China has waged a modern cold war against the US and is determined to overtake it as a superpower, a CIA official has warned.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s East Asia Mission Center Michael Collins said that Chinese President Xi Jinping was exploiting ‘all avenues of power’ to overtake America.
‘By their own terms and what Xi enunciates I would argue by definition what they’re waging against us is fundamentally a cold war, a cold war not like we saw during the Cold War, but a cold war by definition.
‘A country that exploits all avenues of power licit and illicit, public and private, economic and military, to undermine the standing of your rival relative to your own standing without resorting to conflict.
‘The Chinese do not want conflict,’ he said.
President Trump shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping on November 9, 2017
Collins went on to say that Jinping wants ‘every country in the world’ to side with his nation and not with the US ‘because the Chinese are increasingly defining a conflict with the United States and what we stand behind as a systems conflict.’
He went on to say that China is a bigger threat than Russia to the US, adding: ‘It sets up a competition with us and what we stand behind far more significantly by any extreme than what the Russians could put forward.’
He also told how the global fight on terror shifted the US’s focus on monitoring Chinese progress and allowed it to flourish.
‘They are learning to be more coercive, learning to be more aspirational, learning to be more assertive by what they’re getting away with.
‘9/11 is one example where the international community had to shift its attention to something else and the Chinese drove through that decade to especially expand where they are, so it’s a long way of saying that there are things that happened in the international system, things that … helped to explain to some degree the speed and expanse of where the Chinese have gotten to where they are today,’ he said.
He was not alone in his warnings about China.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, Michael Collins (center) described China as ‘coercive and aspirational’
Earlier in the week, other US officials singled it out as the country’s most dangerous adversary.
FBI Director Christopher Wray accused the country of ‘economic espionage’ while Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said the US had to decide if it was a ‘true adversary or competitor’.
Susan Thornton, who serves as the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said the Chinese had a unique ability to ‘take advantage of opportunities’.
‘We have to get back to doing what we do well. Our soft power is incredibly more powerful than their soft power.
‘They don’t really have that same kind of attractiveness that the US system has, and I think that’s because our partners around the world know we stand by them and know we won’t impose our will on them, that we’ll work together with them,’ she said.
The US and China have been locked in trade tariff disputes for months.