Dear World: Are you happy yet? This is not a story about coronavirus; it’s worse. It is a story about War, Unrestricted War. The Chinese have promised the world Happiness and Harmony, but have instead lost the “Mandate of Heaven” and delivered Hell. A few courageous experts have been right all along and this is a letter of thanks to them — and a note to the Americans who may want to follow. After you see the scale of deception unleashed upon our country and after your emotions calm, please take economic action! China is at war. Are we?

General Robert Spalding, in his book, “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept” gives it away in the title. But the stories of deception will send chills up your spine. Up front, the damage from the war is real. “Simply put, 3.4 million US jobs vanished between 2001 and 2017 due to our trade relationship with China….with 75% of the jobs lost in manufacturing.” All of this occurred under the false assumption that this is just “normal free market competition.” How do you adhere to free markets when your competition is communist and does not respect the price system, private property, or the rule of law? Economic elites have no answer. Everyone should know by now that “China welcomes investment, but it won’t let investors take their profits out of the country (China). Chinese companies set up shop all around the world, but the totalitarian CCP (Chinese Communist Party) puts all kinds of limits on foreign companies (USA) growing in China.” Is this the free market system the elites have in mind? Adam Smith knew better.

How has the language and economic logic been so tortured and twisted in China’s favor? Spalding shows how. subtly and effectively. “In 2017, when Chinese president Xi Jinping went to the annual World Economic Forum – the epicenter of globalization – in Davos, Switzerland, he said, ‘We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation through opening-up, and say no to protectionism.’” It sounds like Xi is adopting the West’s point of view, but here is where the CCP turns the tables, and why its influence is so subtle, cunning, and effective. In Davos, the crowd heard what they wanted to hear, “but when one parses what he (Xi) actually said and what was left unsaid, it becomes clear Xi offered no firm commitment to anything. There is no mention of adhering to international law, no mention of changing monetary policy to allow for the free flow of earnings out of China. To whom is Xi saying ‘no to protectionism?’” Not to China – “everything about economic policy in China is protectionist. He’s saying the West should not be protectionist, because that serves CCP goals. So in fact the leader of China was subtly undermining the laws of free trade and globalization while appearing to agree with them.” This is stealth war. The elites are promised billions in short term profits while their own countries are strategically being destroyed. Spaulding’s book details how we can get America back on track.

Bill Gertz similarly gives the premise away in his title, “Deceiving the Sky, Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy.” By 2018, the views of the elites above had finally begun to change. Gertz interviewed Michael Collins, the CIA’s most senior analyst on China. “China has been waging a low-level war against the United States with the overall objective of preserving CCP rule…A country that exploits all avenues of power, licit and illicit, public and private, economic, military, to undermine the standing of your rival relative to your own standing, without resorting to conflict,” he said. Something that would never have been said even 10 years ago.

But this type of war can be every bit as lethal. On January 11, 2007, China launched the KT-1 rocket and obliterated a satellite in orbit, spreading tens of thousands of pieces of high-speed orbiting metal debris that will threaten both manned and unmanned spacecraft for decades to come. “The destruction of an orbiting satellite that day was a twenty-first-century shot heard round the world.” General John Hyten of the U.S. Air Force said it was a “significant wake-up call to our entire military.” The new space/economic/cyber/technology war was now painfully in sight. Every technology imaginable, from navigation to your banking account, runs seamlessly through information relayed by these satellites. The signal was clear: your economic life is no longer safe. PLA General Peng of the Chinese Military Academy stated without irony that this activity “creates happiness for mankind.”

Gertz collects 200 pages of evidence to refute this claim. We all know about the Uighur Camps, Tiananmen Square, the enslavement of Tibet, and organ harvesting. No one is happy in China. But the logic of war runs much deeper.

Xi Jinping, the leader of all Chinese thought and policy, respects three people above all: Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. The two he hates most are Deng Xiaoping (the Chinese reformer) and Ronald Reagan, who crushed Soviet Communism. Did you know that the highest-ranking Chinese official to ever offer to defect to the United States was rejected by the Obama administration? “[Then-Vice President Joe] Biden’s office overruled State and Justice Department officials in denying Wang’s asylum request” And as late as 2014, Hillary Clinton states in her own book that, “we agreed to say nothing about the matter and the Chinese were grateful for our discretion.” This action gave up the most important intelligence asset imaginable. The economic rewards to the Biden’s and Clinton’s have been widely documented. The elites win. Americans lose.

