John A. Gentry

Russian goals, I understand it, very territorially oriented, very empire building oriented.

The Chinese are more interested in influence.

Although, you know, I talked about the importance of sophistication and subtlety and time.

Both Xi Jinping and Putin have been very belligerent lately, haven't they?

Certainly in Ukraine.

So when you are more belligerent, then the influence operations get harder.

So you've got a situation where the Chinese now are showing what probably are their true selves.

How so?

What are you saying?

Well, in the sense that they're trying to push around the Filipinos, for example.

They're talking about invading Taiwan and so on.

In the 1970s,

Deng Xiaoping, leader at the time, was reputed to have come up with a strategy that's been shortened to hide and bide.

So you hide your goals, make China the dominant country in the world, and you bide your time.

until you are sufficiently strong culturally, militarily, economically, politically, and so on, to force these changes on the rest of the world.

So what some of the China specialists are saying is that the hide is not so hidden anymore.

And so this hide-and-bide strategy, which fooled many people in the West for several decades, is now much more in the open.

That said, they still have massive information assets.

The students are still out there.

They still are providing funds to universities.