Imagine waking up tomorrow morning. You open your eyes, reach for your smartphone… but something has changed. The icons are different, the apps are incomprehensible, the language… it’s Chinese. This isn’t a nightmare. It’s merely the anticipation (perhaps not too distant) of a future where the West, lulled to sleep by its own naivety, will find itself subjugated to the silent and pervasive power of China. A war not fought with bombs and missiles, but with apps, video games, algorithms, and hypocritical apologies. A war we are already losing, without even realizing it.

While we rage over a misguided tweet and apologize for trivialities, Beijing is waging an asymmetrical war against the free world. A silent, insidious, yet incredibly effective war that aims to undermine our foundations, steal our future, and impose a totalitarian and liberticidal societal model upon us. And the most unsettling thing is that we, in our blind optimism and culpable naivety, fail to grasp it. A war that steals our youth, courting them, corrupting them, seducing them with its own brand of enticements. After all, what alternative do we offer them? Trump?

This silent confrontation in the digital and cultural realms is far from an isolated skirmish. It is a critical front in a much broader and more intricate campaign orchestrated by Beijing to challenge and ultimately supplant Western influence on the global stage. This comprehensive strategy manifests in numerous interconnected ways: from an ambitious and rapidly expanding military modernization program to a persistent trade war aimed at achieving economic dominance. Furthermore, China is strategically cultivating economic dependencies with developing nations across the Pacific, effectively establishing a network of potential strategic outposts to project naval power and secure vital sea lanes in anticipation of a future showdown with the United States. The relentless pressure exerted on Taiwan, coupled with the aggressive and unfounded territorial claims over islands belonging to Japan and the Philippines, further underscore Beijing’s expansionist ambitions. Even the ongoing conflict in Ukraine serves China’s long-term goals, having effectively transformed Russia into a heavily reliant partner, a de facto proxy through which Beijing can observe and analyze the West’s response to geopolitical aggression, gleaning invaluable insights for its own strategic calculus

China’s Great Digital Wall and Our Culpable Naivety

China has erected an impenetrable digital wall. Every Western social media platform, every information channel originating from the free world – American, European, Korean, or any other – is blocked, censored, rendered inaccessible to its 1.4 billion citizens. A wall built to protect the narrative of the Communist Party, to secure the cult of personality surrounding Xi Jinping, to prevent any “contamination” of free thought.

And what do we do? We welcome every Chinese technological tool with open arms. Apps that spy on our conversations, video games that steal our data, software that analyzes our habits. We download them onto our smartphones, install them on our computers, integrate them into our daily lives, without the slightest awareness that every “tap,” every “click,” every piece of data provided is precious information transmitted directly to Beijing. A treasure trove of intelligence that the Chinese regime uses to study us, to know us intimately, to anticipate our moves, with a single objective: to fight us and impose its will upon us.

It’s not just apps and social media. China blocks search engines, messaging services, operating systems. Anything that might even remotely undermine the regime’s propaganda is banned. And while we delude ourselves with the idea of a market of one and a half billion consumers, they treat us as a digital battlefield to be conquered.

Cultural Censorship and the Rewriting of History (Including Our Own)

The blackmail of the Chinese market extends to culture as well. Western films are censored, cut, and modified to make them “suitable” to the desires of the communist repression. Entire scenes are eliminated, dialogues rewritten, characters changed, all to avoid offending the regime’s sensibilities. And we accept, we bend, we sell off what we have built, what those before us painstakingly constructed, in the name of profit, to see our art violated, our history manipulated, our freedom of expression trampled upon.

But that’s not all. China also forces us to rewrite their history. It demands that our films, our books, our documentaries conform to their narrative, erasing inconvenient episodes, glorifying controversial figures, rewriting entire chapters of the past. Under the guise of a market to be conquered, Beijing is effectively imposing a global cultural dictatorship, rewriting history as it sees fit and forcing us to follow suit.

The Trap of Apologies: A Weapon of Psychological Subjugation

Then there’s the subtle yet devastating strategy of apologies. For us in the West, apologizing is a sign of honesty, courtesy, and civility. For the Chinese, it’s a sign of submission. And they know this very well. They make us apologize for everything, even the excuse of racism, racial stereotypes, leveraging an now senseless sense of guilt of which the West is a victim, not without a certain masochism, even when there’s no reason, even when we are the victims. Every apology we make is a victory for them, a step forward in our psychological subjugation, a humiliation that is recorded, exploited, and glorified in the eyes of the Asian world and beyond. And we continue not to understand this, trapped in our naive conception of honesty and courtesy, terrified of otherwise appearing racist, while we bow down, apologizing, before a regime that knows neither honesty nor courtesy.

