Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon believes that China is playing a dangerous game trying to curtail the rights of Hongkongers. In an interview with the YouTube channel “Zooming In with Simone Gao,” he said that the world is not willing to accept another Tiananmen Massacre.
Hong Kong and China
Steve Bannon warned that should the Chinese government move ahead with a military crackdown in Hong Kong, they would lose their most precious financial crown jewel. “No matter how big the CCP tries to make Shanghai as an international capital market, Hong Kong is the third greatest capital market in the world behind New York and the city of London… the CCP is addicted to the U.S. dollar… they, you know, risk having the goose that laid the golden egg be shut down,” Bannon said in the interview.
He admired the attitude of Hongkongers and said that the combination of Chinese people with English common law is unstoppable. Steve Bannon pointed out that all major lawmakers in the United States have come together to support the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, putting their party differences aside and signaling to the CCP that their actions in the city are unacceptable.
Last month, Steve Bannon ranked the Hong Kong protests as the most important event happening in the world at present. “It’s monumentally important. Number one, remember the whole world has bought into this lie that the Chinese people are not ready for democracy, that the Chinese people can’t govern themselves. I keep saying it’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard; it’s unacceptable that the world’s capitals and the world’s media and the world’s established order have bought into this,” he said to The Epoch Times.
In March, Steve Bannon and a group of former U.S. government officials revived a tool from Cold War-era advocacy in order to counter the Chinese threat to America. The Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) will focus on educating the public and advocating on the entire range of conventional and non-conventional dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The group pointed out China’s severe human rights violations, religious persecution, and the use of chemical warfare as being particularly disturbing.
“As with the Soviet Union in the past, communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom — one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat,” the committee’s announcement said (South China Morning Post).
Primary objective
Steve Bannon’s focus on China as the biggest American threat is not a recent phenomenon. According to the new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, preparing for an all-encompassing war with China was one of the primary objectives of Steve Bannon since he saw the Asian country as the first front in a new cold war.
“China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930… The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” author Michael Wolff quoted Steve Bannon as saying (South China Morning Post).
So far, Steve Bannon’s predictions seem to be coming true as the U.S. is currently in the midst of a trade war with China that does not seem like it will end any time soon. If the situation in Hong Kong worsens and Beijing uses its military to intervene in Taiwan or threatens America’s presence in the South China Sea, a conventional war between China and the U.S. is not out of the question.
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