David P. Goldman - You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World

Advance Praise for
You Will Be Assimilated

David Goldman was an early voice in the wilderness, cautioning that it was one thing to deride Chinese ambition and capabilities, but quite another to thwart them. In his latest analysis, he offers a realist alarm that confronting China is as necessary as it will be taxing, given how long an unprepared and nave America has underestimated Chinese talent, strategic thinking, and persistence. A realistic wake-up call from an American patriot, polymath scholar, and international financial analyst who knows China all too well.

Victor Davis Hanson, author The Second World Wars , The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

China is our enemy. President Trump knows it. David Goldman knows it. Read You Will Be Assimilated if you want to know how serious the threat is. And how America can win.

Sebastian Gorka, Ph.D., Former Strategist to President Trump, Host of America First

David Goldman has lived in, visited, watched, and interpreted China for decades. An economist and a polymath, he predicted long ago the things about China that the rest of us are beginning to see. In this master work, he tells a terrible story, and he shows how to redeem that story from its possible end in disaster. If you want to know where the world is going and how to stop it, read this book.

Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College

David Goldmans book is an urgent wake-up call for America. He details Chinas comprehensive plan to replace us as the worlds most powerful country and dominate global technology, security, communications, and trade within the next few years. There is still time for America to regain the initiative, but only if we act wisely and quickly. If you read just one book about how China plans to make the 21st century theirs and what we can do about it, read You Will Be Assimilated.

KT McFarland, Former Deputy National Security Advisor and author of Revolution: Trump, Washington and We the People

A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-64293-540-0

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-541-7

You Will Be Assimilated:

Chinas Plan to Sino-form the World

2020 by David P. Goldman

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Cody Corcoran

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

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Published in the United States of America

To my teachers. For my children .

CONTENTS

The late Elizabeth Kbler-Ross described five stages of griefdenial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, and depression. Her model applies to Americas response to the rise of China as a global power. For the past decade, we have been in denial. We couldnt believe a country that for generations had been a byword for poverty could compete with us. With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, we have transitioned to anger. As matters stand, we will be bargaining before long.

Chinas national champion, Huawei, is rolling out the next, or fifth, generation of mobile broadband across the whole of the Eurasian continent, from Vladivostok, Russia, to Bristol, England, despite a full-court press by the Trump Administration to stop it. In January 2020, Americas closest ally, Great Britain, brushed off President Trumps personal intervention to allow Huawei to build out part of its 5G networks. The European Community announced that it would take no measures to exclude the Chinese giant. Washington tried to strangle Huawei by slapping export controls on US components for its 5G equipment and smartphones, to no avail. Huawei achieved self-sufficiency in chip production and continues to expand with Chinese and other Asian components. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deplored this outcome as the greatest strategic disaster in US history. At stake is not only the sinews of the new industrial age, but scores of spinoff applications that will transform manufacturing, mining, healthcare, finance, transportation, and retailingvirtually the entirety of economic lifein what China calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The year 2019 was a watershed. As matters stand, the United States will be overtaken by a resurgent China in the next several years. The consequences for American living standards and national security will be dire. This book explains what China is, what it wants to become, and what we can do to ensure Americas pre-eminent place in the world.

I wrote this book because everything youve heard about China is wrongnot entirely wrong, but not right enough. However bad you think things are, theyre a lot worse.

The coronavirus epidemic was Chinas Chernobyl moment.

During February, the phrase Chernobyl moment became a byword for Chinas predicament in the first phase of the epidemic. A month later, when the count of new cases in China dropped to near zero, dark rumors circulated on social media that China had intentionally propagated the virus in a plot to undermine the West. For one brief hopeful moment, the entirety of the Western commentariat believed that Chinas ascendancy had come to a sorry and sudden end. Contempt for China in the United States has turned into anger. As this book goes to press, the media is full of demands to hold China accountable for the coronavirus. There are few practical suggestions, though, about how that might be accomplished. The fact remains that China has repeated the benefit of its massive investment in artificial intelligence and the communications infrastructure that supports it. That is a far greater challenge for the United States than the coronavirus epidemic itself.

Chinas weaknesses, but even more, its strengths, were evident in the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The first response of provincial officials in Wuhan City to the appearance of the virus was to cover it up and intimidate physicians who tried to raise the alarmnotably Dr. Li Wenliang, who died of COVID-19, and to whom the government later gave a solemn apology. Chinas rigid hierarchy typically responds to bad news by killing the messenger. But when China mobilized to stop the epidemic, it reduced the rate of new infections to effectively zero by the week of March 16, 2020. The full story remains to be written, although I sketched the basics in Asia Times. Chinese government algorithms can estimate the probability that a given neighborhood, or even an individual, has exposure to COVID-19 by matching the location of smartphones to known locations of infected individuals or groups. The authorities use this information to use limited medical resources more efficiently by, for example, directing tests for the virus to high-risk subjects identified by the artificial- intelligence algorithm.

All smartphones with enabled GPS give telecom providers a precise record of the users itinerary. Smartphone users in the United States and Europe can access their own data, but privacy laws prevent the government from collecting this data. China has no such privacy constraints, and telecom providers have used locational data for years for advertising.

The government required individuals to download the Health Code app hosted on the software platform of Alipay, the electronic payments system owned by Chinas e-commerce giant Alibaba. A smartphone attachment read each persons body temperature and other vital signs, and uploaded the data to the cloud. Big data analysis matched locational data, coronavirus test results, and vital signs to identify clusters of infection and the path of transmission. Facial recognition software confirmed that the bearer of the smartphone was the registered account holder. An artificial-intelligence algorithm determined when the individual no longer was at risk, and transmitted a green page to the phone, required for admittance into all public spaces. It sounds like science fiction, but it was the result of years of planning and development. As I report in chapter two, China envisions a radical transformation of healthcare through artificial intelligence powered by 5G mobile broadband. The coronavirus epidemic has turbocharged Chinas campaign for world leadership in the field.