Back on May 11, this author warned that the People’s Republic of China could be pre-positioning weapons, including nuclear bombs, inside the United States with the idea that, in the event of hostilities, the Chinese could fire them off. 

Three weeks later, on June 1, Ukraine used pre-positioned drones, bearing conventional warheads, to destroy Russian military assets thousands of miles behind the warfront. Twelve days after that, the Israels used a similar tactic to inflict massive damage on faraway Iran. 

To put the matter plainly, the concept of activating “sleeper” weapons has been proved. Nobody wants a war with China, but even more, nobody should like the idea of the Chinese having planted dragon’s teeth in our midst. It could happen here, some kind of Pearl Harbor or 9/11—or maybe something a thousand times worse. So we need a thorough national assessment of our vulnerability. 

We could start with the sober knowledge that Chinese entities have purchased some 384,000 acres of land in the U.S. Many of those properties are near U.S. military bases and population centers. To be sure, ownership of land doesn’t prove that the PRC has weaponized it, but the Russians and Iranians were insufficiently suspecting—and look what happened to them. 

Happily, there’s a significant effort to unwind those Red Chinese land purchases, and yet for the sake of safety, or at least peace of mind, it’s best to apply the fearful Cold War joke: Maybe there really is a red under the bed.

Is this paranoia? It wasn’t paranoiacs who built rogue communications devices into Chinese solar power components; it was the observant who found them. The discovery of those spy gadgets should convince us, once and for all, not to import such wares from China—and to examine all solar equipment, wherever it comes from. 

Speaking of gadgets that could have nefarious use, China controls an estimated 90 percent of the world drone market. Not only does that mean that the PRC can whip up locust-like—and mosquito-sized—drone swarms, it also suggests that Red China could use its economies of scale to accelerate drone innovation, e.g. further miniaturization and kit-compartmentalization, such that components to be smuggled into the U.S., appearing harmless and thus slipping past inspectors. So we need a thorough review of risks, being as imaginative in our defense plans as other countries have been in their attack plans. 

Thankfully, most PRC-funded Confucius Institutes have been closed. Furthermore, it’s a good thing that the Trump administration has locked down the border. Yet, in the most literal sense, we don’t know who entered this country during the Biden years. So now have the task of surveilling—and perhaps apprehending or expelling—organized malefactors.

Just on June 5, two Chinese nationals were arrested on charges of smuggling toxic funguses that could destroy crops and God knows what else. Is this “agroterrorism”? Or just a bad science experiment? Inquiring minds want to know—and should probe deeply. 

Yet it’s also possible that we are being penetrated in ways that require no direct human invader. Let’s keep asking: Was Covid 19, that worldwide pandemic, actually a Chinese bioweapon? Some well-credentialed experts allege that the Wuhan Bat Lady gain-of-functioned a lethal virus and released it in 2019, killing millions and costing the world economy tens of trillions. 

In 2024, the Heritage Foundation released a bipartisan report, led by John Ratcliffe, formerly a member of Congress and director of national intelligence. The report didn’t reach a definitive conclusion as to virological mass murder, but it perceived the Middle Kingdom through a glass darkly: 

China has been in a league uniquely of its own in its active and aggressive opposition to honesty, transparency, and accountability regarding the virus and its spread. This behavior by the Chinese government, more than anything else, was the proximal origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A year later, Ratcliffe is the Trump administration’s director of the CIA. So presumably, there will be more moments of hard-nosed looking at China’s infectious misprisions. 

And there are other ways of stealthily penetrating the U.S. In a May op-ed, Michael Lucci, CEO of the State Armor Foundation, a body that counts the former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien as one of its advisers, noted the presence of Chinese spyware in American medical devices. In addition to the obvious privacy and blackmail concerns, Lucci pointed out that the accumulation of medical data could give the Chinese an edge on genetic sequencing technologies that could, in turn, aid the production of new medicines—or, of course, new contagions. 

There’s more. On July 1, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) highlighted allegations that China interfered in the 2020 presidential election on behalf of Joe Biden. (Grassley further alleged that, five years ago, the ancien régime FBI leadership interfered with the field investigation. Now why might that have happened?)

Meanwhile, we should trust—but verify—that the Trump administration’s dig, baby, dig policies are addressing the strategic problem of China's chokehold on rare earths. 

Still, more concerns loom: It seems, for example, that hostile foreign powers are using our freedoms to manipulate Western political systems for their own interests. 

It’s long been recognized that the Russians have been funding green groups in Europe, even as Russia itself is not so green. Why this generosity to foreign ecological activists? The answer seems clear enough: to discourage European energy production and encourage importing of Russian energy. (And if useful-idiot greens discombobulate Western societies, that’s gravy for Moscow.) 

