A May 22 New York Times report on the account offered only general details of the role the US Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the run-up to the 1958 Taiwan crisis. However, it is now clear from the original highly classified documents as well as other evidence now available that from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs aimed first and foremost to exploit the tensions to carry out nuclear strikes against Chinese nuclear military targets deep in highly-populated areas.

Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang regime and the Joint Chiefs were allies in wanting to embroil the United States in a war with China. (...)

According to the account authored by Halperin, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, told State Department officials in an August meeting that the third phase would require nuclear strikes on Chinese bases as far north as Shanghai.

The Joint Chiefs played down the threat to civilian casualties from such tactical atomic weapons, emphasizing that an airburst of tactical atomic explosions would generate little radioactive fallout. But the account indicates that they provided no concrete information on expected civilian casualties.

Given the fact that both the Chinese gun emplacements across the Taiwan Strait and a key airbase serving the Chinese military forces in any conflict over the offshore islands would have been located close to significant population centers, such atomic explosions would have certainly caused civilian casualties on a massive scale. (...)

When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that Japan would object strongly to using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland, and forbid the launching of nuclear weapons from their territory, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke suggested that the opposition to nuclear weapons in Japan was “inspired by the Communists,” and that foreign leaders would soon recognize that the use of nuclear weapons by the US “was in their interests”.

Burke closed his argument by claiming that if the US did not maintain the threat of tactical nuclear weapons in conflicts, it would “lose the entire world within three years.” That obviously absurd argument suggests that the intense desire among the Joint Chiefs to use nuclear weapons against China was less motivated by any threat from Communist Chinese than by their own institutional interests. (...)

But more frequently than not, the companies comply with law enforcement demands. And that underlines an awkward truth: As their products become more central to people’s lives, the world’s largest tech companies have become surveillance intermediaries and crucial partners to authorities, with the power to arbitrate which requests to honor and which to reject.

But the White House cited no financial commitments, and there is sharp disagreement among the United States and its allies about how to respond to China’s rising power.

Mr. Biden has made challenging a rising China and a disruptive Russia the centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to build up democracies around the world as a bulwark against spreading authoritarianism. Beijing, for its part, has pointed to the poor U.S. response to the pandemic and divisive American politics — particularly the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — as signs that democracy is failing.

Faced with an urgent competitive threat from China, the Senate is poised to pass the most expansive industrial policy legislation in U.S. history, blowing past partisan divisions over government support for private industry to embrace a nearly quarter-trillion-dollar investment in building up America’s manufacturing and technological edge.

The legislation, which is scheduled for a vote on Tuesday afternoon, is expected to pass by a  large margin. That alone is a testament to how commercial and military competition with Beijing has become one of the few issues that can unite both political parties.

It is an especially striking shift for Republicans, who are following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump and casting aside what was once their party’s staunch opposition to government intervention in the economy. Now, both parties are embracing an enormous investment in semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence research, robotics, quantum computing and a range of other technologies.

And while the bill’s sponsors are selling it in part as a jobs plan, the debate over its passage has been laced with Cold War references and warnings that a failure to act would leave the United States perilously dependent on its biggest geopolitical adversary.

Ms. Fazili said that cabinet departments had embarked on a governmentwide effort “to really diagnose the problems, understand what’s going on out there in these markets, and see what actions can be taken to close those vulnerabilities.”

As part of the initiative, the Department of Agriculture has allocated more than $4 billion to bolster “a resilient food supply chain” that would prevent or lessen shortages, she added.

The initiative was bundled with the creation of “trade strike force” targeting China and other countries to push back “on unfair foreign competition, unfair foreign subsidies and other trade practices that have adversely impacted U.S. manufacturing.”

Chinese workers allege forced labor, abuses in Xi’s ‘Belt and Road’ program

For months, Ding was locked in a 170-square-foot workers’ dormitory near a Chinese smelting facility in Konawe, Indonesia, where he had been assigned to carry out one of his country’s vaunted “Belt and Road” projects.

The 40-year-old native of China’s Henan province, who gave only his surname out of security fears, said a guard kept watch at his door. When the coronavirus ravaged the dorm in November, he developed a 102-degree fever. Still, he could not leave.

Finally, earlier this year, Ding pulled apart the plastic bars on a rear window and climbed out, fleeing on a motorbike driven by a friend. “It was like I went to hell and back,” he said. “I had no other choice but to escape.”  

Interviews with labor rights advocates and a dozen Chinese workers employed by state-owned companies and subcontractors reflect a pattern of abuse that threatens to undermine China’s ambitious bid for diplomatic and economic influence, a mission closely tied to the legacy of leader Xi Jinping. Many spoke on the condition of full or partial anonymity, fearing retribution.

New York-based China Labor Watch asserts in a new report that overseas Chinese workers are victims of human trafficking and forced labor. Workers described being held against their will, forced to work while infected with the coronavirus and deceived into working illegally. Their passports were seized, they said, and most had gone months without pay. Some said they were beaten for protesting conditions or forced into “thought training.”

“The entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor,” said Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch, whose report was drawn from interviews with workers in six countries. “Chinese authorities want the Belt and Road projects for political gain and need to use these workers.”

In 2020, a bipartisan group of senators and Admiral Davidson established a new fund for militarism in the Asia-Pacific, the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, or PDI. In March of this year, Davidson asked for $27 billion for PDI to pay for new airfields, long-range missiles, space-based surveillance radars, joint exercises, and more. President Biden’s initial budget, released last month, signals “most, if not all” of these PDI requests will be funded; identifies China as the top “threat”; increases defense spending by 1.6 percent; and allocates half of our nation’s discretionary budget toward defense.

