We are at war with China & Xi has no limits – West is sleep-walking into terrifying new age, warns Brit ex-diplomat

CHINA is unleashing warfare on the West in a daring bid to create a terrifying new age led by Xi Jinping and time is running out to wake up to it, a former British diplomat warns.

The Communist regime is combining its economic, military and political power to bamboozle the world’s democracies which have become over-reliant on China for basic goods.

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Experts say Xi’s Chinese Communist Party are devising a New World Order[/caption]

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Alarm bells are ringing over deepening ties between Xi and Vlad are[/caption]

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Beijing is making moves with the West barely noticing, according to a former diplomat[/caption]

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China has showed off military might while it wages economic and political battle[/caption]

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Cyber attacks are one of the other ways China in unleashing warfare, experts say[/caption]

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Xi is on an unrelenting mission, it’s been warned[/caption]

That’s according to Matthew Henderson, a Geostrategy researcher who worked for the Foreign Office as a diplomat for three decades.

One key way Xi is pursuing his goal of global dominance is for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to leverage how dependent the West has become on its supply of goods, Henderson says.

Cyber attacks, political influence, military expansion, bribery and corruption are other weapons being deployed out of Beijing, he says – as well as deepening alliances with Russia, Iran and North Korea.

He said the West was reluctant to acknowledge President Xi Jinping‘s insidious progress because of the conflicts already raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.

But he branded this approach “completely stupid”.

Henderson told The Sun: “It’s not a question of opening up another front, it’s a question of admitting that we’ve been at war without really thinking it or wanting to believe it for a very long time.”

The challenge for the West – because of how democracy works – is that its economic, military and political strategies are fragmented, whereas China’s are merged into one in pursuit of one national goal – to take over world order.

Henderson said: “We’ve seen clearly, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are always exchanging this phrase – you’re going to see global changes that haven’t happened in 100 years.

“And we, the Chinese and the Russians, are going to see those changes through together.

“And that basically means unseating the United States as the leader of the rules-based international order.”

Henderson says the West desperately needs to wake up to the dangers of cheaper Chinese goods, like phone company Huawei, and instead endure short-term pain to stop heading down the path of CCP control.

“The reason it’s (Huawei) cheap is because it’s a state-run operation that’s very heavily subsidised precisely with the view of undercutting our own digital market and making sure everyone buys equipment that the Chinese can use to collect intelligence on us.”

Huawei has in the past asserted its technology has never and will never be used to spy, and chief executive Ren Zhengfei insisted he’d “never harm the interests of my customers”.

But the UK vowed to remove the telecom from 5G infrastructure by 2027 after the US slapped sanctions on the company, slamming it as a security risk.

Hudson Institute economic policy pundit John Lee also sounded the alarm on cheap Chinese goods.

Using the example of solar panels, he said China effectively stole know-how from the West to start producing them for far cheaper – allowing it to take over the entire market.

Lee explained to The Sun: “What the Chinese did was that they lured a lot of these (US and EU) companies to set up manufacturing plants in China. Because a lot of these plants are cheaper, they’re subsidised.

“The technology was transferred into the Chinese tech ecosystem, and then the Chinese government subsidised Chinese companies to sell solar panels to the rest of the world at prices around 80 per cent beneath the market price. 

“So obviously, the Western companies then went out of business and that allowed China to dominate supply chain.”

Lee said concerns were now mounting that China is eyeing a host of other technologies to take over, making the West rely on them even more.

Henderson said the West desperately needed political willpower to put an end to business with China, even it means forgoing cheaper goods.

He said: “We’ve simply got to say it’s (China) a different place.

“When you opened your factories in China, or R&D (research and development) in Shanghai, you may well have had a case at that stage to think it’s a good move, well now, it’s not – and you need to think hard about that.

“Nobody has the political will to start what looks like an uphill struggle.

“We need people in public not just saying China is a threat and we need to think twice about buying a Chinese electric vehicle, but we’re now facing a greater threat than since well before the Cold War.”

Finding alternative partners has to be the way forward, Mr Lee said.

He added: “For geopolitical reasons, it’s just an unavoidable choice.”

Henderson added China’s activity in the economically-vital South China Sea – where it claims big slices of disputed waters – has nothing to do with fairer free trade, but making free trade impossible.

And China would then get to “dictate who gets what when”, he said.

AXIS OF EVIL

The contest in the South China Sea recently caught the eye when Xi’s navy joined forces with Vlad’s for a warship exercise including live-firing drills.

Dr Sari Arho Havrén from UK defence and security think tank Royal United Services Institute said the introduction of Russia to the region was part of the two nations’ “no limits” friendship.

Dr Havren said it illustrated how rival alliances were deepening ties.

“It signals a forming of blocs in the area, like China-Russia-North Korea, and then the US-led coalition of Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and so forth.”

Henderson sounded the alarm over China’s deepening ties to countries like Russia and Iran and warned it was time to take notice.

He said: “There are some people who really have spent a long time thinking hard about China, who still really dislike the idea that we should treat them, or can’t even think of treating them as an axis.

“But we have got to do so.

“This is not an axis that exists because the West, with superior power and an active policy of containment or deterrence, has been forcing China into alliance with its Russian friends and its North Korean friends and its Iranian friends.

“Those friendships are long, deep, and they have been nurtured for many years. We have just preferred not to think about it.

“Now we’ve all got our own views about Iran. We’ve got separate thoughts about North Korea, and we’ve had until lately separate thoughts about Russia.

“But unless we start glueing all those pieces together, it’s no longer a jigsaw which we can separate and ignore. This is a big, bright picture staring us in the face.

MORE TRADE BLOWS

Economic conflict between the US and China has been erupting for several years, particularly since 2018 when then-US President Donald Trump slapped the Asian power with tariffs and trade barriers.

The Biden administration has since kept the tariffs in place.

Lee expected Washington – whether Democrat or Republican-led beyond 2024 – to continue firing trade blows at their bitter rival, and countries like the UK could start following suit.

He said: “You are seeing signs of that, and you are seeing at least diplomacy and rhetoric coming out of Europe, even though they haven’t gone as far as the Americans yet in having all out tariff wars with the Chinese.”

China was the UK’s sixth largest trading partner in the year to the end of March, according to the latest government data.

But UK exports to China were 21 per cent down on the previous year, and imports dropped 19 per cent.

While doing business with China for some goods is unavoidable, Mr Lee expects trade decline to continue.

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The world is trying to avert conflict over the city of Taipei[/caption]

Vlad shakes hands with Xi during a meeting in Beijing in MaySputnik/Sergei Bobylev/Pool via REUTERS

With these pictures emerging from Ukraine, the West is reluctant to admit it’s at conflict with China, Henderson saysOLEKSANDR GIMANOV/AFP via Getty Images

A Chinese aircraft carrier sails over the South China Sea in a drillReuters