“You can go off and rule the Universe from beyond the grave.” – Big Trouble in Little China
I guess the French are sensitive about jokes like that. Sore losers.
I’ll admit it right up front. For years I did exactly what millions of other Americans did. I rolled into Walmart©, grabbed a cart, and filled it with cheap Chinese stuff: tools that broke after one use, plastic Godzilla© toys that lit up for a week, and clothes that wore out by the second wash. It was easy. It was affordable. And yeah, I played along, just like everybody else.
We called it “free trade.” What was it really?
It was the slow, deliberate hollowing out of American manufacturing.
Factories closed. Main street died. Towns emptied. Skills vanished. Whole supply chains got shipped overseas under the polite fiction that cheap imports would make us all richer.
They didn’t, at least long term. They made China richer and left us weaker. The base of our economy, the ability to make things, got gutted while we congratulated ourselves on saving a few bucks on a toaster while the Chinese progressed to manufacturing iPhones® on a global scale.
Found two lumps on my car battery, had them tested. One came back positive. Looks like it’s terminal.
But manufacturing was just the opening act. Now let’s talk about our farms.
In the last couple of years we’ve seen Chinese nationals caught red-handed trying to bring biological weapons straight into the heart of American agriculture. Take the 2025 case out of Michigan:
Two Chinese citizens, one a University of Michigan scholar with a PhD in plant pathogens from a Chinese university and the other her boyfriend, got busted trying to smuggle fusarium graminearum into the country through Detroit Metro Airport. That fungus isn’t some harmless underarm cheese cultivated by AntiFa. Nope. This fungus wrecks wheat, barley, and corn before they can be turned to their highest possible use, making booze.
This fungus can wipe out entire harvests and has the added bonus terror of pumping out mycotoxins that poison livestock and people. Being late to the party for any crime not committed by white guys who were their paid informants, the feds called it an “agroterrorism weapon.”
What has 43 actors, four settings, six writers, and one plot? 430 Netflix® movies.
The “scholar” is a Chinese Communist Party member. They were caught in July 2024. The FBI noted this was the second such case involving a Chinese national tied to the same university in a matter of days. The second.
In days.
How long have these shenanigans been going on. Florida is known for cocaine, Florida Man®, and orange. Back in 2005, citrus greening showed up in Miami. The disease is caused by a bacterium native to Asia, spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, another Asian import.
Nobody knows exactly how it arrived. Within a few years, citrus trees stopped producing decent fruit. Groves died by the thousands. Production got cut in half. Farmers went broke. Entire communities that had grown oranges for generations watched their livelihood rot on the diseased trees.
Florida used to be the orange juice capital of the world.
Is it a coincidence that a devastating Asian disease suddenly explodes in America’s second biggest citrus state or part of a longer pattern?
The Earth is has a high proportion of surface covered with water, but little of it is carbonated. The Earth is flat.
Then there’s the poultry industry.
Since early 2022 the chicken farmers have been culling birds by the tens of millions because of highly pathogenic avian influenza: bird flu. Under the Biden administration the numbers got biblical: over 168 million birds affected across commercial and backyard flocks in nearly every state. The result? Massive egg shortages, price spikes, farmers watching their entire operations wiped out in days.
The virus spreads through wild birds, sure. But the timing, the scale, and the economic damage line up awfully neatly with a strategy that weakens America’s food production without a single missile being fired.
I’ve said it before on this blog and I’ll say it again: the Chinese government actually seems to care about making the majority of its people successful. Yeah, individual rights get stepped on. That’s how Chinese society has operated since at least 232 B.C., when Wang Chung won the battle of Win Kong over the Chang Sing and something like 78 million people died.
In the middle of the battle, I switched to my knife to save ammo. Now I’m banned from playing paintball.
Are the Chinese ruthless?
Absolutely.
But the rulers in Beijing have always understood that a strong, productive Chinese population is the foundation of their national and international power. They invest in their people and push them to succeed to keep the machine humming. Contrast that with our own leadership, which often seems to compete to be the bigger champion for bringing in illegals: Democrats as voters and welfare targets or Republicans who want cheap labor. If having millions of illegals or millions of Indians in a society is an advantage, well, China must be falling behind.
Right?
China looks at the world and sees that there’s only one nation standing between them and outright global dominance: the United States.
Open war? Too expensive, too risky, and today’s Chinese just won’t make the sacrifices the old Chinese would to eat their enemies.
But why bother when you can win without firing a shot?
That’s exactly what two People’s Liberation Army colonels spelled out back in 1999. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare. This is nothing less than a blueprint for beating a technologically superior enemy by doing, well, whatever was necessary.
Forget tanks and jets. Qiao and Wang (good name for a urologist) talked about “beyond limits combined war”, and it was exactly that.
“Hey, NASA, your mom said I was big enough.” – Pluto
Trade warfare, financial warfare, resource warfare, PEZ™ warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network (cyber) warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, economic aid warfare, and international lawfare.
The idea was simple: use every possible tool to erode the enemy’s strength while pretending you’re just a friendly neighbor.
How many of those boxes have they checked?
- Trade warfare? Done. They flooded our markets, stole our manufacturing base, and used the WTO like a Trojan horse.
- Financial warfare? They’ve been buying up U.S. debt, manipulating currency, and positioning themselves to pull the rug out when the time is right, which might be now.
- Ecological warfare? See the citrus groves and the poultry barns and the Michigan fungus folks. Introduce a pathogen here, a pest there, and watch the food supply strain.
- Smuggling warfare? Fentanyl, anyone?
- Cyber and network warfare? Constant hacks, intellectual-property theft, missing hard drives from Los Alamos, and infrastructure probes that never quite rise to the level of “war.”
- Psychological and media warfare? Want to bet that China was stoking the fires on both sides in Minnesota during George Floyd?
The playbook was published over twenty-five years ago while we patted ourselves on the back for cheap socks and iPhones.
But not if I were a ghost hunter. Then? Pair of normal socks.
China has been at war, and hope to win before the rest of the world even notices. It’s unrestricted economic warfare, and it’s already here.
But thankfully, we’ve had Godzilla® help us learn the true source of economic wealth in society.
Flipping houses.
