Chaos under Heaven: America, China, and the Battle for the 21st Century

Summary of Chaos under Heaven

1. 1

   When the Dragon Met the Deal Maker

   

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   Winter 2016. In Jared Kushner's Manhattan office, China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi delivered what amounted to a lecture to Trump's transition team. Respect our territorial claims. Accept our vision of great power relations. The Americans responded with defiance mixed with confusion - a chaotic cocktail that would define the next four years. That meeting marked more than a diplomatic encounter; it signaled the end of decades of American assumptions about China. What followed wasn't just policy shifts or trade disputes. It was a fundamental awakening to a reality many had refused to see: China wasn't becoming more like us. We were becoming more vulnerable to them. Inside the Trump White House, three distinct tribes waged war over China policy, each convinced they alone understood the threat. The "Superhawks" - Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro - saw existential danger requiring immediate confrontation. "We're at economic war with China. It's all about jobs," Bannon declared during one heated meeting. They wanted nothing less than hastening the Communist Party's collapse through economic decoupling. The national security hardliners took a different approach. Matthew Pottinger, a former Marine who'd spent years as a Wall Street Journal reporter in China, became the intellectual architect of robust confrontation without regime change. Alongside John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence, this faction focused on countering military expansion, technological theft, and influence operations. Then came the "Wall Street clique" - Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, and Kushner himself - who viewed China primarily through the lens of market access and financial opportunity. They maintained cozy relationships with business titans like Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, who had sold nearly 10% of his company to a Chinese government firm for $3 billion. Trump oscillated wildly between these factions, sometimes embracing trade war rhetoric while simultaneously praising his "very, very good friend" Xi Jinping. One official captured the chaos perfectly: "Trump was great at flipping over the chess board, but he couldn't set the board back up again."

2. 2

   The Family Business of Diplomacy and Failed Summits

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   Chinese officials scrambled after Trump's unexpected victory, with Ambassador Cui Tiankai reaching Kushner through Henry Kissinger. When Trump accepted Taiwan's congratulatory call in December 2016, breaking four decades of precedent, Beijing erupted. Kissinger met Xi with Trump's blessing to smooth relations. Ethical concerns mounted as Kushner's family sought Chinese investment for their troubled 666 Fifth Avenue property, facing a $1.2 billion mortgage. During Trump's first Beijing visit, Kushner held an undisclosed meeting with Chinese private equity executives at the US embassy. Ivanka received Chinese trademark approvals three times after her father's election. During summits, Arabella and Joseph performed traditional Chinese songs for Xi and his wife, addressing them as "Grandpa Xi" and "Grandma Peng"-performances heavily featured in Chinese state media. The April 2017 Mar-a-Lago summit exposed fundamental weaknesses. Despite warnings about Xi's sophisticated tactics, Trump fell into Beijing's pattern. Their thirty-minute meeting stretched beyond two hours as Xi deployed historical grievances while praising Trump's leadership. Despite gaining no commitments on trade, technology theft, or North Korea, Trump declared they had "developed a friendship" and "great chemistry." He quickly abandoned campaign promises, shelving tariffs and backing away from labeling China a currency manipulator. Instead, he agreed to vague 100-day trade talks-precisely the bureaucratic framework China hawks warned would enable Beijing's delays. Peter Navarro erupted during the debrief: "Are we really going to do another Strategic Economic Dialogue and just change the letters around?"

3. 3

   The Quiet War for America's Soul

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   While trade talks dominated headlines, a secret "Bingo Club" convened in a Capitol Hill townhouse. White House officials, congressional staffers, think tank experts, tech insiders, and FBI agents united to expose China's systematic campaign to shape American opinion through influence operations, propaganda, and espionage. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference coordinated hundreds of united front organizations worldwide. Tung Chee-hwa-Hong Kong's first post-handover chief executive-led operations through his China-United States Exchange Foundation, funding research at Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, and the Atlantic Council, plus academic programs at Johns Hopkins. When University of Texas professor Joshua Eisenman questioned this funding, he faced retaliation from administrators who'd accepted Chinese money. The CCP also targeted presidential foundations for credibility. Neil Bush, chairman of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations, defended China during Hong Kong protests while maintaining extensive business interests there. Chinese money penetrated American intellectual life, creating incentives for self-censorship. Researchers learned which topics were safe and which might jeopardize funding-influence operating through normal academic mechanisms rather than crude propaganda.