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, notes, “Biden is very much a creature of Cold War bipartisanship. His comfort zone was established by this western alliance against the Soviet Union and communism. Therefore I was worried during the campaign that (Biden) was going to try to reconstitute bipartisanship in foreign policy while pursuing a more partisan agenda domestically. That’s precisely what has happened.”

This summer, the Senate will likely pass a broad, bipartisan package to counter China, including the Strategic Competition Act, which contains a number of hardline stances, some inserted by Senator Marco Rubio. The act expands unilateral sanctions on China, requires referring to Taiwan as a government, and strikes references to “One China” policy. According to Tang, the act also appropriates $100 million annually for 2022 through 2026 for the U.S. Agency for Global Media—including government propaganda programs, such as Voice of America and CIA-backed Radio Free Asia—to spread information on “the negative impact of activities related to (China’s) Belt and Road Initiative.”

Tang speculates the Belt and Road Initiative is targeted because it isolates U.S. trade power and therefore reduces U.S. sanction power. The appropriation is part of a larger $1.5 billion Countering Chinese Influence Fund to combat the “malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally.” The act also requires that the Committee of Foreign Investment review any higher institution donation above $1 million for fear of espionage. Senator Mitt Romney recently said he’s “very, very reluctant to bring in students from China ... here to steal technology.”

The Strategic Competition Act—and the rhetoric around it—echoes sinophobia during Cold War McCarthyism, when the FBI banned Chinese Americans from transferring money to their relatives in China who depended on them for survival, tapped phone lines, interrogated an officer of the leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance until he committed suicide, demanded 40 major Chinese American associations produce full records and photographs of their membership within 24 hours, and imprisoned and deported Chinese American intellectuals. When the U.S. is in conflict with another nation, that nation’s diaspora becomes the target of state suspicion and violence here.

Indeed, the same people and organizations calling China a grave threat nakedly reveal the real reason for American brinkmanship. The Council on Foreign Relations reports in 2015 that “preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective ... in the twenty-first century.” President Biden himself wrote in 2020, “The Biden foreign policy agenda will place the U.S. back at the head of the table.… The world does not organize itself.”

China is not a threat because it’s attacking U.S. soil. China is a threat because it threatens American global hegemony. Here the underlying logic of Yellow Peril becomes clear. Proliferating the false idea that China will take over the West rationalizes starting conflict in the Asia-Pacific; this nearly perfectly parallels the geopolitical theater of a century ago. The Yellow Peril, the faceless horde, the ever-growing yellow population, an existential threat to the West, to liberal human rights, to the market economy, to the “rules-based” order, to American primacy.

Who we define as our international enemy, or perhaps just competitor, also becomes our enemy at home. These incidents are not accidents—they are collateral damage—because Yellow Peril and its relatives xenophobia, sinophobia, anti-Asian racism, and McCarthyism have always been tremendously useful in building consensus in the American public.

Grazier describes a military-industrial-congressional complex first warned of by President Eisenhower in 1961. Defense industry money drives increased military budgets in three ways:defense contracts, operating like pork barrel, that impact the districts and constituents of members of congress; political contributions to congressional campaigns and at least $100 million in annual defense lobbying; and the funding of a national security elite, including $1 billion for think tanks such as the Center for New American Security, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations, which launder industry interests through mainstream media.

In the United States, we commonly understand “Yellow Peril” as a xenophobic response to influxes of Chinese laborers. Yellow Peril produced national shames such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remains the first and only ban on all immigrants from an ethnic group. But the propaganda also supported foreign policy. In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supposedly dreamed of Buddha seated on a dragon, threatening to invade Europe. He used Yellow Peril (die Gelbe Gefahr) to build alliances with other imperialist nations and justify invading China first lest the East conquer the West. In the Opium Wars of the 1840s, the U.S. and other Western nations killed 30,000 Chinese people so that they could forcibly sell opium to civilians, while notable Americans and elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton built their wealth on opium colonialism. This is the foundational moment of U.S.-China relations.

Today, Yellow Peril propaganda is bipartisan and mainstream. Indo-Pacific commander Admiral Phil Davidson’s warning of China’s “pernicious” and “malign” influence, an Atlantic Council report that lengthily describes how “China presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world,” Senator Jim Inhofe’s belief that “we’re in the most dangerous time of our lifetime”—these are only the tamest examples of such rhetoric on China. Dan Grazier, the Jack Shanahan Military Fellow at the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, notes that at the Senate confirmation hearings for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, China was mentioned at least 70 times.

Critical to this contemporary promotion of Yellow Peril is the image of China as the military aggressor. But right now, the U.S. has 800 overseas military bases, half of them encircling China. China has one (in Djibouti). The U.S. spends more on defense than the next 10 nations combined, including China. The U.S. has extensively planned for a naval blockade of China, cutting off its oil supply. The U.S. has 20 times the nuclear warheads of China and yet is still spending an additional $100 billion to build up a new nuclear arms arsenal. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has stationed 130,000 troops in the region, conducting nearly daily military exercises with drones, missile drills, helicopters, island hopping and more, according to Madison Tang, campaign coordinator at CODEPINK. “These military exercises create accidents. These exercises can be provocations in and of themselves. There’s a lot of military brinkmanship happening where American forward posturing (is being) framed as defensive,” says Tang.