This Year's Olympics Will Double as Xi Jinping's Coronation | Opinion

"To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." So said General Sun Tzu around 500 BC.

Chinese Communist Party chairman Xi Jinping is poised to open the 2022 Olympics in Beijing this week. When that ceremonial torch arrives and cauldron pyre is lit in Bird's Nest Stadium under his pontifical gaze, Xi will raise his hand, and with a small wave, send a message to the world. He's won. Their resistance has been broken without fighting.

If the 2008 Olympics marked China's "coming out" on the world stage, the 2022 Olympics mark a far more world-historic event.

The 2022 Olympics are Xi Jinping's coronation ceremony.

Later this year, Xi Jinping will likely cement his undisputed rule over the world's most populous nation, as well as China's new status as a dominant world power, as he is named chairman for an unprecedented third term at the 20th National Party Congress of the CCP. That term could very well pave the way for a lifetime chairmanship—the CCP has only had one other lifetime leader, Mao Zedong.

The CCP has more than earned the perfunctory criticism it's gotten from the West. In 2019 the Wuhan Institute of Virology engaged in reckless gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that likely resulted in a leak that caused the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The CCP's response? Databases purged, disinformation spewed about soup at a wet market, doctors locked away, domestic travel banned and international flights encouraged and Xi lying to the WHO about human-to-human transmission. Over 5 million have been killed, with billions lost in economic ruin as tens of millions of people were barred from work under lockdown policies. Don't expect any apologies.

Need we even mention the CCP's brutality toward Uyghurs and Tibetans, jackboot crackdowns in Hong Kong and police-state repression of house Christians and Falun Gong? Those abuses, and the militarization of the South China Sea, have gone unanswered by a servile West, as the free island of Taiwan is marginalized from the world.

But of course, no response will come from the neoliberal establishment. The CCP neutered any substantive resistance through a two-pronged strategy of merger with desultory Western elites and acquisition of the institutions of global governance. And boy did it work.

Western elites told us opening to the West would make China more democratic. To the contrary, China opening to the West made the West more authoritarian. Our moribund elites tasted a morsel of the CCP variant of state capitalism and their infatuation was instantaneous.

I saw this myself working in Shanghai in the mid-2000s. Delegations of glad-handing politicians and business leaders would touch down to learn about how the CCP regime bypassed antiquated notions such as private property, contracts and the rule of law. This was, naturally, always combined with copious amounts of baijiu.

The CCP system is rule of the regime, by the regime, for the regime. Want to build a high-speed train but historic homes are in your way? Demolish them. Want to build a Disneyland but the neighbors don't like it? Bye-bye neighbors. Need access to Iranian oil overland but the Uyghurs are in your way? Lock them up. Want to control shipping lanes? Build some military islands. The CCP plays to win. The West just plays.

And Joe Biden? He may pay lip service to human rights, but Ol' Joe himself traveled to China years ago and announced "it's in our self interest that China continues to prosper." Perhaps he was talking about his family's own self-interest. It's as if the CCP has won a war without firing a single shot.

It's become a parlor game to list deals the CCP has struck with titans of finance and corporate power, as well as its lucrative arrangements with the families of Western leaders. Sure, Hunter Biden is among them, but the portfolios of Democrats and Republicans alike are profligate with CCP ventures. This is no simple "elite capture" on Beijing's part. This is elite merger. By the way, former California senator Barbara Boxer recently registered as a foreign agent of a CCP surveillance operation.

Even within the CCP itself, Xi has snuffed out opposition through massive, publicly televised "anti-corruption" campaigns. Along the way, the chairman has taken down members of the once-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, the Minister of Public Security, rival Bo Xilai, generals, judges and law enforcement officials. The main rival faction to Xi is the previous ruling wing of the party—technocrats headed by an aging Jiang Zemin. While Jiang has attempted to exert influence over the legal apparatus, Xi has neutralized these efforts and Jiang's faction no longer poses a serious threat.

Had Jiang leaked Wuhan files confirming a lab leak and coverup, it would have been an enormous blow to Xi and certainly thwarted the latter's designs. That said, admitting a Wuhan lab leak may also have set in motion the downfall of the regime itself, a line the technocrats are certainly unwilling to cross. See Tiananmen Square about that. CCP leaders studied the demise of the USSR and are not about to admit culpability for a global Chernobyl anytime soon.

Three cheers for Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce and the CCP. We've hollowed out our country, our infrastructure is crumbling and our cities are in violent free fall. Yet we are not predestined for national future as mindless consumers of cheap CCP trinkets. It doesn't have to be this way. The normal people, the laobaixing, can excise neoliberals and their CCP handlers from the Western apparatuses of government. But until then, Xi will have his way.

Sun Tzu would be proud.

Jack Posobiec is Senior Editor of Human Events and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is a veteran U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer and Mandarin linguist.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.