Americans for Intelligence Reform

Brad Johnson, President, and retired CIA Senior Officer and Chief of Staff. Insight into current events from an intelligence angle.

Expansionist China targets Taiwan

With Hong Kong the latest conquest of the Chinese Communist Party’s expansionist plan, Taiwan is next. Brad Johnson points out the encroachment into the Taiwan straights, China’s false claims to it and the stakes. In addition, China has invested millions into small countries through predatory loans sure to end up in default. What does all this portend and why are so many political powers on both sides of the aisle friendly to the Chinese? Retired after 25 years in the CIA as a senior officer and station chief, Brad now devotes his efforts to his non-profit Americans for Intelligence Reform. Our national security faces enormous threat because political interference in our intelligence agencies. Here, you find in depth analysis of both global and domestic events and what they mean for the U.S. Please subscribe and share. No more than ever, we need sources like AIR to tell us what mainstream media refuses to.

https://youtu.be/RWSYYkt98Qo

[expander_maker id=”8″ more=”Click for entire transcript” less=”Read less”]
brad johnson it is september the
00:03
24th of 2020. you know i i
00:07
have conversations occasionally with
00:08
friends that insist
00:10
that china is in no way imperialist or
00:12
expansionist
00:13
and uh it is to laugh i think you’re
00:17
going to maybe tell us some things that
00:19
might inform that opinion
00:23
yes i i to suggest that that
00:26
china is not expansionist or
00:30
you know or doesn’t have essentially
00:32
imperial design is
00:33
is kind of the height of naivete i mean
00:36
what you can talk about
00:37
tibet just look at what’s happened in
00:39
hong kong they had
00:41
had a deal made with britain that they
00:43
had signed and everyone had agreed that
00:45
it was going to be you know one country
00:47
two systems i think was the name of the
00:49
deal or something along those lines
00:51
and finally china just cracked down and
00:54
and made a new
00:55
security law and just moved out anyone
00:57
in hong kong
00:58
who had any position of authority was
01:00
removed and
01:02
chinese communist party members were
01:04
moved in and they just de facto
01:06
absolutely took control and run it with
01:08
an iron fist so how you can ignore facts
01:10
of that nature is
01:12
you know as i say it’s just naivete on
01:14
someone’s part or
01:15
they’re so politically leftist rabid
01:17
type leftists that they just don’t care
01:19
uh and that brings us to kind of the
01:22
subject some of the things i wanted to
01:24
mention
01:25
the status quo for example with taiwan
01:28
for
01:28
since basically following world war ii
01:31
uh the revolution that took place in
01:33
china where chairman mao took over
01:35
chased the nationalist chinese out they
01:38
settled on
01:39
in taiwan and they that’s called
01:41
nationalist china
01:42
and that’s been basically left everybody
01:45
unhappy ever since
01:47
but there was a line of demarcation
01:49
there was a line basically halfway
01:51
between
01:51
mainland china and taiwan that was the
01:55
you know the border if you will out in
01:57
the taiwan straits in the ocean there
01:59
and so uh china as we’ve seen again has
02:03
become very aggressive on the world
02:05
stage and this is one of those areas so
02:07
chinese pilots and this has all really
02:09
started to get
02:11
fired up in the last say month or so
02:14
it’s really starting to get worse i mean
02:15
by stages it’s been getting worse
02:17
but now it’s at a new stage and
02:21
china has done something that’s now
02:24
unique
02:24
in taiwan and this just hit the chinese
02:28
military air force aircraft have been
02:31
flying
02:32
in the taiwan straits but on the
02:34
taiwanese side
02:36
and past this line of demarcation
02:40
and when confronted by taiwanese
02:43
air force aircraft uh they’ve said
02:45
there’s no such thing as a demarcation
02:47
line there’s one china and
02:49
and they’re it so that is brand new
02:52
they’re essentially now
02:53
denying that taiwan has any rights to
02:56
its
02:56
say coast area and those sorts of things
03:00
because it’s all
