The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger

“Joseph Solis-Mullen vividly captures the folly of politicians, pundits, and policymakers who are pushing the United States towards an unnecessary military confrontation with China. Exaggerating the Chinese threat is already spurring idiotic U.S. corporate subsidies and far worse could follow.”

—Jim Bovard, USA Today columnist and Fellow at the Libertarian Institute

“Whenever bipartisan agreement on any topic occurs in Washington, the average citizen should start to worry, or at least carefully scrutinize the facts of the issue. That’s what Joseph Solis-Mullen does in The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger. Members of both parties now compete to turn China into a ten-foot-tall red menace. Because the informal global U.S. Empire can always use an inflated threat to justify its policy of worldwide interventionism, China–with its rapid economic growth and reach, enhanced military capabilities, and increased diplomatic influence—has been eagerly glommed onto by the U.S. military-industrial-congressional-media complex (US MICMC)to replace the Soviet Union, Iraq, al Qaeda, and ISIS as the overweening threat du jour. As during the Cold War and subsequent War on Terror, the threat from China is being exaggerated—this time into a Cold War II, complete with a US-led containment policy. In his succinct, well-written, and thoroughly convincing book, Solis-Mullen incisively debunks the China threat by exploring China’s history, the history of American intervention in Chinese affairs, and China’s substantial, but under-discussed, internal problems and external constraints. Also, instead of the usual jingoist and alarmist hype spewed forth by most American books on the topic, he actually includes the Chinese perspective. Solis-Mullen cogently concludes that a China with growing economic, military, and political power merely wants to have more influence in its immediate environs – instead of global supremacy at U.S. expense. In fact, he argues that the main reason the US MICMC is so concerned about a rising China is not because the Chinese represent a dire threat to the security of the American populace and territory, but because they do pose a real threat to the United States being able to do whatever it wants in East Asia, as has been the case since World War II.”

—Dr. Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute