The China Threat and How to Resolve It

May 14, 2007 — -- A fundamental lesson of the 20th century is that democracies cannot coexist indefinitely with powerful and ambitious totalitarian regimes.

Sooner or later the competing goals and ideologies bring conflict, whether hot war or cold, until one or the other side prevails. This central lesson must be learned before we can even begin to understand the threat posed by the People's Republic of China. Unfortunately, the current political leaders and elites are slow learners.

To learn more about the Intelligence Squared-US Debate series, and its May 16 debate about China, go to http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/

Nazism and Soviet-style communism were the ideologies that guided the past century's dictatorships, and they were discredited only when their brutal regimes were destroyed at fearful cost in human life and material wealth. The great threat of the 21st century — to the United States and the world — is "socialism with Chinese characteristics," as the unrepentantly violent rulers in Beijing beguilingly call the Marxist-Leninist theory and practice that oppresses the 1.3 billion inhabitants of the People's Republic of China.

The China threat is not an illusionary theory, as Beijing's rulers want the world to believe. It is real and growing stronger under misguided policies of a coterie of China specialists, inside government and especially within intelligence agencies, as well as in the academic world and the business community. Successive U.S. administrations share the blame, with the liberal Democratic administration of President Clinton accelerating the problem through a series of missteps, fumbling and outright appeasement that is in a class by itself. The result has been that the United States is actually helping to create a new superpower threat to world peace and stability in the decades to come.

China today is ruled by a small collective dictatorship of Communist Party policymakers and has repeatedly shown itself prone to miscalculations on a staggering scale — miscalculations that have cost tens of millions of its own people's lives. A 1999 assessment put the death toll under Chinese communism at between 44.5 million to 72 million people through repression, famine, executions and forced labor.

Bill Gertz is a reporter and columnist for The Washington Times. His most recent book is "Enemies: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets — And How We Let It Happen." (Crown Forum)