PREFACE
Sean Patrick Hazlett
The term “Thucydides’ Trap” has often been used to characterize the evolving relationship between the United States and China. The phrase describes a situation where an emerging power threatens to displace a dominant one. It harkens back to a time when the rise of Athens and the Spartan fear of that rise made the Peloponnesian War inevitable. Whether China’s ascent truly represents a Thucydides’ Trap, it is fairly obvious that the United States and China are currently on a collision course.
In late October 2022, China’s ruling Communist Party awarded President Xi Jinping an unprecedented third five-year term as general secretary, eschewing a tradition of a two-term limit established since the death of Mao Zedong, the last leader to rule China for more than a decade.
Xi’s break with custom is an ominous sign of things to come for China. The elevation of Xi and the increased concentration of power in his hands have almost certainly increased the likelihood of future conflict. His calls for faster military development and defense of China’s interests abroad, as well as retrograde notions of a return to the past “glories” of Mao’s China are concerning. As I write this, the people of China are bravely resisting an oppressive lockdown in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, and Chengdu, among others, to protest the country’s zero COVID policy at a time when the rest of the world has long since returned to some semblance of normality.
His crackdown on Chinese entrepreneurs and shift backward toward a state-controlled economy could be especially damaging, particularly for a country that has one of the fastest-growing ageing populations in the world. According to the World Health Organization, 28 percent of China’s population—an estimated 402 million people—will be over age sixty by 2040. With a proportionally declining labor force, that rapid growth will require an adaptable approach to support this demographic shift; an approach that will challenge a China hamstrung by an inflexible and corrupt economy composed of state-controlled enterprises.
At the same time China’s domestic concerns are growing increasingly unstable, the country has become progressively bellicose abroad. Chinese adventurism in the South China Sea’s Spratly and Paracel Islands has involved a patient but inexorable march to steadily establish footholds on uninhabited islands claimed by multiple nations in the resource rich expanse using a strategy akin to slowly peeling away multiple layers of skin from an onion.
Not only do the Chinese employ this strategy at sea, but also on land. Since 1962, the Chinese military has been carefully creeping forward along its Indian border to seize contested land from its neighbor in the Himalayan foothills around the Line of Actual Control.
The Chinese have also ramped up military shows of force near the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which Japan also claims. The threat there is dire enough that Japan’s ruling party has proposed doubling its defense budget as a share of GDP from one percent to two percent over the next several years.
China’s military sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone to wear out Taiwan’s air defense forces have not only been provocative, but also have dramatically increased the likelihood of a war over the island. Chinese jingoistic rhetoric prior to US Speaker Pelosi’s 2022 trip to the island nation, and its simulated blockade and live-fire exercises afterward, represent yet another instance of concerning adolescent behavior by a rising power. And with more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity concentrated on Taiwan, such an attack would force the United States to intervene, not just to protect that island nation, but to defend its vital national security interests. In fact, the US National Security Council projects that the loss of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company could cause a one-trillion-dollar disruption to the global economy.
Most recently, in February 2023, the Chinese government went as far as sending a surveillance balloon over the continental United States, violating US sovereignty. The situation ended with US aircraft shooting down the object over the Atlantic Ocean and the US Air Force conducting an ICBM test in the Pacific Ocean as a show of force.
The infiltration of American society by Chinese interests is also a major cause for concern. As of July 2020, the FBI was opening one new China-related counterintelligence case every ten hours, and half of the FBI’s five thousand active counterintelligence cases involved China. Chinese intelligence ran an extensive operation between 2011 to 2015 to influence and compromise local, state, and national politicians, including several members of Congress. One suspected intelligence operative, Chinese national, Fang Fang or Christine Fang, targeted rising politicians in the Bay Area and nationally, like Representatives Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu, Tulsi Gabbard, and Mike Honda.
The Chinese have also established unauthorized “police stations” in numerous countries around the world to include the US and Canada, possibly to pursue influence operations, spread propaganda, and harass Chinese nationals living in these countries.
Through talent recruitment programs like the Thousand Talent Programs, the Chinese government paid scientists at American universities to secretly establish parallel research programs in China, sometimes involving US federally funded research. In fact, one estimate suggests that over the past decade, the Chinese government spent two trillion dollars on such efforts—a sum larger than its military budget over the same period.
China has also been active in the cyber realm. Beginning in 2009, Chinese hackers infiltrated US corporate networks and stole trade secrets from dozens of US companies ranging from Morgan Stanley to Google. In 2014, Chinese intelligence hacked into the Pentagon’s Office of Personnel Management, stealing the personnel files of all current and former federal employees as well as all security clearance applications, affecting more than 22 million people, including the editor of this very anthology. In 2017, the Chinese military hacked Equifax and stole the sensitive personal information of 150 million Americans—nearly half the US population.
Chinese intelligence has also attempted to use its commercial technology as a Trojan horse to penetrate the telecommunications infrastructure of the United States and its allies. In 2012, Australian intelligence officials discovered malicious code in a Huawei software update that had infected that country’s telecommunications systems.
Even today, the FBI warns that video-sharing app, TikTok, owned by the Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, could be used by the Chinese Communist Party to influence users, control their devices, and even spy on US federal employees by hoovering up data about their location, preferences, and salacious details about their private lives that might make them vulnerable to compromise. In November 2022 and prior to the US midterm elections, Twitter uncovered three covert Chinese operations spanning nearly two thousand user accounts to stoke partisan discord.
While the looming great power competition between the United States and China is only starting to heat up, the myriad histories of the next world war are now in your hands. What strange circumstances precipitated the Great Sino-American Conflict? Was it triggered by an ultrasecret US occult computer that hurled American soldiers backward in spacetime to thwart a Chinese-summoned eldritch horror or does an extraterrestrial intelligence spur an arms race that leads the two countries to war? Did a US military campaign in mainland China awaken a supernatural force that could move mountains and rend continents or did World War III begin with a bomb sent from the future to erase the past? To find out, gaze through the kaleidoscope of multiple realities and bear witness to the disturbing visions of World War III from today’s greatest minds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.