their production caused markets to shed billions in value almost overnight, this created incentives to game the stock market in magnitudes that would dwarf their standard strategy of simple currency manipulation.

Unlike the western world of three and five year plans, China calculates long-term national planning over decades, even centuries.  The Chinese eye sees far over the western horizon and ironically what got us here was the converging willingness of one nation to sacrifice millions of her citizens into the role of indentured slaves to the service of another nation, seduced by the dream of cheap consumption with the plausible deniability of the reality of that human cost.

This unholy alliance has created moral dynamics that are as warped as the concepts that created them.  The Chinese feel justified in stealing any and all intellectual property they can get their hands on.  Any why wouldn’t they, when compared with the West’s eagerness to effectively enslave their people?  And then the US pretends to condemn the Chinese for human rights violations, but apparently only those offenses that have to do with re-education camps, and not the assembly of iPhones or televisions.

More than half a million Chinese nationals are enrolled in US universities and colleges.  Arguably, our most valuable national resource is academia.  Just as the US stockpiles a range of commodities known collectively as the strategic reserve, higher education in the US should be guarded and reserved for the education of our own citizens, not those who openly plot against US interests and end up using our own knowledge against us.  Foreign nationals pay twice the tuition as US citizens and again, greed is the motivator.

While we accuse the Chinese of all sorts of misdeeds, our appetite for consumer consumption fuels the very evils we pretend to abhor.  Until we are honest with ourselves and base our decisions on Godly moral values, both nations will foster evil practices and blame each other for the deeds they have both embraced.