The controversy over the cross-strait service trade agreement mostly stems from the question of whether Taiwan will be completely occupied by China once the agreement is approved.
The book China’s Silent Army by Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araujo recently published in Taiwan may have the answer. The Chinese translation of the title is “China is Quietly Occupying the Whole World” (中國悄悄占領全世界). Jointly written by two Spanish journalists who spent two years conducting more than 500 interviews in 25 countries, the book uncovers the ugliness of communist China as it quietly occupies the entire world.
The two authors found that from natural gas fields in Central Asia’s Turkmenistan and Middle Eastern bazaars in Dubai to mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa, the Chinese are everywhere, grabbing resources from customers and from the surface of the planet.
Chinese products and manpower are changing the way global business operates, and Chinese businesspeople are not only occupying the busiest streets in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, but also forests and jade mines in Myanmar.
A miner in Peru said that he felt that he was living in a Chinese colony because a Chinese state-owned company had bought both the mine where he works and the town where he lives. Chinese companies are also bringing Chinese workers to Africa, while abusing local workers and damaging local environments. They are colluding with greedy local authorities to gain an advantage by trick or by force.
We know that China is boosting its economy by exploiting workers and lowering wages, and its cheap products are causing global deflation. Many countries are discontented with this, and boycotts, retaliations and riots often occur. For example, local residents burnt down a Chinese-owned shoe warehouse in Elche, Spain, in September 2004. At that time, there were dozens of Chinese-owned shoe stores in Elche, which had forced local stores to close down and meant that the unemployment rate among shoemakers in the city rose as high as 30 percent. Shoemakers’ jobs were in danger and since their protests were also led by people with ulterior motives, they turned into frightening riots.
Apart from Spain, even the US, the world’s most powerful economy, is threatened by cheap Chinese goods. How is it threatened by the rising Chinese economy? There is a clear description in the 2011 book Death by China by Peter Navarro. According to the book, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has employed every possible means — from protectionism, exchange rate manipulation and cyberattacks to espionage activities — to attack every front line. In addition, the CCP has made every effort to gain resources worldwide, even at the cost of supporting the most dangerous regimes and engaging in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
In the US, some people were injured or killed by dangerous goods imported from China, including toxic food, toys and contaminated medicine. At the same time, many large US enterprises are allying themselves with Chinese state-owned businesses, thus contributing to the destruction of the US manufacturing industry.
Communist China, under the leadership of the CCP’s “party-state capitalism,” is reaching its dirty hands into every corner of the world. Will Taiwan really be able to escape, if only by sheer luck?
As China’s Silent Army mentions, late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), who launched China’s economic reforms, gave a speech to the UN General Assembly on April 10, 1974. In the speech, he promised that “China is not a superpower, nor will she ever seek to be one... If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialist, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”
This quote tells us that Deng’s successors have broken his promise, and this book was written in response to Deng’s statement and to expose China’s ambition. Should the whole world not also follow Deng’s statement and oppose Beijing while working together with the Chinese people to overthrow the Beijing government?
Wu Hui-lin is a researcher at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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