Sobering headline in The Wall Street Journal: “Xi Is Ratcheting Up China’s Pain Threshold for a Long Fight With Trump.”
The hottest issue, of course, is trade. Negotiations are in an uncertain state, which seems to be, in fact, the new normal. Plenty more flashpoints, too, including Taiwan, other territorial claims in the Pacific, and the latest threat, Deep Seek, the nimble Chinese AI that seems to be, in fact, a sinister twofer: both a copycat and spyware.
In the Journal’s words, “The Chinese leader wants to harden his country specifically for a confrontation with the U.S., urging officials to engage in what he calls ‘extreme scenario thinking.’” Reaching back to its roots, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs circulated a video of communist supremo Mao Zedong, declaiming in 1953 about the then-raging Korean War: “No matter how long this war will last, we’ll never yield.”
Americans may be a little fuzzy on that conflict, in which nearly 34,000 American GIs died. Yet the Chinese remember it better, as some 150,000 of their soldiers—all “volunteers,” supposedly having rushed to the front to repel the Yankee imperialists—died on nearby territory. Indeed, the regime never lets its people forget; to the CCP, the fight against the USA is a major validator.
For his part, Donald Trump, too, is talking tough: “We’re taking back our country from a sick political class that got rich selling America out and bleeding America dry… After decades of politicians who destroyed Detroit to build up Beijing, you finally have a champion for workers in the White House—and instead of putting China First, I am putting Michigan first and I’m putting America First.”
So it’s America First vs. China First. But how, exactly, could this competition be manifested? To be sure, the CCP regime is spending heavily on its military—although not so much as the U.S. Perhaps the PRC has achieved significant cost-savings by sponging up U.S. intellectual property (IP); many of its weapons do, in fact, look like knockoffs of American designs.
On the overall issue of Chinese IP theft, it’s interesting that this is one topic on which the Trumpified FBI still links to the words of former director Christopher Wray: “The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China.”
About now, foreign policy realists and the restraint-minded might be asking themselves: Is there any way out of this cycle of great-power competition—this Thucydides Trap, this cold-war, risking a hot war? Perhaps a President Rand Paul would treat these issues in such a way as to moot the Blob and its hawkish presuppositions.
Yet sometimes, war comes anyway. Belgium wasn’t looking for a war in 1914, or 1940, and yet war came. Even those with an essentially defensive outlook still need to think about defense.
So now to Donald Trump. The 47th president is often thought to be the most realpolitik-oriented commander-in-chief since the 34th president, Dwight Eisenhower. Trump’s hopes for settling the Ukraine War seem to echo, in fact, the way Ike settled the Korean War, and Trump seems eager to avoid other conflicts.
As for Xi, no doubt Trump would love to make a “big, beautiful deal” with him. Yet the Thucydidean forces of tragic history might be so strong as to thwart an entente.
Meanwhile, the arms race continues. The U.S. boasts 11 aircraft carriers, while the Chinese have three, with a fourth on the way. Also, China builds 50 percent of the world’s ships, while the U.S. builds just 0.1 percent—although Trump has a plan to up that share. Regarding this rivalry, the historical-tragical mind sees echoes of the early 20th century British–German contest to build the biggest dreadnought.
Today, it’s possible that the Chinese have gained a big edge on a different kind of nautical equipment: landing barges, the kind that could be used to invade Taiwan. (In 2022, this author ventured a solution for Taiwan that, it’s safe to say, has never made it into any Blob briefing paper.)
Yet for the most part, CCP China has avoided direct competition with the U.S. Is that because China is weak? Or because it’s clever? Some 2,500 years ago, the military philosopher Sun Tzu wrote, “All warfare is based on deception… We must make the enemy believe we are far away.” To be sure, all militaries have stealthy traditions, and yet the Chinese have been more inscrutable than most.
Back in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping set the Sun Tzu tone: “Hide Your Strength, Bide Your Time.” China played the “developing country” card: Don’t mind us, we’re very poor. Indeed, to this day, China gets a small amount of foreign aid money from the U.S., more from the European Union, and much more from the World Bank.
The American political system hardly noticed when PRC agents overcame their presumed poverty and poured cash into Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. And we also barely noticed that, at the same time, the PRC gained much of our satellite technology.
These were, after all, the days when the U.S. and China declared themselves to be “strategic partners.” Clinton brought China into the World Trade Organization, while George W. Bush looked into the Chinese soul and saw an ally in the “global war on terror.”
