Guest post by Sven von Storch
This week we mark the 100th anniversary of the most murderous regime in human history. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, and went on to plunge China into a 20-year civil war, full of unimaginable poverty and misery.
When veteran war correspondent Ernest Hemingway – nobody’s wimp by any standards – visited the Chinese civil war with Martha Gellhorn in 1941, he found the human deprivation so appalling and disgusting he never wrote about it or ever talked about it again.
By the end of the 1970s, after 30 years of Mao’s tyranny, after 25 to 75 million dead in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, China was so completely impoverished it resembled today’s North Korea. The Soviet Bloc was economically far superior to the destitute land of the CCP. China was further backward than any other country in the world.
Since the CCP was downright hostile to the Soviet Union, including shooting battles on the border, Nixon and the West resolved to woo the CCP to harm the USSR.
However, the CCP figured out how to use this gambit against us: To harm the Soviet Union and replace it as the world’s foremost Communist power on the one hand, and to lure hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pocket of the hated West on the other hand, which we invested in China in the hopes of establishing a capitalist system there.
The West has been blinded by greed for profit and fooled by the CCP ever since. All warning voices were silenced as early as the 1980s.
On the backs of millions and millions of slave laborers, the CCP managed to ramp up production at unbeatably cheap prices.
Poverty in Communist China was so unimaginable, people were willing to work for food. No other country could beat their production costs.
At the same time, the CCP copied our knowledge and stole our patents, and our companies just accepted it, blinded by profit. When Huawei stole their Operating System from Cisco, they didn’t even bother to remove their name from the source code header. When BMW built their plant in Shenzhen, the CCP opened a plant right across from it, building Chinese knock-offs.
The CCP then used the hundreds of billions of dollars the West sends to China to finance the infiltration and subversion of Western societies, to buy our patents and companies, and hire lobbyists to allow the CCP to invest even more, and so on.
It’s a vicious cycle. A Ponzi scheme. The West itself made the so-called Chinese economic miracle possible and has been financing it until today, to our own detriment.
We think we need China, but in fact, the CCP is in desperate need of hard foreign currency to keep their economy going while manipulating their own funny-money currency, the Yuan/Renminbi, every which way they want.
At the end of the Iron Curtain, the Warsaw Pact was equally desperate for hard cash to prop up their pretend currencies and buy goods on the world market. Unlike the Soviet Union, however, the CCP doesn’t have to spend their money on a Reagan-style arms race, because the West poses no threat to the CCP, on the contrary. The PLA is building their third carrier strike group, while the Pentagon is going woke and transgender.
We like to be impressed by their double-digit growth rates, but in truth, the only reason the CCP economy is growing so fast is because the country was so incredibly impoverished, and has so much catching up to do.
The CCP growth rate pales in comparison with that of West Germany after WWII. But we in West Germany had no slave labor, quickly eradicated poverty, and established rule of law, property rights, and proper bookkeeping rules.
Seen this way, the West German economic miracle was far greater than China’s boom. If North Korea were to open up tomorrow, its growth would be even greater than that of the CCP. Of course it would: because North Korea is so poor, labor is much cheaper and the pent-up demand much greater.
Our own Western corporations and feckless governments are ultimately to blame for the growth of the CCP. Which Chinese product is actually competitive on the world market that was not pirated first? Without the collaboration of Apple, Microsoft or Google, Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes, the CCP would be nowhere.
The CCP manipulates every growth forecast, every annual report, because its own debt crisis, shadow banking market, and a real estate bubble can burst at any time. Whole newly-built megacities stand empty like Potemkin Villages.
China: It’s a gigantic hoax.
Sven von Storch is the head of the Berlin-based Civil Alliance and the husband of Beatrix von Storch, vice-chair of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) faction in the German Bundestag.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnfXElka9T4
