Gordon Chang: We Sat There And Watched While China Surpassed Us Militarily | Video

CHARLES PAYNE: Gordon Chang is a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and also the author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”

Good morning, Gordon.

Yes, obviously, you have been up front and center on this, a lot more than anyone. And now it seems like everyone is catching up to your warnings. And the irony of this, of course, is, you have got to wonder if it’s too little, too late.

A report out from the U.S. military this week that China now has a larger navy than the United States. China has more air defense missile systems. They have more land-based missiles. Essentially, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that America was asleep.

This is more than just an embarrassment, isn’t it? This is a serious threat.

GORDON CHANG, AUTHOR, “THE COMING COLLAPSE OF CHINA”: Well, this is a serious threat, Charles.

You referred to the Pentagon China military report, which is an annual report. And, in it, it was alarming this year, because they were more realistic.

And, by the way, China has whole classes of missiles the United States does not have. And the reason is that we were in the INF Treaty, which prohibited intermediate-range missiles. China was not a member of the treaty. And so, therefore, it developed missiles that can hit U.S. Navy ships.

So, clearly, we have a long way to go to even get to parity with China in some classes of weapons.

PAYNE: Now, to my knowledge, right, President Trump, though, took us out of that arrangement. And I remember when talks that he was going to do that came up, the media went nuts. They were like, it’s another agreement with the world, and we’re lacking leadership.

It’s nuts because we sat there and watched China become a military power on par and in some cases beyond what we even can provide right now.

CHANG: You’re absolutely right, Charles.

You know, we should not have been in the INF Treaty, when China was not a party to it. This is not the early days of the Cold War, the 1980s, when INF made some sense. And you’re right. The media did go nuts about this, because they said, oh, President Trump is withdrawing from the world.

What he was doing was, he is permitting the U.S. Navy to develop the same class of missiles that China had. So, we have got to understand, multilateralism is great when all the countries in the world are part of it and when they want to be.

China right now is going on its own. And we have got to defend ourselves.

PAYNE: Of course, we have got 10 nuclear submarines. Apparently, though, they have some larger ones in development. And they’re able to use technology stolen from America that maybe could mitigate the power of our nuclear ships. This is an emergency.

There’s something else that I read, Gordon, that made me think about you. It’s in Nature magazine, of all things, the Seven Sons, those seven key universities in China, all started by the military, that have done joint academic papers with the U.S. military — U.S. universities.

This blows my mind. From 2013 to 2019, 254 of these science and technology papers, we have done this jointly with them. And all of the information that we gather and that we discover, they get to take back to the communist Chinese military.

CHANG: Yes.

And we have PLA, People’s Liberation Army, researchers in the United States. Trump administration has revoked their visas. That’s a very important step.

But, also, Charles, we have companies like Google with artificial intelligence partnerships in China. Now, nominally, the parties on the other side of those partnerships are civilian. But because of China’s civil-military fusion, which is a doctrine that Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, has been ruthlessly enforcing, it means that everything that Google does in China gets pipelined directly to the Chinese military.

So, we’re giving them the technology to configure their forces, to kill Americans. This is hideous.