In 2017, Xi traveled to Davos, posing as the champion of globalism—in contrast to you-know-who. Why, the Chinese argue that they are upholding the liberal world’s green climate aspirations—even as they themselves are still building coal-burning plants.
All this maneuvering has given the PRC fans in high places, such as The New York Times’s Tom Friedman, who has been writing in praise of the communist regime for decades; just in April, filing from Shanghai, his Steffens-esque headline: “I Just Saw the Future: It Was Not in America.”
In response to Chinese strategery and Western dupery, America-Firsters need to think harder. One path to enlightenment is revisiting classic studies of China’s martial ways. One such is Scott Boorman’s 1969 tome, The Protracted Game: A Wei-Chi Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy.
Weiqi (transliterated wei-chi in some earlier systems of romanization) is the national strategy game of China; it is to the Chinese what chess is to Westerners, enjoyed by intellectuals and generals (plus admittedly, plenty of nerds). Also known by its Japanese name, go, weiqi is played with simple, undifferentiated pieces, called stones, white vs. black, on a flat grid. Unlike chess, once a stone is put down on the board, it can never be moved. But it can be removed—if the opposing player succeeds in surrounding it. That’s the object of the game, to defeat the other player by wiping out his forces and occupying the most space on the board. In Boorman’s words, victory comes from “sitting the enemy to death.”
In terms of motion and action, weiqi makes chess seem like pinball. In fact, playing weiqi is more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, even as you seek to disassemble the opponent’s pieces.
Boorman writes that Mao Zedong was an “avid” player of weiqi. He applied all his wiles over two decades as he led the communists to their 1949 victory over the Chinese government, led by Chiang Kai-shek.
In a 1938 pamphlet, Mao wrote that the Reds’ struggle was
rather like a game of wei-chi. Campaigns and battles fought by the two sides resemble the capturing of each other’s pieces, and the establishment of enemy strongholds (such as Taiyuan) and our guerrilla base areas (such as the Wutai Mountains) resembles moves to dominate spaces on the board.
Boorman adds, “The underlying dynamic of Communist mobilization technique was encirclement, in direct analogy with that key wei-chi process.”
In a war of weiqi, the risk is that you wake up one day and realize that you’re surrounded and overwhelmed. In that same 1938 pamphlet, Mao added, a bit ominously, “If the game of wei-chi is extended to include the world, there is yet a third form of encirclement as between us and the enemy.” (Emphasis added.)
After Mao’s victory in 1949, American politics was vexed by the question, “Who lost China?” Now, eight decades later, we’re asking, “Who helped China get so strong?” There is an even more urgent question: “How do we defend ourselves?” Answering that means examining all the possible threats.
Some say there’s a fifth column in North America. Yet in addition, there seem to be many more infiltrating columns. The Spectator observed, “Scratch at almost any major US political story and sooner or later you’ll hit a big red nerve that belongs to the Chinese Communist party.” Going beyond familiar—but serious—concerns such as trade, cyber theft, counterfeiting, rare earth monopolization, and fentanyl, The Spectator focused on China’s $1 billion investment toward influencing Harvard’s “IP.”
Want more to worry about? Think drones. They’re obviously mobile, and yet their mere presence in the U.S. gives them a potential weiqi vibe of wait and see. According to a 2024 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a single Chinese company, DJI, accounts for 80 percent of world drone production; in the U.S. market, it’s 90 percent.
So here’s a question: If the Chinese make our drones; could they, potentially, turn them against us? Like so many flying Frankensteins? Trojan horses? (Two years ago here at The American Conservative, this author considered some of the implications for homeland security.)
If we escalate up the sneakiness scale, there’s the issue of Covid-19—how it came to be, and how it got loose. Was it a Chinese bio-weapon? That’s the emerging consensus: One close observer, Dr. Richard H. Ebright, blames China for unleashing a pandemic that killed 20 million and cost the world economy $25 trillion. Oh, but wait: According to Ebright (and many others), the Wuhan Bat Lady must share credit with Dr. Anthony Fauci and all the other American gain-of-functioneers. So maybe the PRC has at least something of a point when it seeks to shift blame for Covid onto Americans—at least a few Americans.
Interestingly, the same Rand Paul is now leading the Covid-origin investigation for the U.S. Senate. That’s encouraging in terms of fearless truth-telling, and yet it’s also a reminder that even a hardcore libertarian will find himself enmeshed in China concerns. Even avowed non-interventionists must realize that other countries might be plotting to intervene here.
