Ever since the Coronavirus pandemic was gifted to the world by China, the USA led by President Donald Trump has rained fury over the communist regime of Beijing. Trump has drawn a clear battle-line between the two countries with the able support of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been China’s Achilles heel for far too long.
But, there is another facet of this newfound aggressive strategy from America–the confrontational stance Trump administration has acquired lately against China has been completely engineered by Chinese advisers having an unfavourable opinion of Beijing.
Reports have come into light which state that Trump administration has employed China-born individuals as advisers in its close-circle to create a gameplan to effectively combat China at its own game, by using Beijing’s shrewd political strategies against itself and exploiting its weaker points.
Yu Maochun, known as Miles Yu in the US is one of the China-born advisers whose name has been doing the rounds of political circles of Washington and Beijing both for orchestrating the aggressive China policy.
Yu is a professor of East Asia and military history at the US Naval Academy and advises the US State Department and specifically Mike Pompeo on decisions regarding China.
Yu’s appointment had raised few eyebrows within the US as he is a first-generation immigrant and has close ties with Chinese dissidents. However, he quickly gained acceptance amongst his American peers and is now the pivotal cog in the machinery for Trump administration. US Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affair David R. Stilwell had even called Yu as a “national treasure” of the US.
Another China-born US citizen Mung Chiang is the foreign policy adviser of Pompeo and both behind the curtains have devised the strategy to push China into the corner. Chiang is a tech entrepreneur and dean of the college of engineering at Purdue University. He has been on secondment at the State Department since last year and acts as Pompeo’s science and technology adviser. Chiang on previous occasions has severely criticized China on its handling of COVID-19.
In an attempt to corner China on its atrocities on minority Uyghur population in Xinjiang, the White House in August last year appointed Elnigar Iltebir, a prominent Uygur-American academic as the US National Security Council’s director for China.
These advisers know the inside-out working of the CCP and therefore have proved of utmost significance to Trump. Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New-York based think tank, said the appointments underlined the US government’s values.
“They weren’t picked because they have connections to a dissident community or because the issues are sensitive to Beijing, they were selected because they have expertise that the administration values in terms of the strategy it wants to develop with regard to China.” said Elizabeth.
Global Times, the mouthpiece of CCP has even published op-eds criticizing the two Chinese intellectuals. Usually, China celebrates people with Chinese ancestry who have achieved positions of power outside the country, especially in a country like the USA. But because Yu and Mung’s decision making has hurt the CCP’s cause rather debilitatingly, the Global Times showed no empathy towards one of its kin.
The newspaper dubbed Yu as a hostile “fanatic” who wants to see the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party.
Off late, the US has gone after Chinese tech giant Huawei and got it banned from the UK, France, and numerous other European countries. Now he is after Tik Tok and has given it the ultimatum that if the Chinese espionage company doesn’t sell its entire US business to Microsoft in the coming 40-odd days, then it will be banned from the States.
The US has pulled troops from Germany and stationed them in the South China Sea with the already present US warships in the region. Pompeo had warned China that if takes any reckless step in the region, then the repercussion would be devastating.
Trump leaves no occasion to term Coronavirus as Chinavirus and the wordplay might have been effectively brought into Trump’s vocabulary by his two Chinese advisers.
Pompeo had even met the survivors of Tiananmen square on its 31st anniversary in June and sent a message to China that all of its sins will be unearthed one after another.
Just the way Ramayan had a ‘Vibhishan’ who helped Lord Ram to bring demon Ravana to justice by providing critical bit of information to Lord Ram at key junctures, the Vibhishans of China sitting in the US are engineering the doom of Beijing and its communist regime. Trump has played a masterstroke here and China is searching for answers.
