Is It A Great Idea To Go To War With China?
The most dangerous enemies to the US may be located within its borders
The entire wording of the US House of Representatives bill to ban TikTok sounds like these officials regard China as a mortal enemy. They and political advocates say that China uses TikTok to spy on and manipulate US people with propaganda. But is that really true, and is China the backward, primitive, evil, oppressive nation many people in the US believe?
Metropolitan and Economic Development Areas in China
Most people in the US are unaware, but China transitioned from a planned, Maoist (“Communist”) economy to a market economy in 1984. The feared and hated “Chi Coms” are a group of committee members in each region, city, and province. The common Western image of thin, starving Chinese people wearing gray cotton pajamas and bicycling to work is a relic of the past.
China has ten cities with over 10 million population, including several that many people in the US have never heard of like Dongguan and Foshan, along with Shenzen, the city on China’s mainland that links Hong Kong to mainland China.
China has Special Economic Zones with market economies and rapid economic growth, and Shenzen is one of them. Special Economic Zones in China are located primarily along the country’s coast. China also has other zones that have contributed to the country’s rapid economic growth, economic and technological development zones (ETDZs), free trade zones (FTZs), export-processing zones (EPZs), and hightech industrial development zones (HIDZs).
China’s Special Economic Zones are called special because they have financial, investment, and trade privileges, and a broad variety of businesses are present in them.
China has 21 Free Trade Zones which have fewer restrictions on investment and international trade. The FTZs started in 2013 with Shanghai and have rapidly grown. They are China’s main way to encourage FDI: foreign direct investment. All of these areas have capital exchanges and cross-border financial services. Some of the FTZs are tax-free for foreign investors.
Health in China
According to a 2023 report published in Cureus, China spends 6.5% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health to serve a population of 1.4 billion people. There are 1 billion more people in China than in the United States.
China didn’t provide health care for much of its population for decades. In the mid- to late-1990s, only 7% of China’s population had health insurance and those who lacked money to pay for care did without. In the early 2000s, China’s government began to try to improve the situation, adding medical insurance programs for both urban and rural Chinese citizens. By 2011, 95% of China’s population had some form of health insurance and could also receive some form of care, in many places, excellent care. However, rural Chinese citizens, about 40% of the population, still do not have top-level care, and many have to travel long distances for care. China does have a bifurcated urban vs. rural healthcare system.
Let’s put our thinking caps on for a minute. We might be able to think of other nations that also have less healthcare and services for people who live in rural areas.
As far as healthcare facilities go, China has 36,570 hospitals and nearly 1 million primary clinics. Over 3,200 of China’s hospitals are large medical centers and teaching hospitals affiliated with colleges and universities. Per-capita, there are far more hospitals and clinics in China than in the US (6,120 hospitals, approximately 34,700 medical clinics). The US has approximately 24% of the population that China has, making the gap between medical clinics in each nation particularly wide.
There is such a thing as medical debt in China, and it disproportionately strikes middle and low-income families. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Environmental Research and Health found that about 2.4% of middle income Chinese families and 3.9% of low-income families had medical debt they couldn’t pay, averaging the equivalent of $5,000 to $6,000 USD per family.
China does have chronic health problems. The leading causes of death in China are stroke, ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. Most of these diseases are associated with tobacco smoking. Over 300 million Chinese people smoke tobacco, and the nation is the world’s largest tobacco producer and consumer. Chinese people consume 46% of the world’s cigarettes.
The obesity epidemic is also on the rise in China. According to a 2023 report in the Journal of Global Health, China had the world’s highest number of obese and overweight children. Nearly 60% of Chinese men and 18.2% of Chinese women are overweight or obese.
Compare & Contrast: US vs Chinese Life Expectancy
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the US spent $4.5 trillion on healthcare in 2022, accounting for 17.3% of GDP. US life expectancy declined in the late 2010s and 2020, and is 76.4 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In China, life expectancy post-COVID-19 is 78.2 years, according to a 2023 report in The Lancet. China’s life expectancy is projected to exceed 81 years by 2035, a national health target set by the Healthy China 2030 plan.
Chinese Government & Politics: How Did Xi Become President of China?
There is some idea that the US is free and we have total control over our lives, whereas in countries like China, there aren’t any elections and there is no Democratic process. China handles elections differently: they use local, regional, and national bodies of representatives in the Chinese Communist Party to create governing structures and elect people. There are eight other political parties in China but the Chinese Communist Party is the sole ruler of itself, and the Chinese State. There are separate governing structures for Party business and for China’s overall governance. The Congressional Research Service has published an extensive overview of China’s methods of governance and current officials. Most of China’s top leaders are born between 1953 and 1963, making them significantly younger than the US crew of octogenarians.
China’s current President Xi Jinping is a product of this process. He also has life experiences that influence how he leads China, ones that are very different from all US leaders in recent decades. Xi has been a city and provincial governor and has held leadership roles in China’s state governance and the Communist Party. Most of all, even with our US view of China being totalitarian, Chinese people who are members of these governing bodies debate, collaborate, and vote. Xi is not an all-powerful dictator as Mao was — though it appears that if he chose to be, he could be. When he retires, his replacement will be chosen by the Chinese Communist Party unless there are dramatic changes.
In 2022, 69-year-old Chinese President Xi Jinping was re-elected for his third term as General Secretary of China’s ruling Communist Party, assuring him of being China’s President for at least five years. Xi’s educational background is chemical engineering and as a young man, he served in China’s Central Military Commission and Defense Ministry.