Another huge window of vulnerability is AI. Last year, the Hudson Institute’s Arthur Herman wrote,
China was paving the way toward an AI-dominated future none of us wants. For the past seven years, China has been moving ahead with its plans to become the world’s AI superpower. This includes building the next high-tech industrial revolution for victory on the battlefield and creating a total surveillance multiverse.
Mindful that anything digital is AI-able, we should look askance at all Chinese electronics and software in America, starting with TikTok. That popular app is routinely found to have delivered troves of personal data back to its Chinese masters.
There’s also that new kid on the AI block, DeepSeek. This Chinese company burst on the scene earlier this year offering supposed technical superiority in the “AIrms race,” even as it fended off questions as to its exact provenance and its true purpose. In the words of a 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “DeepSeek presents risks … to the United States’ partners and allies, as well as the tech industry.”
The report found, for instance, that because DeepSeek was sloppily built, it lacks basic security protocols. So American AIs, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini (last year, this author mocked an earlier version; it’s gotten better since) are many times more effective at thwarting hacks than DeepSeek.
In April, the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (yes, that’s its exact name) declared,
DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security. Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot, offering users a way to generate text and answer questions, closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China, creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law.
Of course, conservatives might be thinking, None of these companies, on either side of the Pacific, are to be trusted. It’s hard to argue that point, but we can say of American companies that there’s always the hope they can be made to operate within the metes and bounds of the U.S. Constitution. Of a bad-actor American company, we can still ask, Compared to what?
In the meantime, we haven’t fully fathomed that DeepSeek is now everywhere in American life: on smart phones, in crypto, and even in HR. Indeed, given the inherent interconnectedness of the internet, it’s possible, even likely, that the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans is now sitting in Chinese databases. So as we think about it, the idea of a fifth column, or a sixth or seventh or eighth column, might need to be revised into infinity.
Can American regulators and defenders keep up? Let’s hope so, because there’s more trouble coming, as other Chinese companies, including Huawei and Alibaba, debut their AIs. In fact, the PRC brags that it has built an AI “supermarket.”
Just last month Xi Jinping told the CCP Politburo, according to a readout translated by ace Sinologist Bill Bishop, “AI can become an international public good that benefits all humanity.” My considerably freer translation: Just as we gained worldwide market share by dumping cheap goods, let’s now cut prices to insinuate our AI into everything around the world, positioning our tech like so many surrounding weiqi pieces. Then, whenever we want to, we can remove opposing stones and occupy their spaces.
Here’s how a conference this month at the American Enterprise Institute summarized China’s strategy: “Rather than competing for AGI [Artificial General Intelligence, the next step for AI] breakthroughs, China’s race is about embedding AI throughout its economy as quickly as possible.” In other words, let the Americans spend money building the niftiest tech—which the PRC can likely then steal, anyway. In the meantime, if Chinese AI is embedded (nice weiqi image) everywhere, from China to other cooperating (or unwitting) countries, Beijing wins the great game.
Mind-boggling tech brings forth nightmare forebodings, straight out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror: We wake up one day surrounded by our own machines—which are now their machines.
Yet there’s more: Digital updates notwithstanding, weiqi is eternally about the patient positioning of hard physical objects. The weiqi-minded might see in those impassive stones the inspiration for a devilish plan in line with Xi’s call for “extreme scenario thinking.”
For instance: Is it possible that the PRC has put down “sleeper” nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction, inside the U.S.? Given the porous-to-open borders of the last three decades—punctuated only by brief periods of Trumpian closure—is it really so hard to imagine that the PRC might have snuck in weapons, or the components of weapons, for later assembly and use? Just like stones in weiqi, these pre-positioned weapons would sit passively, tucked away under American cities, never moving, always waiting. There’d be no need for launch rockets, or guidance systems, just a way of detonating them if the call ever came from Beijing.
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The point here isn’t to give the Chinese ideas about devastating America. After all, plenty of thrillers have treated sneak-nukes already, including Tom Clancy’s 1991 best-seller, The Sum of All Fears. After 9/11, plenty more grim scenarios were war-gamed.
Yet China is a lot smarter than was Al Qaeda. The Chinese play quiet weiqi, not noisy jihad. Americans should be reminded: When studying potential enemies, we must understand the game they are playing—which might be much different than the game we like to play. If the Chinese know weiqi and its politico-military applications, then we must be sedulous students—and effective counter-players.
Knowledge is power, and power keeps the peace.
