China’s Economy is Built on Theft

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You may never have heard of ‘Shanzhai’, a Chinese term meaning something like ‘bandit camp’, but the odds are that you have already encountered it every time you shop on Amazon.

Shanzhai is one of China’s great industrial powerhouses. A generation ago it meant knockoffs of Louis Vuitton purses being peddled in American Chinatowns, then it was how every 99-cent store in the country was being stocked, and now it’s where the products you see on Amazon with preposterous names that seem like random letters strung together are coming from.

China’s economic miracle Is not built on hard work and innovative products, but on massive theft. Its rapid growth appears remarkable only when compared to legitimate economies, but the correct analogy for the “economic miracle” of the People’s Republic isn’t GDP growth in America or the European Union, but for criminal organizations which can experience record growth and collect huge profits by breaking all the rules until law enforcement finally shuts them down.

The People’s Republic of China is what happens when a criminal organization becomes too big to shut down and when there is no law enforcement agency capable of stopping its crimes

In 2019, 1 in 5 corporations accused China of stealing their intellectual property in just that year. The numbers are only growing worse as China copes with its domestic economic weaknesses after COVID, especially in its phantom domestic real estate market, by doubling down on economic warfare against the rest of the world. China’s economic successes don’t disprove the inevitable failure of Communism. China’s domestic economy is a failure. Its planned domestic production is a spectacle of disasters. China, like the USSR and Nazi Germany, can only compensate for its domestic ideological economic failures through a program of conquest.

The difference is that China’s plan of conquest is economic, not military, its invaders use computers rather than landing troops, and it sells the proceeds back to its victims.

China has militarized its entire economy and much of its civilian population to wage economic warfare against the world. In a land of total repression, the only freedom that Chinese people are allowed is the freedom to take advantage, to lie to, manipulate and rob foreigners.

Loyal Communists eagerly take part in “pig-butchering” romance scams that rob Americans, many of them elderly, of billions a year, they come to America as students, researchers and tech workers to steal our technology, they hack into our secrets, and form propaganda armies pretending to be Americans on social media to uphold China’s greatness.

And because it allows them a taste of freedom.

China’s citizens live under one of the more relentless police states ever invented. The People’s Republic is a police state that uses every tool from human informants to apps and AI to repress its people, but while ordinary Chinese people are tightly restricted in what they do at home, virtually any ‘profitable’ crime, from shipping fentanyl precursors to American intellectual property from foreigners, is countenanced, occasionally with a knowing wink by the regime.

Committing crimes at home is ruthlessly punished while committing crimes abroad is the engine of China’s economy. China’s thefts this year will inflict under $500 billion in losses on the United States. Those numbers reflect a network of public-private criminal enterprises bringing together hacking groups, spy agencies and companies that collude to steal research and copy products on a previously unprecedented scale. This global crime spree is China’s economic miracle.

The People’s Republic of China officially deplores criminal operations. Officially, it abides by some intellectual property laws. Officially it bars the shipment of fentanyl precursors. Officially it has no idea who these hackers are who keep stealing our defense and trade secrets. The same regime that oversees a social credit system and eliminates pictures of Winnie the Pooh from social media somehow can’t manage to root out large scale criminal enterprises.

China’s underground economy is a fiction. The dark and light sides of the economy, the bandit camps, pig-butchering scams and hacking groups are integrated with the major multinational companies and the state officials in red ties and Italian business suits, they just work different sides of the same global economic war. Chinese companies seduce their Western counterparts into partnering with them and transferring technology to them as the price of access to the Chinese markets. Western companies trade away their future and assets for short term quarterly gains. The technology transfers not only benefit the Chinese companies that devour them whole, taking over not only their Chinese businesses, but also their global businesses, but the ‘bandit camps’ that draw on the same resources and churn out copies of their products.

The defense secrets stolen by China’s hacking groups go to the military while the trade secrets go to the companies. The hacking groups are populated by some of the same ‘talent’ that take jobs doing the dirty work for the tech companies that they’re hacking and spying on. The ‘dark’ hacking groups and the regime’s official Thousand Talents program are different faces of the same thing. Much as the bandit camps and the companies that ‘partner’ with western multinational corporations are different in name only. They’re all tools of economic warfare.

China’s economy is organized crime on a scale so vast that it threatens the entire world.

Individually these are criminal tactics, taken together they’re a state of economic warfare. The difference between a criminal organization and a criminal state is not only in degrees. Criminals are at war with law-abiding individuals and groups within a society, but when a state becomes a criminal organization, it’s at war with the larger society of mankind. A criminal is a force of corruption, but China has demonstrated that a sufficiently large criminal state corrupts the world.

The People’s Republic of China has only been able to rob much of the world, including America, because it has also corrupted powerful elements within different countries. It has not only waged economic warfare against the world, but elevated those who benefit the most from it into positions of power where they are able to defend its thievery and even depict it as fair and right.

China’s American stooges lecture us on the “economic miracle” that “lifted millions of Chinese peasants out of poverty.” (At least those millions that the Chinese Communist regime had not previously killed.) But China’s economic miracle is no different than Mexican cartels lifting peasants out of poverty by employing them to smuggle drugs or Al Qaeda lifting peasants out of poverty to plant bombs. Underneath the sleek sheen of its fake capitalism, China’s economic miracle is no different. Its destructiveness is masked by its higher order of cleverness, but is ultimately a more complex way of employing large numbers of people in criminal operations.

The People’s Republic of China is not a country, it’s a state-owned criminal enterprise. Decoupling our economy from China is the first step in getting a global criminal organization to stop stealing from us.