by Arnaud Bertrand 

It may be one of the most insane reports ever produced by a US think tank, and that's saying something.

The Hudson Institute has just published a 128-page plan entitled "China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China", edited by Miles Yu (director of the Institute's China Center), which provides detailed operational plans to bring about the collapse of the Chinese regime through systematic information operations, financial warfare, and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for post-collapse management by the United States, including military occupation, territorial reorganization, and the installation of a political and cultural system subservient to the United States.

I really don't know whether to laugh or cry about it.

Cry at the arrogance and casualness with which they write about overthrowing the government of the world's largest economy, the main economic lifeline for most of the planet and a quarter of the human race.

Laugh at this cartoonish wickedness believing that a declining empire, which can't even maintain its own infrastructure and has lost every major conflict it has provoked in the last two decades, could orchestrate and manage the controlled collapse of a country of China's importance.

Regardless, the report is fascinating to read because it reveals so much about the sick soul of the American empire and some of the main reasons for its decline—a comical detachment from reality, an inability to learn from past failures, a zero-sum worldview, a denial of sovereignty in others, and, more than anything else, the fact that this report screams despair.

There is a common pattern well-known to political sociologists: when groups face existential threats to their status and identity, they often exhibit compensatory extremism—becoming caricatured versions of themselves to defend themselves against irrelevance. This was, for example, the case of the Southern Confederacy before the Civil War, which responded to growing abolitionist pressure by becoming more fanatically committed to slavery and “the honor of the South" than it had ever been before.

This Hudson Institute report reads a little like this: Witnessing the end of American primacy, some members of the imperial establishment are transforming themselves into a grotesque caricature of themselves, taking every toxic aspect of American foreign policy and amplifying it to absurd extremes, becoming more imperially ambitious and delusional than ever before, planning interventions of unprecedented scale and audacity as if doubling down on their worst impulses might somehow restore their waning dominance.

As such, this report should not be read as a true policy blueprint—its analysis of China is so detached from reality as to be completely worthless. Rather, it should be read as an anthropological specimen, a fascinating window into the fever dreams and neuroses of a dying empire, where compensatory extremism strips away all pretense and reveals what US hegemony has always been—just as the Confederacy's fanatical focus on slavery exposed the moral rot that had always defined that system.

So let's examine this artifact piece by piece and see what it reveals about the dying empire that produced it.

What stands out most about the report is how incredibly detached from reality it is.

On the one hand, the whole report prejudges that the Chinese are desperately waiting to be "released" by Americans, which is a completely ridiculous notion to anyone who has spent more than a few minutes studying Chinese history.

Let us recall that one of the most fundamental episodes in the history of China was the "century of humiliation", when China was weak and partially colonized by Western powers. The Chinese people universally regard this episode as one of the most shameful periods in their history.

People often like to claim that the Communist Party derives its legitimacy from its economic performance, but in truth, it derives as much credit, if not more, from the fact that they were the ones who actually liberated China from the century of humiliation, expelled foreign powers, and restored China to its historical position as a great civilization that could chart its own sovereign path.

Thus, the idea that the Chinese people are secretly dying to see the Communist Party collapse in favor of a return to foreign subjugation at the hands of a Western power is beyond absurd: it represents the exact opposite of everything around which the Chinese national psyche is organized.

Yet this is exactly what this report shamelessly recommends: complete subjugation to a much greater extent than what happened during the worst moments of the century of humiliation.

At that time, the Western powers seized ports by imposing unequal treaties, but they still left China whole and with a government, however weak. This report proposes something much more totalitarian:

• The complete balkanization of China by supporting "regional autonomous provinces aiming to separate from China»
• The installation of "Nuremberg-style tribunals and truth commissions" to rewrite Chinese history and imprison Chinese government officials
• A military occupation with "approximately 20 US Special Operations Forcesis" in every major city and the creation "of a division-sized reconstruction corps (10 members) of Mandarin-speaking experts from various professions to advise the new government»
• A complete financial takeover where the United States "would restructure the Chinese financial system: recapitalization, repudiation, privatization and decentralization»
• And even rewrite the Chinese constitution through conventions overseen by the United States.

In short, the report proposes colonialism on steroids, to an extent even worse than the 19th century – not just exploiting China, but erasing it altogether.

To call this detached from reality is to be kind; we are here in the realm of pathological delusion. This is not just bad policy, it is a complete rupture with any understanding of how the world really works, what China really is, or what American capabilities really are.

Even at the height of European imperialism, colonial powers still understood local realities and the limits of their own power better. And, at the time, the power differential between them and their targets was overwhelming—industrialized nations with modern militaries conquering largely agrarian societies. Today, we have the opposite: the United States, with its crumbling infrastructure, declining industrial base, and failed military adventures, dreaming of colonizing the world's industrial superpower.

This was perhaps the most revealing and cynical aspect of the report: how it recommends instrumentalizing ethnic tensions as weapons of territorial dismemberment. The authors calculate which separatist movements to support based solely on the fact that it is "in the American interest", illustrating once again how all the high-flown rhetoric about self-determination and human rights is nothing more than a cynical geopolitical calculation designed to weaken adversaries.

So, for example, they support Xinjiang independence because it weakens China, but express serious reservations about Tibetan independence because of "border disputes, particularly regarding the Sino-Indian border» that could potentially destabilize US relations with India. This shows that the calculation is purely cynical: they want to weaken China, but not if it creates complications with a strategically valuable partner. As for the well-being of local populations, it is not even an afterthought: these are mere tools to be exploited for American geopolitical interests.

Overall, the report is a perfect window into the imperial mindset that views the entire world as a chessboard where peoples, cultures, and nations exist solely to advance American interests. The casual way they discuss redrawing borders, supporting or opposing independence movements, and manipulating ethnic tensions reveals the extent to which they have lost touch with the basic humanity of the people they so casually reorganize; treating 1,4 billion people and their diverse communities as nothing more than geopolitical variables in their strategy.

