3min chapter

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#209 Xi Jinping Will Do Whatever It Takes to Get Taiwan | Ian Easton

China Unscripted

CHAPTER

The Importance of Taking Xi Jinping at His Word

If the PRC is going to be looking for a trigger to justify their invasion, then shouldn't the US just try to avoid triggering China? But the problem with that approach is they can come up with any trigger they want. They could invent one. I mean, they could fire a missile at themselves and say the Taiwanese fired it at them. Or they could blow up something in China and blame it on the Taiwanese. These kind of, there's a term of art for maybe false flag operations. It's like a Reichstag fire type situation. And so I think it comes to this fundamental debate that exists regarding the intentions of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

00:00
Speaker 3
But if the PRC is going to be looking for a trigger to justify their invasion, then shouldn't the US just try to avoid triggering
Speaker 1
China? But the problem with that approach is they can come up with any trigger they want. They could invent one. I mean, they could fire a missile at themselves and say the Taiwanese fired it at them. You know what I mean? Or they could blow up something in China and blame it on the Taiwanese. I mean, these kind of, there's a term of art for maybe false flag operations. I forget what the exact term is. It's
Speaker 3
like a Reichstag fire type situation.
Speaker 1
These kinds of things happen all the time and authoritarian governments are particularly good at attempting them and often they're successful at doing it. And so I think it comes to this fundamental debate that exists regarding the intentions of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. If you believe that they don't intend to invade Taiwan, that they are not revanciest, that they are not expansionistic, that they're not actually as ambitious as they may seem to be, if you believe that, then it's very easy to fall into the camp of, well, if you know, okay, let's not provoke them. Let's not back them into a corner. Let's not give them a reason to attack us, right? But there's another school of thought that I belong to and that school of thought says, listen, it is crystal clear from their behavior and from the words that they say and write. It's crystal clear that they are preparing to attack Taiwan and that they do want to create a new world order. Xi Jinping talks about this relentlessly and I think we're mistaken if we don't take the man at his word and if we keep making excuses for him and say, oh, he couldn't possibly mean that. I mean, this is like people in the 1930s who read Mein Kampf and were like, oh, how cute of Hitler to write about these crazy things and surely he can't be that racist and that expansionistic and that crazy. And that nationalistic and our history books are a replete with stories that tell us all about the devastating result of that strategic mistake that we and many of our allies ended up making. And I think this is a chronic problem we have is that we constantly downplay the threat. We constantly underestimate the Chinese Communist Party and we stay in many ways we stay asleep and they're on the move and they're doing things that are very dangerous. And I think we make the problem worse and more dangerous for ourselves by not responding accordingly.

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