Now Beijing appears to be playing the same game. The Washington Examiner’s Robert Schmad has detailed China’s boosting the revenues of major U. S. philanthropies, through Uyghur slave labor and good deals with the People’s Liberation Army. In turn, these philanthropies have amplified pro-Chinese policy positions on green issues. Given that China is not at all green—it belches more CO2 than the U.S. and the other 37 OECD countries combined—this merits examination. 

In fact, it appears that the PRC is playing a geopolitical three-cushion shot: China money to green groups to hits on the U.S. economy. Schmad details how Chinese money is reaching into U.S. state legislatures, aiming to reshape policy. 

To cite just one of Schmad’s examples, the Iowa Environmental Council (IEC) has actively opposed state legislation that would establish a legal-liability shield around Bayer, the company that makes Roundup—Bayer having purchased the herbicide’s original maker, Monsanto. Tort lawsuits on Roundup have cost Bayer some $11 billion, and the greens like it that way, hoping to eliminate the herbicide altogether, at least in the U.S.. 

To that end, IEC assigned no fewer than seven lobbyists to work against the shielding legislation, which is backed by Hawkeye State farm groups. And here’s Schmad's kicker:

Describing itself as a “nonpartisan alliance of diverse organizations and individuals working together to protect and preserve Iowa’s environment,” the Iowa Environmental Council has, since 2015, consistently received a large portion, at times a majority, of its funding from the Energy Foundation, an international green nonprofit group with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

According to another digging journalist, Thomas Catenacci, while the Energy Foundation is technically headquartered in San Francisco, its true hub is in China. For instance, the CEO of the Energy Foundation is one Ji Zou. Catenacci adds: 

Zou previously served as the deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy, an agency within the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Ping He, a senior policy adviser at the group, worked for eight years at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a leading state-run research institution.

The Energy Foundation is not small: According to Pro Publica, its revenues in 2023 totaled $286 million. So in addition to its funding of activities in Iowa, it can afford to fund similar lobbying efforts in other states, like Florida, Idaho, and Missouri. 

For its part, American agriculture fears this onslaught. In the words of Missouri State Senator Kurtis Gregory, Show Me State farmers are “under attack from two fronts: trial lawyers looking to cash in on frivolous lawsuits and Communist China, which aims to infiltrate and control our agricultural industry.” Gregory adds, “Legislation to end lawfare against Roundup is a critical line of defense to protect Missouri’s farmers and keep our food supply secure.” 

To add another twist to the tale, China is the world’s leading producer of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup—and the country shows no inclination to halt its own production. So if Roundup is sidelined in the U.S.—with likely deleterious effects on U.S. farm production—the PRC stands to gain from the vacuum.

Maybe that’s the grand strategy: The Chinese are working hand-in-glove—perhaps money-in-palm is a better way to put it—with American green groups to manipulate American politics. 

To be sure, some will argue that health concerns about Roundup are perfectly valid, and that IEC and other green groups would be acting exactly the same way without any help from the Chinese (even if it seems inarguable that they’d have fewer resources with which to lobby). That’s why we need rigorous investigations—including from the legislatures of the affected states—threshing out legit fears from fake news. Policy ought not to be made, as it often is now, by green groups and their close allies, the tort lawyers.

In the meantime, admittedly, a blow to American agriculture is not the same thing as a mass-casualty event. Still, it is a cut—one of a thousand the Chinese could be inflicting. 

And yes, the U.S. might be preparing sneaky stratagems of its own to affect China. To which we can say: Good. It’s good, that is, to have deterrence.

Valuable perspective comes from the aforementioned State Armor Foundation: 

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The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) plan to defeat America includes maneuvering the United States into dependence on China for energy and other critical supplies while preventing the U.S. military from intercepting China’s energy sources. To secure U.S. dependence, the CCP has been co-opting the progressive American climate change lobby to push a transition from fossil fuels and other critical inputs on which the United States (or the broader West) is self-reliant onto “green” technologies controlled by China. Through this strategy, the CCP has already increased U.S. dependence on their batteries, solar panels, electric vehicle charging stations, and other components produced in China. The CCP is now trying to compel further shifts of the U.S. electricity grid and fertilizer market away from Western companies.

It’s through this bleak template that we might consider all the other concerns about Chinese activities that touch the U.S., from TikTok to AI to more familiar types of espionage. 

Admittedly, this is a depressing topic, all this long-twilight-struggling, as we are forced to contemplate the many threats and terrors creeping towards us like so many Lovecraftian tentacles. Yet the prospect of actually losing a war is even more depressing, so that should help keep us watchful.