Review of Bowing to Beijing: How Barack Obama is Hastening America’s Decline and Ushering a Century of Chinese Domination by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II.
In the early 1920’s, Vladimir Lenin was attending one of his regular meetings with the Politburo. The Soviet Union was facing famine, riots and widespread social upheaval caused largely by its socialist collectivist policies. The specter of the world’s first communist state, dedicated to nothing less than world revolution and the overthrow of the Christian social order, struck many in the West with well-founded fear and apprehension.
And yet, legions of Western companies were pouring money and technology into the U.S.S.R. Household names such as Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the Radio Corporation of America among others, were investing millions of dollars in Russia, building factories, selling their products, and worst of all, providing the Russian government with every sort of technical assistance and expertise. Turning to his advisor, Grigory Zinoviev, Lenin remarked that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Historians tell us that Lenin never actually made this comment, but a more accurate summary of the relationship between the communist world and the West could scarcely have been made. In a single sentence, it affirmed: (1) that Communism is inherently weak, and (2) it will nevertheless conquer the world, not by its own strength, but through complicity, cynicism and treason from within the West.
How history repeats itself. In their aptly titled book, Bowing to Beijing: How Barack Obama is Hastening America’s Decline and Ushering a Century of Chinese Domination, Brett Decker and William C. Triplett II demonstrate beyond any doubt that this Western self-demolition in the face of the communist threat continues unabated, not with the old Soviet Union, but with China. They show how the present Obama Administration and fifth column politicians, media personalities and businessmen – motivated in no small part by sympathy for Marxism and antipathy for Christian civilization as symbolized by the United States – are delivering our country into the hands of the Red Dragon.
In the world of statecraft, symbolism carries tremendous weight. Mere words, simple gestures and even body language can have major long-term consequences. A case in point, and the inspiration for the book’s title was the bow President Obama gave to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. The bow has become a fitting metaphor for the Obama administration’s China policy: a subservient, groveling and penitential gesture about America’s sins, real or imagined. Quoting Dr. Lillian Glass, an expert in body language:
“The Chinese leader does not return the bow. In fact, the leader looks very superior to Obama as he doesn’t bow back…The bottom line, perceptions wise, is that when a president of a powerful country bows to other heads of state or those in a lesser political position, it makes him appear weak. There is nothing humorous about a president of one of the most powerful countries in the world being perceived as weak, under any circumstances.”
The gesture has not been lost on the Chinese. The communist regime, emboldened by America’s perceived decline, continues to enslave its 1.3 billion people, persecute Christianity (especially Catholics faithful to Rome), embark on a massive military buildup, threaten and intimidate its neighbors, brazenly steal secrets and technology from American corporations and the U.S. government and export weapons and technology to terrorists and their state sponsors such as Syria, Iran and North Korea.
Bowing to Beijing lists in detail, case after case, of blatant Chinese aggression, such as the 2011 encounter between the USS McCampell and the MV Light, a Chinese-owned merchant ship involved in high-tech weapons smuggling to the Middle East via Burma. And yes, slave labor, not to mention torture, kangaroo courts, forced abortion, non-existent property rights, “shoot-to-order” prisoner organ harvesting and “re-education labor camps” are a way of life in twenty-first century China.
Admittedly, wishful thinking about China comes from the political right almost as much as it does from the left, albeit for different reasons. A persistent conservative myth about China is that free-trade will eventually win over the communists to Western-style democracy. Supposedly, the Chinese will inevitably see the error of their ways and dictatorship will give way to elections, peace and prosperity.
This rosy picture is fake. In China, only the communists become rich, and the rich become, well…communists. Of all Chinese with a net worth of over $16 million, 91% are children of top Communist party members. Indeed, a pseudo-aristocracy comprised of a mere 200 to 300 members of important communist party families, called “Princelings,” wield near total control over the government, economy, military and financial system of the supposedly “classless” People’s Republic.
Ironically, China’s burgeoning middle class is becoming the Communist Party’s strongest support. Anyone who gets rich in China owes that wealth to the good graces of the Communist Party. Why would they want to shatter the status quo? Regime change is bad for business, after all.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Bowing to Beijing lies in the fact that Decker and Triplett understand the larger picture. The United States is arguably the last great remnant of
Christian order and civilization in the world today. Western leftists have spent decades trying to undermine and destroy this order. They dream of the day when the “imperialist” Christian West will cease to be the preeminent influence on the planet. China, like the Soviet Union before it, is their best hope to vanquish Western “oppression.” The supportive media almost cannot contain their enthusiasm for the upcoming “Chinese century.”
Bowing to Beijing is a crucially important book that helps dispel this myth of Chinese power. It shows how China, despite all the help from the West, is fundamentally weak. An utterly corrupt, amoral system will never rule the world of its own strength. Just as a terrorist cannot resist the power of a modern, serious, disciplined army, China can only hang us if we sell them the rope and climb the gallows ourselves.