China’s Orwellian Threat to the Free World

From the peoples and citizens China oppresses to the nations it exploits and the Westerners it has co-opted, The China Nexus paints a comprehensive picture of China's global treachery.

The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny

By Benedict Rogers, Optimum Publishing International, 2022 • 415 pages

The verdict: This book surveys the full scope of China’s policies and goals, while detailing the specific actions it has taken and individuals it has targeted.

WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS

Author Benedict Rogers shows why the new Cold War between the West and China poses a greater threat than the U.S.-Soviet standoff ever did. China is more powerful and strategically adept than the Soviet Union ever was—and no less determined to defeat the West. Moreover, it leads a formidable anti-Western axis of Russia, Iran and North Korea while drawing many other countries into its orbit, most notably through the Belt and Road Initiative. The China Nexus is the wake-up call the free world needs.

THE ARGUMENT

At the heart of The China Nexus is a stark warning: China is an oppressive, amoral regime bent on remaking world order after its image. It seeks to discredit and weaken the West and replace its democratic paradigm with an authoritarian one. The West must respond with strength and resolve—sanctioning China for its human rights abuses, exposing its lies, and defending its victims. But confronting China is not merely a moral imperative; it is an act of self-defense. Rogers calls on the U.S., for example, to abandon its policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, and replace that doctrine with “strategic clarity,” and leave China in no doubt that the West will defend Taiwan.

Rogers leaves virtually no dimension of the China threat unexamined. He dedicates individual chapters each to the persecution of Christians, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong; organ harvesting, the suffocation of Hong Kong, belligerence toward Taiwan, and its support for a dangerous, nuclear-armed North Korea. He then lays out a clear course of action for the free world :(1) hold China’s leaders accountable for human rights violations, including through sanctions; (2) provide lifelines and a “platform in the free world” for those who are suffering the most; and (3) “reduce strategic dependency on China” while strengthening alliances among democratic countries and with Taiwan.

“China is ‘far more dangerous and advanced’ than the Soviet Union, because it is so interconnected with the global economy and deeply embedded in our own societies.”

—The China Nexus, pp. 360–61

WHAT WORKS

Rogers wistfully recounts the relative liberalization of the 1980s-90s, when hopes that China would evolve into a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system gained currency. Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012 shattered those hopes. Rogers compares Xi to Stalin and portrays his rule as every bit as totalitarian as Mao’s. At the same time, his deep affection for the Chinese people draws a crucial distinction: the nexus driving China’s oppression is not its people, but the ruthless Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. Rogers exposes the extraordinary reach of that regime—from its corruption of the UN and cynical support for North Korea to its assault on Hong Kong and the critical importance of Taiwan to the defense of democracy. But nothing lays bare the CCP’s brutality more starkly than his account of organ harvesting: industrial-scale killing for profit.

WHAT DOESN’T

The China Nexus includes too many of Rogers’s personal anecdotes for my taste, especially in the early chapters. Yet his firsthand experience in China strengthens his credibility and gives the reader a vivid sense of the man behind the book. His stories of teaching English as a young man in the coastal city of Qingdao (known for its beer), for example, are engaging and memorable. More consequential is his account of five years as a journalist in Hong Kong, as China steadily tightened its totalitarian grip on the city—a moving, firsthand portrait of how China methodically and brutally crushed the freedoms of its own people.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Western patriots cannot afford to underestimate China. Through programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is strategically, patiently, and purposefully expanding trade ties, controlling key infrastructure, and gaining leverage in many countries across Asia, Africa and even in Europe. In the West, China has become such an economic powerhouse that many cannot imagine doing without it. But national security must come before profit. The West must recognize the threat the CCP poses to Western democracy and abandon the illusion that appeasement can make China’s ambitions disappear. As Rogers demonstrates, appeasing China in the hope that it will abandon its campaign to defeat the West is akin to Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace for our time” after accepting Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Anyone seeking to understand the full extent of the threat China poses should read this book. Hoping for the best requires preparing for the worst—politically, economically, and militarily. Decades of willful ignorance and appeasement will backfire, emboldening the very regime they were meant to placate. To preserve the peace, the West must confront the CCP belligerence wherever it appears.