Xi is a Chinese “baby boomer.” He was born in Beijing in 1953. His father was Xi Zhongxun, a former guerrilla fighter in China’s civil war and senior Communist Party official. Although his father was a Communist official, between 1969 and 1975, Xi was sent to work in a poor rural village during China’s Cultural Revolution, and he was far from the only one. Between 10 million and 16 million young people from China’s cities were sent to work in the fields in the countryside. An estimated 2 million people died due to constant upheavals during this time, including many teachers.
If you’d like to learn more about the extreme upheavals in China at that time, I recommend Red Scarf Girl, a heartbreaking and touching memoir by Ji-Li Jiang.
Most of all, the common view that China is a completely dictatorial nation full of mindless drones isn’t true. Xi’s “rise to power” consists of a series of increasingly responsible governing positions during which he seemed popular and effective, without a lot of disruption and devastation. As China is advancing in all measurable metrics, with a few exceptions like the environment, Xi’s experience as well as that of other Chinese Communist Party leaders, might not be exclusively those of evil Bond villains seeking world domination and death.
China’s Record On Human Rights
The US State Department says that “People in China cannot practice the religion of their choice” and “Members of minority groups are subject to mass arbitrary detention, Orwellian-style surveillance, political indoctrination, torture, forced abortions and sterilization, and state-sponsored forced labor.”
I do understand that if these things haven’t happened to individuals in the United States personally, there are millions of people who deny these problems in the United States. In terms of “members of minority groups,” the US minority group that would be most equivalent to ethnic minorities in China who are suffering oppression would be Native Americans. Most people in the US are unaware that to this day, the US government owns Native American reservation land. Not the people who live there. This one factor means that Native Americans will never be able to develop their own land to achieve wealth. Instead, they need to pursue businesses they are permitted to have, like casinos.
The United States does use torture. You can read about the CIA’s torture program here.
The United States conducted forced sterilization well into the 1970s, inspired by a 1927 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Buck vs. Bell, in which the state of Virginia was told it did have a right to sterilize a “feeble-minded” young woman, Carrie Buck.
The US also has “Orwellian-style surveillance” of its population. This was authorized after September 11, 2001 and none of it has been rescinded since. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes US government agencies to surveil the communications of foreign people without any due process. If you call anyone outside of the US, your call is very likely to be completely recorded and these days: analyzed for “undesirable” content. Audits of every Federal agency, from the FBI to the CIA and NSA, show that millions of communications have been surveilled and analyzed without people’s knowledge or permission. Section 702 was set to expire in December 2023, but it was temporarily extended by the US Congress. It is now set to be reviewed or reapproved by 19 April 2024.
Any Americans using our social media in recent years know that if we express opinions contrary to what any government official, and many private businesses, want, it can not only be tracked down, it can be removed and censored with ease.
As to “mass arbitrary detention,” China has the world’s second-highest prison population at about 1.7 million people. Shocking, right?
The United States has the world’s largest prison population, 1.8 million. This is in raw numbers. When compared to percentage of population which are incarcerated, about .12% of the people in China are in prison. The US incarcerates .53% of its population.
An outside observer — let’s say an alien from another planet — might not perceive the gigantic gulf of lifestyle, “freedom,” and cultural differences between China and the US that is so heavily promoted in the US. Some might even call relentless US political attacks on China stating how horrible it is to live there a form of “propaganda”.
Chinese Military Capabilities
In 2017, “think tank” RAND corporation gave China only a few areas of advantage over the US in a shooting war in the South China Sea in both Taiwan and the Spratly Islands, a disputed archipelago.
China’s army, in keeping with the Chinese Revolution and Maoism, is called the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It is under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. The PLA is a “conscript force,” which means young Chinese men are drafted twice a year.
In recent years, China’s navy has built itself to the point where it is the world’s largest. Most of China’s ships are newer and more capable than US naval vessels, particularly the US Navy’s Littoral ships, aka “Little Crappy Ships” which are not used in combat and are set to be taken out of service.
The US Department of Defense refers to China as the “PRC,” aka People’s Republic of China. DOD’s 2023 report on Chinese military power says that the PRC has more than 500 nuclear weapons, and will have over 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2023. The DOD also reports that China is developing its aerospace warfare capabilities and cyberwarfare capabilities at a rapid pace.
The report also notes increasingly aggressive actions by China regarding Taiwan, with increased “fly-overs” and approximately 180 “coercive and risky” air intercepts with USAF vehicles in 2020.
China and India both have larger armies than the United States. Whereas China does draft young men into its armed forces, India and the US both have volunteer forces.
And this is the real issue. United States armed forces increasingly cannot meet their recruitment targets.
According to the US Air Force’s recruiting chief, “We’ve seen a steady decline in the military even being an option for our youth as they contemplate the future, with propensity dropping from 13 percent four years ago to 10 percent.”
What many people commenting online about a nation that has been at war for nearly its entire history fail to acknowledge is something I’ve known for over 20 years as a community college teacher serving numerous USMC members and with family members as ranking officers in USN and USMC: 71% of America’s young people do not qualify for military service because of:
Obesity
Drug use
Physical and mental disabilities
Misconduct or criminal records
Lack of aptitude (i.e. inability to conform to military discipline or understand written instruction)
Viewed this way, US armed forces are doing a great job of recruiting from among the much smaller group that’s qualified to serve.
China may well be an enemy of the United States.
But this country’s most dangerous enemy is its own self. We can see that Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution was a horrible, devastating event for Chinese people.
We can’t see, apparently, that slow-moving lack of doing anything constructive for any person in the United States over the past five decades is grinding this nation down to the point where there’ll be nothing left to attack and no one able to defend.
The idea is insane from top to bottom. We ripped up and relocated our entire manufacturing base and sent it to China.