Expert warns China is ‘configuring its military to kill Americans’
A FOREIGN affairs expert has warned that China is “configuring its military to kill Americans.” During an interview with Fox News on Monday, Gordon Chang said: “I think China believes it needs to move fast and that means we’re going to see problems, not in the 2030s, we’re going to see problems now.” Chang said […]
A FOREIGN affairs expert has warned that China is “configuring its military to kill Americans.”
During an interview with Fox News on Monday, Gordon Chang said: “I think China believes it needs to move fast and that means we’re going to see problems, not in the 2030s, we’re going to see problems now.”
Chang said a recent Pentagon report showed that China might be attempting to at least double its number of nuclear warheads by the end of the decade, including those able to reach the United States.
Chang advised: “We shouldn’t be enriching a hostile regime with our trade and with our investment. I believe that decoupling is what we absolutely have to do especially this year.”
According to the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on China’s military, the agency said that China has nuclear warheads in the low 200s – the first time the US military has disclosed this number.
The Pentagon said the growth projection was based on factors including Beijing having enough material to double its nuclear weapons stockpile without new fissile material production, Reuters reported last week.
“[President] Xi Jinping has been talking increasingly about this notion that China has a mandate of heaven to rule the world,” Chang explained.
“They [believe that they] not only have the right to do it, they have the obligation to do it.”
On Tuesday, Chang tweeted that “Yes, it’s time to protect #America by “decoupling” from #China, completely.”
Chang’s comments against China came on the same day that President Donald Trump vowed to sever ties with the world’s second-largest economy.
“We lose billions of dollars and if we didn’t do business with them we wouldn’t lose billions of dollars. It’s called decoupling, so you’ll start thinking about it,” Trump said on Monday at the White House.
Trump continued: “We will make America into the manufacturing superpower of the world and we’ll end reliance on China once and for all, whether it’s decoupling or putting in massive tariffs like I’ve been doing already.”
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“We’re going to end our reliance on China, because we can’t rely on China.”
“We will bring jobs back from China to the United States and we will impose tariffs on companies that desert America to create jobs in China and other countries,” he added.
Other officials and analysts have said that the two countries’ economies are so intertwined that decoupling could be impractical, but Washington would continue to pressure Beijing to level the playing field.