03:01
part of one china so uh a dangerous
03:05
escalation on their part
03:07
uh the scenarios that that
03:11
there’s a lot of reporting on chinese
03:13
you know doing scenarios on what it
03:15
would be like to attack taiwan and so
03:17
they they’re confident that they’re
03:19
they’re going to do this at some point
03:20
when there’s a uh the first
03:22
chance they get to invade and take over
03:25
taiwan they will
03:26
do and the only thing stopping them
03:29
right now is really the united states
03:31
and the fleet that we have the pacific
03:32
fleet that we have in the area and
03:34
aircraft carriers china is building a
03:36
more
03:39
powerful navy and i think they’ve
03:41
launched their second aircraft carrier
03:42
now
03:43
so they have two aircraft carriers there
03:45
so they’re looking at it as they’re
03:46
getting to the point
03:48
where they can fend off the united
03:49
states and then go into time
03:51
taiwan and take over completely i my
03:54
little recommendation out of this is i
03:56
think that it’s time
03:57
to take a look at a two china policy i
04:01
mean we need to have
04:02
uh kind of a zero sum beginning where we
04:05
don’t go in with preconceived notions
04:07
and
04:07
uh essentially taiwan has been a
04:09
completely separate country for
04:11
since you know following world war ii so
04:14
it’s kind of silly to keep pretending
04:15
there’s actually only one china when
04:17
they’ve been completely separate
04:19
countries and completely separate
04:21
forms of government and everything for
04:23
decades and decades so
04:25
i think it’s time to re-examine that but
04:27
this is all part of this very aggressive
04:29
chinese communist expansionist plan
04:32
uh that they’re enacting and we’ve seen
04:36
just hardly a week goes by without us
04:39
seeing
04:39
somebody be indicted uh here in the
04:42
united states or kicked out of a
04:44
research institute or a university
04:46
or arrested for espionage spying for the
04:48
chinese
04:50
that’s just here in the united states
04:51
but worldwide it’s going on as well
04:53
just that extremely aggressive
04:55
intelligence that they’re doing
04:56
but there’s a number of other things
04:58
that they’re doing and they’re using
05:00
predatory economic policies
05:02
to uh to gain huge swaths of influence
05:06
they’ve been very aggressive
05:07
in africa something we’ve talked about
05:09
in past interviews
05:10
been very aggressive in latin america
05:12
again something we’ve talked about in
05:14
past interviews
05:14
but here was a new thing and i wanted to
05:16
bring it to everyone’s attention as well
05:18
and china is now using those same
05:20
predatory lending policies or practices
05:24
or economic investment policies to
05:27
essentially
05:27
invade a soft invasion not with arms and
05:30
ammunition and so on not kinetic energy
05:33
invasion but an economic invasion
05:35
and where they’re doing it now is in the
05:37
caribbean which of course is the
05:39
backyard of the
05:40
of the united states some of these
05:41
places where they’ve been active
05:43
that have long been you know kind of on
05:45
the bad guy list like cuba for example
05:47
that’s only 90 miles
05:49
off the southern tip of florida so it’s
05:51
very close in
05:52
you know bahamas is even closer and and
05:55
just in some of these countries real
05:56
quick some of the amounts of money that
05:58
china has invested in those countries
06:00
600 million in cuba i mean
06:02
for an island of 10 million people uh
06:04
600 million is a lot of money
06:07
where is this going bahamas 450 million
06:10
antigua and barbuda billion barbados 490
06:14
million
06:14
trinidad and tobago 1.9 million jamaica
06:18
2.7 billion dollars
06:21
these are all relatively small countries
06:23
and they’re building
06:24
infrastructures they call it belts and
06:26
roads i think is the name of the program
06:27
but what that what is that
06:29
that is a chinese effort to come in and
06:32
build infrastructure but it’s set up in
06:34
a predatory loan fashion
06:36
these it’s designed specifically to give
06:40
real infrastructure to these places
06:42
but in such a way that they can never
06:44
pay it off
06:45
so what happens is essentially the bank
06:47