Youthful Seduction and Video Games: The New Opium of the People (Made in China)

China has understood that to conquer the future, it must seduce the youth. And it does so with a powerful and insidious weapon: video games, especially those for smartphones. Colorful, seemingly harmless, free (or almost free) titles that capture the attention of millions of young people worldwide. China wants to create a “cool,” modern, attractive image for a generation that has no memory of what China was just twenty years ago: a country of peasants who didn’t even know what technology was. Today, it presents itself as a giant of innovation, and young people, often unaware of the past and attracted by colorful pixels, fall into the trap.

It’s the same strategy Japan used fifty years ago with manga and anime. Except that today, in the era of pervasive online connectivity, these games are not just entertainment. They are tools of espionage, data theft, and mental manipulation. Every match, every interaction, every in-app purchase (often very expensive, with the “freemium” model) is a flow of information and money that goes straight to Beijing.

Take PUBG Mobile, a giant from Tencent. Millions of young Westerners, but also many Arabs, because they have fresh and fragrant money to be plundered, spend hours playing, immersed in a virtual world controlled and manipulated at will by China. And it speaks volumes that there is a Chinese version of PUBG Mobile, much more advanced and “beautiful” than the international one, but inaccessible to Westerners. Why? To prevent contact between young Chinese people and the free world, but above all to show the world a presumed Chinese superiority, to make people desire something that is “made in China.”

It is estimated that tens of billions of Western money, thanks to micro-transactions, end up in Chinese pockets. By any means, even better if “dirty.” In fact, the techniques used to make young people spend money – extractions, loot boxes, all based on luck, but there’s nothing random about it – are borderline legal, or perhaps beyond, but certainly already within the realm of gambling. Everything seems blatantly rigged, fake, artfully designed to ensure you never get anything without spending hundreds, often thousands of dollars in game credits, perhaps for the skin of a famous car, or an outfit, a helmet.

AI: The New Frontier of Manipulation

And let’s not forget Artificial Intelligence. China, in a move that screams hypocrisy, bans Western AIs like Gemini and ChatGPT from its territory, guilty of spreading truth and knowledge, and therefore potentially dangerous to the regime. But simultaneously, it aggressively promotes its own AIs, such as “DeepSeek,” in the free world. A bluff, artificially inflated, fallacious, but above all trained with manipulated information, created ad hoc to control the Chinese population. And if we make this manipulated AI freely accessible in the West? Here, thanks to some naive individuals who believe it, the dictatorial communist propaganda of Xi Jinping infiltrates even through AIs, controlling information, distorting the truth, and undermining our freedom of thought.

Why We Are Losing and What We Must Do

We are losing because we are naive, superficial, obsessed with short-term profits, and paralyzed by a politically correct mindset that prevents us from calling things by their name. We don’t see the war because it’s silent, because it’s fought with weapons that make no noise, because the enemy smiles and sells us cheap smartphones, video games, and low-quality products.

But the truth is that Xi Jinping’s China is a terrible enemy, a totalitarian regime that has no respect for human rights, freedom of expression, or democracy. An enemy that is fighting us by any means, exploiting our weaknesses and our naivety, to bend us, defeat us, and subjugate us.

It’s time to wake up. It’s time to open our eyes and understand that this is not just an economic competition. It’s a war for global supremacy, a war for the control of minds, a war for our future.

What can we do?

• Recognize the enemy: Call Xi Jinping’s China what it is: an authoritarian regime that is fighting us.
• Protect our digital infrastructure: Limit the use of Chinese apps and software, invest in secure alternatives, and protect our data.
• Defend our culture and freedom of expression: Do not give in to the blackmail of Chinese censorship, support artists and creators who defend our values.
• Expose the trap of apologies: Stop apologizing for everything and start defending our principles with pride.
• Educate the youth: Make young people aware of the risks of Chinese technology and the true nature of the regime.
• Invest in research and development: Create Western technological alternatives that are not subject to Chinese control.
• Coordinate action among democracies: Create a united front to counter Chinese aggression.

There is no more time to lose. We are losing face and dignity now; tomorrow, we will lose the war. And it won’t be pleasant to wake up tomorrow subjugated to Xi Jinping’s China. The reckoning has begun. Are we ready to fight?