Silent Conquest—China’s Attempt to Reshape the World

In the weekly culture magazine of Germany’s public broadcaster ARD, GMF’s Mareike Ohlberg explained how the Chinese Communist party is using its economic power to reshape the world order.

In China, the Communist Party decides on the truth. “It was long claimed that there was no person-to-person transmission of the novel coronavirus,” says Mareike Ohlberg, “even though all physicians in Wuhan knew that such transmission occurred. They had known this for a long time, yet the official position was that all was good, that there was no danger. That way, they gambled away an important time window.”

Many Western governments wrongly believed that they could democratize China through trade. “For many years, even decades, we have dealt with China in a highly naïve way. We always thought that change would eventually occur through trade. The thinking was that if the West trades with China long enough, China would open up,” Ohlberg says. “We thought we could change China, but now, it’s the contrary.”

“In fact, the Communist Party feels very threatened by the idea of democracy and the separation of powers,” says Ohlberg. “The Chinese Communist Party has realized that if it wants to safeguard Chinese power on the long-term, it is not enough to be in power in China, but the entire world will have to be reshaped.”