Chinese state media is calling on a nuclear buildup as a "strategic deterrence" against the United States, Newsweek reported Tuesday.
"We must be prepared for an intense showdown between China and the U.S.," Hu Xijin, the editor of the Chinese state-run newspaper the Global Times, wrote in an editorial Thursday. "The number of China's nuclear warheads must reach the quantity that makes U.S. elites shiver should they entertain the idea of engaging in a military confrontation with China."
President Joe Biden has kept up the tough public stance on China after former President Donald Trump pressed toward a trade deal that sought to call out China's human rights abuses, intellectual property theft, forced-technology transfer, and trade imbalances.
Also, Biden announced last week a 90-day review from the U.S. intelligence community to issue a report on the COVID-19 origins, which the Trump administration has long maintained was likely released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"As the U.S. strategic containment of China has increasingly intensified, I would like to remind again that we have plenty of urgent tasks, but among the most important ones is to rapidly increase the number of commissioned nuclear warheads, and the DF-41s, the strategic missiles that are capable to strike long-range and have high-survivability, in the Chinese arsenal," Hu brief missive began. "This is the cornerstone of China's strategic deterrence against the U.S."
Hu called for "a large number of Dongfeng-41, and JL-2 and JL-3 (both intercontinental-range submarine-launched ballistic missiles)" to "form the pillar of our strategic will."
He admitted the buildup should be meant to deter war, not strike it, but he noted "U.S. hostility toward China is burning."
"On this basis, we can calmly and actively manage divergences with Washington to avoid a minor incident sparking a war," Hu concluded. "U.S. hostility toward China is burning. We must use our strength, and consequences that Washington cannot afford to bear if it takes risky moves, to keep them sober."
Earlier Monday, Far East foreign policy expert Gordon Chang on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now" denounced China's "gain of function" coronavirus research at the WIV before the COVID-19 global pandemic as "basically a biological weapons program."
"So, you boil this all down: U.S. taxpayers from fiscal 2014 started funding China's biological weapons program against the U.S.," Chang told host John Bachman.
Chang noted "China sent its top biological weapons expert" to the Wuhan lab last January, he believes, "to clean up evidence of a lab leak as well as to destroy evidence of a biological weapons program."
"I can't prove that, but why would you send a military officer to a nominally civilian facility?" Chang asked. "Well, the answer is because they were doing military research there and elsewhere.
"I think China did a very good job in cleaning up, but there is a lot of evidence that has been left behind."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.