‘China Hawk’ Confab Portrays China as Enemy-Image, Blames Beijing for Violence in U.S. Cities

July 28, 2020 (EIRNS)—Yesterday and today, some of the Trump Administration’s and U.S. Congress’s most rabid China hawks are gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington to map out war plans against China. “War” is no euphemism. For this confab, sponsored by Liberty University’s Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty Center, China has become the enemy image, accused of fomenting a Mao Zedong-style “Cultural Revolution” in America’s cities, while deliberately spreading the coronavirus.

Among those peddling this dangerous rhetoric are madman geopolitician Steve Bannon, White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro, neo-con “China expert” Michael Pillsbury, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and several like-minded legislators. Senator Blackburn reflected the tone of the discussion, charging in her remarks, reported by the Washington Examiner, that “the same Marxist philosophy used by the Chinese Communist Party is filling the streets of Portland, Chicago, and even a few blocks away from right where we are right now here in Washington, D.C.” Blackburn reportedly just issued a paper last week demanding a complete overhaul of U.S.-China relations.

Yesterday, speaker after speaker also blamed China for failing to stop the spread of the coronavirus at the beginning of this year and thus holding it responsible for the U.S.’s high unemployment, school closures and disruption to civic life—including violence exploding in many cities. Rep. Brian Babin of Texas remarked, “we’ve got just the beginnings of a Cultural Revolution going on here.” Fortunately, he said, the coronavirus had at least begun to alert the American people to the threat China represents. “If there’s anything that comes out of this pandemic, it’s the fact that we looked behind the curtain, and we have seen the barefaced adversary that wants to take us down and wants to supplant us as the No. 1 nation on the face of this Earth,” he said.

Representing the British imperial view, Steve Bannon also spoke at the event. In related remarks today for CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Bannon went over the top and in effect delivered a death threat to Chinese President Xi Jinping, warning that China and Xi personally are in “the U.S.’s gun sights.” The U.S., he said, should target Xi and those associated with him on a personal level, by imposing sanctions and seizing all their assets, throwing in, revealingly, that the series of four anti-China speeches given by National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Attorney General William Barr, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, reflected a “coherent and comprehensive strategy,” Newsweek reported him as saying.

Driving home the British strategy of ensuring that President Donald Trump never meets or collaborates with Xi Jinping, Bannon praised the fact that people “are standing up” to China around the world, and that this will be “the greatest legacy of President Trump’s eight years in the White House.” He insisted that rather than cooperate with China on trade, the U.S. should just proceed to strip China of its sovereign immunity and “break the Hong Kong dollar.... It’s time to take the fight directly, financially, to the Chinese Communist Party.”