by Megan Russell

Imagine: it’s the summer of 2025, and the United States has been surrounded by foreign military bases. The bases have been built by some antagonistic country on the other side of the world that drones on about the inevitability of war. Leaders of this country pump billions into their military, drumming up advanced AI weaponry, building long-range ballistic missile systems targeting the most populated U.S. cities, and sending thousands of troops to the Caribbean in preparation. Large-scale war games are held throughout the region, including drills that simulate nuclear war on the U.S. In the next two years, they say. War is coming, and we need to be ready. Meanwhile, back on domestic soil, the nation’s top thinkers gather to plan the collapse of the U.S. government, releasing a 120-page document outlining the steps to take after the war leaves nothing but dust and instability behind. 

But wait. You don’t need to imagine. That is happening, just not to the United States. No, the U.S. is not the victim at all—the U.S. is the antagonistic country on the other side of the world, bloating its military, prepping for war, and outlining the collapse of another nation’s government. 

The U.S. has built over 300 military bases in the Asia Pacific region alone, installed long-range missile systems pointed at China’s largest cities, and held joint war exercises with regional allies simulating nuclear war with China. And just last week, the federally funded Hudson Institute released its 128-page plan for the collapse of China’s government. 

Western media tells you that China is the most aggressive nation on earth, but China has shown extreme restraint in the face of U.S. military buildup and hostile rhetoric calling for war. If the opposite were true—if China had surrounded the U.S. with missiles, troops, and bases—the U.S. would have already considered that an act of war. Just think back to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba almost led to the U.S. declaring full-scale nuclear war. 

Luckily, the facts speak louder than U.S. war propaganda, and these are the facts: the U.S. has over 900 foreign military bases, while China has just one. The U.S. has surrounded China with over 300 military bases, while China has zero in the entire Western Hemisphere. The U.S. has launched 251 military interventions since just 1991, while China hasn’t intervened in any country for 50 years. 

And as the newly deemed “Department of War” marches rapidly toward a $1 trillion dollar war budget, consider the deep emphasis China has placed on maintaining a “peaceful coexistence” with other nations, with strict guidelines of non-interventionism and mutual respect. 

The truth is, you can’t understand China from a Western perspective. The U.S. is a relatively young nation born out of settler colonization and genocide of the native people. Our wealth was amassed through resource extraction, exploitation, and slavery. In comparison, China has undergone thousands of years of dynastic empires rising and falling. It has a strong cultural continuity and shared historical experience that informs how it conducts itself in the global theater. Its wealth was amassed internally, not through imperialist behavior or exploitation of another. It’s an ancient civilization with deep roots, and a unique vision of the world shaped by a long philosophical tradition and an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist framework. 

Additionally, China was one of the world’s largest economies for over 2,000 years, accounting for around 25-30% of global GDP. It wasn’t until the 1800s that colonial violence and occupation by the British Empire, and later Japan, drove China into poverty. In the 1970s, it was one of the world’s poorest nations. The fact that China was able to return to its former prosperity despite decades of foreign intervention is nothing less than a miracle.

So why is the U.S. so set on war? It’s simple. China’s economic prosperity threatens the current global order that positions the U.S. at the top, and forces all other countries to bend to its will. It’s a war that will be waged to protect U.S. global hegemony and the monetary interests of the Western elite. The only threat here is the United States preserving its interests through bombs and bloodshed. 

On July 10, 2025, the U.S. and its allies began conducting the largest military exercises in the Pacific since World War II. Nicknamed Resolute Force Pacific, or REFORPAC 2025, the exercise involved over 350 aircraft, more than 12,000 service members, and took place at more than 50 locations across 3,000 miles in the Pacific, including Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and international airspace. The U.S. Air Force says these exercises will “prove how we’ll fight and win” a war against China. 