The overall goal is to balkanize China transparently through what they call a "controlled fragmentation" ; by supporting the secession of certain regions while preventing other provinces from doing the same. I imagine the calculation is to achieve the optimal level of Chinese weakness; fragmented enough to never again pose a strategic threat, but stable enough to continue to serve as a market and manufacturing base under American supervision. They want to create a "ideal point» of permanent subordination for China: too divided to be powerful, but not so divided as to be chaotic and economically useless, thus risking the collapse of the global economy on which the United States depends.

Which means this report effectively validates all the points China keeps making: that US support for separatist movements has nothing to do with genuine concern for human rights and everything to do with weakening geopolitical rivals; that all the humanitarian rhetoric is just cover for outdated divide-and-conquer tactics; and that China's defensive posture and emphasis on sovereignty are rational responses to a genuinely hostile imperial power.

Perhaps nothing reveals more the depth of the American imperial illusion than the report's assumption that the political, cultural, and social transformation of 1,4 billion people can be managed by simple organizational charts and administrative procedures.

The authors are convinced that the reconstruction of Chinese civilization is essentially an exercise in project management. They propose to convene "a constitutional convention "with "151 to 201 people" to write a new constitution for nearly 20% of humanity. They detail how the selection would be made."representatives of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities","representatives of the main political parties","representatives from various sectors (such as education, labor, business, and religious groups)", treating China's political restructuring as if they were organizing a business.

This is hubris of the highest order, as if one of the youngest nations on the planet can somehow teach governance to a 5.000-year-old civilization that was already extremely sophisticated when America wasn't even a shadow of an idea, that invented bureaucracy when Europeans lived in feudal chaos, and that has managed to manage the world's largest population through countless transformations while the American system struggles to govern 330 million people without constant crisis.

But more than anything, it reveals an astonishing inability to learn. Having failed to rebuild Iraq with its 25 million people, having abandoned Afghanistan after 20 years of failed attempts at nation-building, having transformed Libya from Africa's most prosperous nation into a failed state, they now believe they can manage China's civilizational transformation. It's frankly comical, and very characteristic of the Trumpian era – Mr.no one knows XXX better than me» – an absurd level of grandiose illusion.

Interestingly, when you read the report, most of the problems they attribute to China are actually much worse when it comes to the United States.

For example, they describe how “Beijing's coercive policies complicate relations with the countries of the South" and how "Diplomats and other officials of international organizations are increasingly skeptical of China's global influence, making their foreign policy more difficult. "

But we live in a world where, according to a recent survey conducted among 111 people in 273 countries by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, perceptions of the United States are plummeting while perceptions of China, particularly in the Global South, have been rising steadily for years and have now surpassed the United States.

We also live in a world where the United States is now systematically withdrawing from multilateral organizations and attempting to undermine the multilateral system—having left multiple UN agencies, blocked international legal proceedings, weaponized the dollar by imposing unilateral sanctions, and increasingly operating outside established international frameworks while China integrates more deeply into global governance structures and international economic institutions.

In short, the somewhat rogue world state they describe as China is just themselves, to a much greater extent than China.

They also denounce "Political corruption within the CCP, bureaucratic inefficiency, and other waste also hinder economic progress and public trust.", which is simply hilarious coming from a country where public trust in government institutions is literally single digitThen than a famous long-term study A Harvard study in China found that the Chinese population's trust in its central government stood at 95,5% (in 2016, the final year of the study).

Economically speaking, the report laughably describes the Chinese government as "the master architect of what is poised to be the greatest economic and financial catastrophe since at least World War II, and perhaps in human history", this is a country that has become the world's largest economy by purchasing power parity, the global manufacturing superpower, and has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in four decades while maintaining consistent GDP growth that eclipses America's performance over the same period. In fact, again, by Q1 2025, China grew by 5,4% year-on-year while the US economy fell by -0,5%.

The report concludes, based on these ridiculously twisted premises, that "Although the People's Republic of China (PRC) has overcome crises before, a sudden regime collapse in China is not entirely unthinkable.." If so, what about the United States, which, by its own framework of analysis—economic stress, political corruption, declining global influence, loss of public trust—should be considered far more vulnerable to sudden regime change than the country it targets?

It's a classic pattern that has marked all empires throughout history: unable to accept their own decline, they project their fears and failures onto their rivals while dreaming of impossible victories that will restore their faded glory.

Roman elites planning to reconquer Gaul while Rome burned. Ottoman officials dreaming of retaking Vienna as their empire fragmented. Now we have American strategists planning the collapse and colonization of China while their own society crumbles around them.

It's human: when our worldview and positionality are challenged, we see what we need to see to preserve our purpose and identity, even as that view becomes increasingly detached from reality. We have to justify to ourselves that our worldview remains valid, that our role still matters, that the systems and identities around which we've built our lives aren't crumbling; and when they are, we often react by clinging to increasingly extreme versions of who we think we once were, as if the solution to the problem of our growing irrelevance is that we should be more " ».

In this case, it turns out that the " » embodied by the Hudson Institute is the American imperial machine stripped of all veneer. For decades, this machine has disguised its imperial appetite behind noble rhetoric, but in this report, we have raw imperialism in its purest form, openly planning the dismemberment of civilizations and the subjugation of peoples. In their compensatory extremism, they may have accidentally produced the most honest document ever written about the American empire. 

Translated by Wayan, proofread by Hervé, for The Francophone Saker.

https://en.reseauinternational.net/un-groupe-de-reflexion-etasunien-a-accidentellement-redige-le-document-le-plus-honnete-sur-lempire-americain/

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