Other elites, such as Google, decide to get into China “by secretly agreeing to assist the Beijing government in developing a special search engine, using proprietary algorithms that would assist in censoring content on the internet.” In critique, another hero, Gordon Chang, “views Beijing’s technology control system as a massive digital totalitarian experiment.” The U.S. Big Tech sector is apparently all-in.

Gertz outlines the work of several other heroes who have spent their lives fighting and analyzing “Financial and Economic Warfare with Chinese Characteristics.” Roger W. Robinson Jr. is a veteran financial warrior like no other. His work helped Reagan take down the Soviet economy, and he is now at work on China. He and Kevin Freeman of “Economic War Room” have shown that America spends relatively little fighting this economic war. Economic attacks come in via leveraged derivatives or cyber efforts, and can result in trillions of dollars in losses. Yet, the perpetrators can remain undiscovered. The Chinese currently control parts of our active military thrift savings plan TSP and index funds at Morgan Stanley such as the MSCI index, which is expanding the Chinese share by the day. Many other U.S. financial instruments also fund the Chinese military and weapons systems currently aimed at us. The day will come when Americans demand change and find out that this change will damage their retirement accounts. This is stealth war.

Many other warriors have joined forces in this new economic war. Steve Bannon, Matt Pottinger, Michael Flynn, Michael Pillsbury, and Peter Navarro have all come alongside the most powerful hawk on China in the White House, President Trump. “For Bannon, the new approach to China is to apply Reagan’s strategy toward the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Reagan said in 1988 at a Moscow summit: “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.” Trump has made clear that economic security and military policy are two sides of the same national security coin.

I could show that the heroes above were all ridiculed by the sleeping elites and their hired gun typists, but time is short. The most powerful way to validate the work above, which I hope you share, is to show that the Chinese said practically all of the same things themselves back in 1999, in the book Unrestricted Warfare, by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui — a book written by two PLA senior colonels from the younger generation of Chinese military officers and published by a PLA house in Beijing. They went on to become generals in China, so their writing in 1999 must have been prescient.

Qiao states "the first rule of Unrestricted Warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden." “Warfare which transcends all boundaries and limits, in short: unrestricted warfare….the rules of war may need to be rewritten.” They go on to derisively explain how Uncle Sam’s success on conventional battlefields has led to an American preoccupation with traditional warfare, while the weak do not have to be so constrained.

"Did the special nature of the Gulf War...trigger 'a revolution in military affairs' or not? This is ultimately a question of perspective […] Perhaps because victory was achieved so easily, to this day there are very few people in Uncle Sam's wildly jubilant group that have accurately evaluated the significance of the war.” By “significance,” they mean the undeniable fact that no one can beat Uncle Sam with guns or planes, and that therefore, other types of warfare will commence.

“Whether it be the intrusions of hackers, a major explosion at the World Trade Center, or a bombing attack by bin Laden, all of these greatly exceed the frequency band widths understood by the American military,” they wrote two years before 9/11. “The American military is naturally inadequately prepared to deal with this type of enemy psychologically […] and especially as regards military thinking and the methods of operation derived from this.”

“However, by using the combination method, …a completely different scenario and game can occur,” they continue. “If the attacking side secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nation being aware of this at all and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets, then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponent's computer system in advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network, and mass media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into social panic, street riots, and a political crisis.”

This doesn’t quite match the condition spoken of by Sun Tzu, wherein "the other army is subdued without fighting." However, it can be considered to be "subduing the other army through clever operations."

I have reviewed and praised the U.S. sources above because, perhaps, Americans want to understand all of the links and transitions above. The Chinese communists certainly do. I told you this story would not be about the coronavirus. It is about war.

David Alan Brat is the dean of the Liberty University School of Business. He served as the U.S. Representative for Virginia's 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019.