Modern U.S. war-waging often occurs through the use of proxies and funding the troops of another country, as long as they act in U.S. interests. They’ll call it military strategy, but at the very root of it, you’ll find a dark feeling of indifference towards the citizens of other nations. Our government couldn’t care less what happens to innocent people in Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines. As long as U.S. global hegemony is preserved, death, human rights abuses, and planetary destruction will go unconsidered. 

China’s “acts of aggression,” as labeled by mainstream Western media, are often just its own defensive military exercises that it conducts in response to the constant war games off its shores. But please, let’s be honest with ourselves—what country wouldn’t respond that way? If anything, it’s an act of restraint in response to blatant preparations for war.

Just last week, the Hudson Institute (which has received millions from the U.S. Department of Defense) held a conference to discuss the collapse of China’s government and released a 128-page document outlining the plan. The document is heinous and dystopian, outlining a gradual invasion of China through clandestine disinformation campaigns, cultural and psychological restructuring, military intervention, and an overall manipulation of the soul of China from the shadows. 

Phase 0 will begin before the collapse. U.S. Special Operations Forces will use psychological and political warfare to sow division between the government, the military, and the people—and the government has already funded billions of U.S. tax dollars to do just that. They plan to twist narratives to undermine China’s history, exploit trauma, and mock the CPC through disinformation campaigns. Phase 1 will go into play after China’s collapse, which is U.S. occupation in everything but name. U.S. forces will be deployed to China’s cities and embedded into China’s military. A new puppet government will adhere to the whims of U.S. leaders. Anyone sympathetic to the CPC will be “controlled” while U.S. forces conduct action raids to secure nuclear weapons. And finally, Phase 2 will attempt to rewrite national consciousness by installing a U.S.-approved version of history. They will create a “Voice of China” modeled after the “Voice of America,” the people will be re-educated about the evils of communism, and a “sad but transparent” period of national mourning will pave the way to a new China shaped entirely by the United States. 

The rest of the document outlines how to precisely target China’s facilities, restructure China’s financial system to suit U.S. interests, secure assets, restructure the military, and conduct a “reconciliation” campaign. At the end, the document mentions an imaginary, arbitrarily drawn line across China separating east from west, and discusses potentially splitting or partitioning territories. It also considers name changes for China, such as Taiwan or the Chinese Federal Republic. 

The document is as Orwellian as it sounds, written by “experts” such as Miles Yu, Ryan Clarke, and Gordon G. Chang. Chang is one of the most frequently cited “China experts” in the U.S., but he’s not an expert so much as a propaganda mouthpiece. He has built an entire career out of making bold, spectacularly wrong predictions about China’s collapse, all while reinforcing U.S. imperial talking points.

His most infamous claim came in his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, in which he confidently declared that the Communist Party of China would fall by 2011 at the latest. When that didn’t happen, he extended the deadline… and extended it again. He even made Foreign Policy’s “10 Worst Predictions of the Year” list twice. Over two decades later, not only has China not collapsed, but it has grown into one of the world’s most powerful economies and a leading force in global diplomacy and development.

Despite his long track record of failure, Chang remains a regular on Fox News, a speaker at military think tanks like the Hudson Institute, and a go-to figure for anti-China hardliners in Washington. Why? Because he tells them exactly what they want to hear. His role is simply to justify aggression, stir up fear, and promote regime change narratives under the cover of “expertise.” In truth, Chang is no more than a state-aligned propagandist, useful only because he reinforces the U.S. imperial worldview so Congress can use more of your tax dollars to go to war on China.

People like Chang will keep returning to live Congressional hearings and federally funded organizations like the Hudson Institute to justify U.S. war and domination abroad. It is intentional information warfare being waged by the U.S. government, and it is the first step to manufacturing consent for military action abroad. It’s time to demand that lying imperial mouthpieces like Chang no longer get uplifted to be used as a means for global death and destruction—not in Congress, in academia, or anywhere. We must reject the path of endless war and build a world based on mutual respect, not militarism. But that future requires us to stop imagining that we are always the victims and start recognizing when we are the aggressors.

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Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she spent one year studying in Shanghai and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between U.S.-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.