forecloses the chinese government
06:49
essentially forecloses and they end up
06:51
owning all of this infrastructure so
06:53
every one of these islands maybe cuba
06:56
being a little bit different but every
06:57
one of these islands caribbean islands
06:59
that are relatively close to the
07:02
southern tip of florida or the southern
07:05
coast of the united states
07:07
and say the northern coast of latin
07:09
america which gets it into the area of
07:11
venezuela
07:13
that whole swath of these island nations
07:16
is uh is being bought by by china so
07:19
moving in very aggressively
07:21
uh this is something this is all part of
07:23
that worldwide campaign that china is up
07:26
to
07:26
and they’re very effectively
07:28
implementing it when they run into
07:30
example these intelligence intelligence
07:32
problems that they’re having now because
07:34
it’s not that they haven’t had great
07:35
successes it’s just that now the
07:37
attention has been turned to them
07:39
everyone knows how big that threat
07:40
really is in the intelligence arena
07:42
and so they’re making a lot of arrests
07:44
so the chinese have had a lot of
07:46
setbacks in that area meaning that their
07:48
successes are now being cut
07:50
back although there’s still many of
07:51
those successes out there for us to
07:53
discover i’m sure
07:54
but this is one of those areas that’s
07:56
going unchallenged they’re not being
07:57
challenged
07:58
in africa they’re not being challenged
07:59
in latin america and now this program
08:01
and
08:02
in the caribbean they’re just not being
08:03
challenged in those areas the united
08:05
states is kind of a
08:06
sleep at the switch and let me say this
08:07
is not
08:09
a president trump issue this predated
08:12
that
08:13
and i think in the previous
08:14
administration they knew
08:16
and didn’t care they’ve been very cozied
08:18
up we’ve had a lot of politicians
08:20
whose family members are making a lot of
08:23
money
08:24
off of china and a number of
08:27
key senators and congressmen and
08:30
certainly there’s been a lot of
08:31
information just out recently about
08:33
joe biden’s son having some very odd
08:35
connections
08:36
making a lot of money uh when he was
08:38
when he was on that board of an energy
08:40
company in ukraine
08:41
also making money off of china so
08:43
there’s there’s a lot of connections and
08:45
all of these things everybody’s
08:47
you know politically it’s going to be so
08:49
difficult to go after these people
08:51
because you know who’s in the power to
08:52
fight back and it’s the congressman and
08:54
senators
08:55
that are in bed with china that that are
08:57
the ones in power to stop because it’s
08:59
the senior people right so
09:01
it’s it’s a very very end both parties
09:03
this is not you know
09:05
not a one-sided issue it’s everyone up
09:07
there in washington
09:09
that’s in a position of power over a
09:10
long period of time it’s hard to
09:14
resist the temptation of being able to
09:16
make
09:17
you know tens or maybe hundreds of
09:19
millions of dollars so
09:20
they succumb and they’re human beings
09:23
and it’s something that we’ve got to
09:24
figure out a way to fight
09:25
here in the united states something that
09:27
we’re working on hoping to have some
09:28
success with but
09:30
this is another iteration of where china
09:32
has run amok they’ve been running them
09:33
up for a long time
09:35
in fact president trump is the first one
09:37
to start to stand up against them with a
09:38
lot of the way the
09:39
ways that they’ve been funding
09:41
themselves by stealing money essentially
09:42
from the united states so
09:44
that has to be expanded we need to do
09:46
greater efforts hopefully in the second
09:47
term as
09:48
president uh trump will start to fight
09:51
back in these arenas that we’re seeing
09:52
really start to unfold and just how
09:54
aggressive they are in china
09:56
as it stands right now there’s there’s
09:57
very they’ve had some bumps in the road
10:00
but nothing’s really stopping them
10:02
they’ve slowed but
10:04
aren’t aren’t stopping they’re still
10:06
very aggressive on the world stage
10:07
and mean to expand
10:41
you
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