4. Chapter 4

   When Silicon Valley Met the Great Firewall

   By 2018, the US-China conflict expanded beyond trade into technology. Intelligence agencies identified critical vulnerabilities: Chinese tech giants benefited from stolen IP and government subsidies while answering to military directives. The arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada marked a dramatic escalation. Trump was furious when news broke during his G20 dinner with Xi, later complaining they'd arrested "the Ivanka Trump of China." Xi took two Canadians hostage and repeatedly tried linking Huawei's fate to trade negotiations. Silicon Valley faced its own moral crisis. Google, despite leaving China in 2010 over hacking concerns, was by 2017 building an AI center with Tencent and secretly developing censored browser Dragonfly. When Peter Thiel accused Google of "treason," Trump promised to investigate - eight days later, Mnuchin found nothing. Apple, with $44 billion in Chinese revenue, made stark compromises: moving Chinese user data to servers inside China and surrendering any ability to protect users from authorities. During the 2019 Hong Kong protests, Apple hid the Taiwanese flag emoji, removed news outlet Quartz, and deleted HKmap.live, an app protesters used to organize. The message was clear: access to China's market required moral compromise - companies positioning themselves as champions of freedom became instruments of authoritarian control when profits demanded it.

   Chapter 5

   The Greatest Financial Scandal and Hidden Atrocities

   While most industries grew cautious about Chinese business risks, Wall Street dramatically accelerated investments. MSCI quadrupled its mainland Chinese holdings in 2019, channeling approximately $80 billion as the Trump administration pressured Beijing. The Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index directed an estimated $150 billion into 364 Chinese firms. American pension funds automatically tracking these indices funneled retirement savings to Chinese markets with minimal scrutiny - including companies building weapons for the People's Liberation Army, firms accused of hacking US targets, and entities complicit in human rights abuses. Roger Robinson, former chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, recognized that China was recruiting "over 100 million American retail investors with a vested financial interest in opposing sanctions against Beijing." He condemned this as "the greatest financial scandal in world history." Meanwhile, evidence of China's atrocities against Xinjiang's Uyghur population became overwhelming. Under Xi Jinping's orders, authorities constructed detention facilities holding over one million Uyghurs - the largest mass internment since World War II. The region transformed into a sophisticated open-air prison combining AI surveillance, facial recognition, mandatory DNA collection, and digital monitoring. University of Washington sophomore Vera Zhou was arrested in October 2017 for simply using a VPN to submit homework. Without charges or legal representation, she spent five months in an internment camp enduring forced Mandarin instruction and Communist Party propaganda. When UN ambassador Nikki Haley publicly addressed the crisis, Chinese representative Ma Zhaoxu warned she "shouldn't talk about the Uyghurs." Treasury Secretary Mnuchin repeatedly blocked congressional sanctions, prioritizing trade negotiations over human rights.

   Chapter 6

   When the Cover-Up Became a Pandemic

   On January 28, 2020, a high-level Chinese doctor secretly warned Pottinger the virus rivaled 1918's pandemic - half the cases were asymptomatic with human-to-human transmission across provinces. O'Brien and Pottinger briefed Trump: "This is the single greatest national security crisis of your presidency." Despite unanimous opposition from officials including Fauci, Trump implemented a China travel ban on January 31. China's cover-up was systematic. They censored social media, silenced whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang, and sanitized the Huanan market without collecting samples. Though officials mapped the genome by January 2, they suppressed it until researchers defied orders on January 11. Most critically, they knew about human-to-human transmission by January 14 but waited six days to communicate this while millions traveled for Lunar New Year. On February 6, Xi deliberately misled Trump, claiming China controlled the outbreak and the virus would disappear with warmer weather. Questions intensified when 2018 embassy cables revealed concerns about biosafety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where inadequately trained technicians researched bat coronaviruses. The pandemic exposed China's willingness to conceal lifesaving information and vulnerabilities from decades of integration without safeguards.

   Chapter 7

   The Reckoning We Can No Longer Avoid

   By 2020, US-China relations had collapsed to their lowest point since 1979. Despite his chaotic approach, Trump catalyzed a fundamental shift in America's understanding of the China challenge, making engagement-focused policies politically impossible to resurrect. Trump's legacy was contradictory. His team correctly identified critical issues - Beijing's intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, industrial subsidies, and military assertiveness. Yet his erratic leadership and public feuds with allies undermined effectiveness. Rather than building an international coalition, he simultaneously launched trade disputes with the EU, Japan, and other potential partners while abandoning TPP, a powerful tool for creating economic alternatives to China in Asia. Still, Trump's presidency irreversibly shifted the global conversation. COVID-19 exposed previously overlooked vulnerabilities - from medical supply chains to Beijing's manipulation of international organizations and willingness to use economic coercion for political purposes. Democratic nations now face a complex challenge: strengthening institutions against foreign influence, addressing supply chain vulnerabilities, investing in technological innovation, and protecting public health infrastructure. Success demands difficult trade-offs between economic interests and security concerns. This isn't about engagement versus confrontation - it's about clear-eyed realism over wishful thinking. The question isn't whether to compete with China, but how to do so while maintaining democratic values. Until America and its allies develop a coherent, sustainable approach, global instability will intensify. The awakening has begun. What we do with this clarity will define the next generation.

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