Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy

The United States’ approach to China since the Communist regime in  Beijing began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on  a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a  peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later the hope of producing a  benign People’s Republic of China has evaporated. The Communist Party of  China deceived the West into believing that its system and the  Party-ruled People’s Liberation Army were peaceful and posed no threat.  In fact, these misguided policies produced the emergence of a 21st century challenge that may be as dangerous to the United States and its  allies as the Soviet Union was. How can it meet this challenge?

About the speaker

Bill Gertz is an award-winning national security journalist and author of seven books, including Breakdown: How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11 and The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America. He last spoke at the Westminster Institute on his 2017 book,  iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age. He is currently senior editor of The Washington Free Beacon, an online news outlet, and national security columnist for The Washington Times.

Gertz has an international reputation. Vyachaslav Trubnikov, head of  the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, once called him a “tool of the  CIA” after he wrote an article exposing Russian intelligence operations  in the Balkans. A senior CIA official once threatened to have a cruise  missile fired at his desk at The Washington Times after he wrote a  column critical of the CIA’s analysis of China. China’s communist  government also has criticized him for his news reports exposing China’s  weapons and missile sales to rogues states.