Steve Bannon in Japan, rails against China’s ‘hegemonic’ ambitions

KOBE, Japan — Former Trump administration chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon railed against China’s “hegemonic” ambitions Wednesday, telling a crowd in Tokyo that the West and its Asian allies must wake up to communist Beijing’s plan to “dominate” the world economy.

American elites have long believed a “false premise” that China’s communist government would become more of a liberal democracy and a free market economy as its prosperity grew, said Mr. Bannon, who appeared in the Japanese capital just days after U.S. President Trump concluded a lengthy tour of Asia, including stops in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing.

“The exact opposite has happened,” Mr. Bannon said. “The Chinese leadership had no intention ever of joining the rules-based international order. They had their own plan, and they executed that plan very rigorously.”

“The question has to be asked: Are all our elites in the West, are the elites in the United States that stupid?” he said.

Mr. Bannon, who is executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News, made the the comments in a freewheeling speech to the 12th annual InterEthnic/InterFaith Leadership Conference — an event backed by Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy.

The conference features human rights activists and religious figures who accuse Beijing of persecution. Mr. Bannon’s speech, broadcast over YouTube, was a highlight. He painted Mr. Trump as an outlier pushing against an elitist global establishment afraid to play economic hardball with Beijing.

Mr. Trump, summing up his Asian trip himself in a White House address hours after his former aide spoke, praised the hospitality of Chinese President Xi Jinping and said he has made progress on both trade and the North Korean crisis during his stop in Beijing last week.

But Mr. Bannon told the Japanese audience that Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory was linked directly to American working-class anger stemming from economic circumstances caused by China’s rise and absorption of once U.S.-based industry.

“The exporting of Chinese deflation and the exporting of Chinese excess capacity,” Mr. Bannon said, “gutted the upper Midwest of the United States.”

“The people who know that are not our elites,” he said, “[it’s] the workers. They understand where the factories went. They understand where the jobs went.”

“What American policy has been — has essentially been by our elites — [is] the management of America’s decline,” he said, adding Mr. Trump won by promising to do the opposite, to “bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States.”

’Global hegemonic power’

U.S. media and the West in general have willfully ignored clear signs China plans to take over the global economy on authoritarian terms, Mr. Bannon said.

He cited on the nationalistic speech Mr. Xi gave last month on ascending to a second five-year term at the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing.

Mr. Xi laid out an ambitious vision during the speech in the massive Great Hall of the People near Tiananmen Square, hailing China’s island-building efforts in the disputed South China Sea as well as his signature foreign-policy initiative, the “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure investment project aimed at expanding ties between China, Europe and Africa.

“The crisis we have in the West is that President Xi can give a three-and-a-half hour speech and actually walk through [China’s] plan for global hegemonic dominance, and nobody in the West pays attention,” Mr. Bannon said.

Mr. Xi’s speech was “not a funny speech,” he said. It was “meant to tell the world: ’This is where we’re going, this is what we’re going to do, and this is how we are going to dominate as a global hegemonic power.’ “

It was “more than a warning to the West,” he said, arguing that Mr. Xi essentially signaled “the Confucian mercantilist authoritative model has won and the Judeo-Christian liberal democratic free market capitalist West has lost.”

Mr. Bannon also lamented the “$5.6 trillion” that Washington has spent on wars since 2001, suggesting if the money were spent “on development of our inner cities [and] development of our infrastructure, we’d be much further along today in competing with China in the world economy.”

Following Mr. Bannon’s resignation from the White House in August, Vanity Fair carried a report citing a “source” who claimed Mr. Bannon had told people he thought Mr. Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it a full term.

Mr. Bannon has not since disputed the Vanity Fair report. But his remarks in Tokyo seemed to heap praise on Mr. Trump.

“What has been the response in the West to [China’s rise]?” Mr. Bannon said. “The response in the West has been, up until recently with President Trump, fairly disorganized.”

He praised the president for warning China that Washington may begin formally investigating suspected Chinese theft of technology and intellectual property — and for for signaling that the White House plans to examine China’s practice of forcing American companies to share their intellectual property in order to gain access to the Chinese economy.

Chinese theft of American intellectual property has taken “the flower of the liberal democratic free market system … our innovation,” he said.

“The ascendant economy in the United States, of Silicon Valley and Wall Street and Hollywood and the imperial capital of Washington, D.C., has no interest in taking on China,” he added.

“They’ve all benefited from China’s rise,” Mr. Bannon said. “It is the working class people … that have had to bear the brunt of that — the Trump voters.”

“It is the populist movement on a global basis that’s going to be the reaction to this,” he said.

But it remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump will truly act on behalf of that movement. During his visit to Beijing last week, the president toned down his criticism of Beijing, saying China isn’t to blame for the mammoth trade imbalance with the U.S.

Mr. Trump said the “very one-sided and unfair” trade relationship between the U.S. and China is actually the fault of his predecessors in Washington. He also called Mr. Xi “a very special man.”

“I don’t blame China,” Mr. Trump said. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens? I give China great credit.”

The president made the comments while simultaneously expressing hope that Mr. Xi will “work hard” to reduce tensions that have escalated recently between Washington and North Korea.

• Dave Boyer contributed to this report from Washington.