As the People’s Republic of China responds to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, motivated in part by the PRC’s cyber-theft of American technology and proprietary information and the PRC’s extortion of the same and its demand for backdoors into foreign business’ (including especially American) core software as a condition of doing business in the PRC, buckle up, indeed, as the article at the link above suggests.
The PRC will do far more than this, though, as it attempts to coerce the US in the pursuit of its Warring States strategy.
Beijing retaliated against planned US tariffs on Chinese goods by targeting high-value American exports—including farm products, cars, and crude oil—bringing the world’s two biggest economies closer to an all-out trade war.
That’s just the beginning. If we don’t abjectly surrender, the PRC will expand their conflict with open cyber-warfare against us, with rapidly expanding attacks on our government and our infrastructure with denial of service attacks against our financial structure, our distribution grids, DoD, State, OMB (again), etc. These attacks also will include planting false data wherever they can and with simple vandalism on our key databases.
The PRC also will open the economic spigots with northern Korea and actively facilitate its final acquisition of a capability to deliver its stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The PRC will object and seek to prevent the Republic of China’s businesses from altering their supply chains, which currently involve PRC companies, and they will in the end openly attack—politically, economically, even militarily—the RoC.
Tariffs may or may not be the best way to fight the PRC’s war, but this is a struggle that we must win. Lose, and we will find ourselves badly curtailed. Recall that trillions of non-PRC-related trade sails to us through the South China Sea, which the PRC has claimed for itself and has been steadily militarizing.
