Channels hostile to him have said that the claim "is unsupported by evidence". There were several reasons why the CCP leadership disliked Trump. He kept referring to Covid-19 as the "China virus", which it subsequently proved to be, once Tulsi Gabbard on her final day as Director of National Intelligence in the US administration declassified the information that the virus had leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. With his business instinct, Trump recognized that something amiss was present in the denial of reports that a lab leak was the cause of the Covid-19 epidemic.

It turned out that what the Wuhan Institute was developing was a bioweapon, a virus that would spread rapidly and cause an immense number of casualties. The research was funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington, headed by Dr Anthony Fauci. The NIH went into overdrive to refute the truth, that a lab leak was the cause of the Covid-19 epidemic. Initially, the NIH Director said that the virus was not transmissible between human beings, only to go back on this claim later. Fauci joined hands with the Chinese authorities in denying that international travel would spread the virus. In the meantime, the CCP authorities had banned all travel from and into the rest of the PRC from Wuhan and the adjoining province, the only travel being allowed being travel to international destinations. As a consequence, Covid-19 spread across the world, as flight after flight from Wuhan landed at the airports of multiple countries. Fauci got sanction to fast-track vaccine development and became in effect a salesman for the MRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna at lightning speed. Almost every day he would tout the benefits of these two vaccines, and ensured that billions of US dollars were spent on buying them and vaccinating much of the population. The CCP had only limited shutdowns to try and slow the onset of Covid-19 within its population, but joined hands with Fauci to say that complete national shutdowns were needed, including in the US, the country the PRC was seeking to replace in the global primacy sweepstakes. There were indeed casualties, including fatalities, but these were later found to be caused by co-morbidities whose effect was boosted by the shock of knowing a patient was suffering from Covid-19. Former DNI Tulsi Gabbard did the world a favour by declassifying documents showing the Covid-19 origins and the role of the NIH in spreading untruths about the origins of the virus. By doing so, she showed President Trump was right in his suspicions. Trump was made the subject of innumerable social media messaging that was in effect directed by the CCP, and which ridiculed him as a "conspiracy theorist", much in the manner Vice-President JD Vance is undergoing now. Because of such misinformation, Trump lost the 2020 elections to Joe Biden, who from the start backed Fauci and his. activities and who sought an accommodation with the PRC rather than confrontation. The online world was the battlefield in the 2020 polls, and Trump was heavily outclassed. Twitter actually banned him, even though he was a sitting President of the US. Twitter was as unreliable, as heavily censored to create a particular slant as Wikipedia has long been. Trump was correct in his recent speech, identifying election interference from the PRC as the cause of his defeat in 2020. Those media outlets that boosted propaganda spread by the CCP and Fauci during the previous US administration have gone into overdrive ridiculing his election claims. And because the poisonous messages are spread stealthily and secretly, ridiculing the truth has become as easy as was the case with the origins of Covid-19 during the days of the pandemic.

Such activity is of a piece with ancient Chinese classics. Sun Tzu, who was born well before the birth of Christ, wrote in his classic "The Art of War" that the best way to defeat the enemy was to do so without fighting. The enemy must be made to believe that the forces against them were so numerous that resistance was futile. They would thereupon surrender to the Chinese fighting forces touched upon by Sun Tzu. Although the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, sought to "forget the Old and embrace the New", even making the study of Confucius illegal and unworthy of a member of the Communist Party. Soon after Mao passed on, his battle against the Olds was quietly forgotten and the Communist Party of China (CCP) styled itself as the natural successor to the China of ancient times. The study of Confucius was revived, as the CCP found his doctrine of "following the rules of hierarchy" useful in subduing the population, the CCP being at the top of the hierarchy, according to itself. The Party therefore needed to be obeyed "in the interests of China", and if it was not, this was treason not just against the PRC but against Chinese history itself. Mao himself had little respect for his former (and several present) colleagues in the upper rungs of the CCP hierarchy. He expelled several, jailed others and even executed a few, including his deputy, Liu Shao-Chi. Only Zhou En-Lai survived, simply by being servile to Mao, and worked hard at preserving the hold of the party amidst the chaos unleashed by Mao. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) unleashed by Mao lasted a decade, and wiped out almost the entire leadership of the CCP. Indeed, "Bombard the Headquarters" (of the party) was the slogan Mao gave to the millions of youth who were let loose as Red Guards, abusing and killing senior CCP cadres. In a way, the culling of the top leadership became a boon to China, because when Deng Xiaoping ("the Capitalist Roader" in the words of Mao), he faced little resistance to his reversal of Party doctrine by going by the slogan "to get rich is glorious". The Deng years saw the shift of the PRC from an impoverished economy to a much more prosperous state, with investment flowing in from the US, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

The best performer in attracting investment was Jiang Zemin in Shanghai, who made the city a rival of New York in development. After a decade in office at the top, Jiang gave way to Hu Jintao who continued the legacy of fast growth. After his decade came Xi Jinping, who is ruthless in a manner Hu was not, and would go to any length to fell a foe, as he has shown since 2012. The CCP General Secretary recognizes Trump as a foe and has unsheathed his virtual sword to ensure his ignominious defeat in future US polls. Trump has of course been his next worst enemy, behaving in a capricious manner and losing support. However, in his prime time address, Trump was accurate. He lost in 2020 (partly) because of oppositional activity by Xi Jinping. The CCP General Secretary has been helped by the erratic behaviour of President Trump, and his replacing superb warhorses with Yes Men and Yes Women in his Cabinet. He cannot, however, fire Vice-President J.D. Vance, and the sooner Vance takes charge at the White House, the better for the US and the democracies that are friends and allies of the US. In the manner of Marco Rubio or Gabbard, Vance is clear about the China danger. The country reached Peak Oil a few months ago in transportation, hence its vulnerability to Oil Shocks will be lessened. The PRC is on track to reach Peak Oil across all sectors in a few years' time, just as it is racing ahead in AI. The contest delineated in the book "Cold War 2.0" is getting fiercer, although India has enough reserves of talent to enable the country to remain on track towards becoming the third superpower besides the US and China.