The US blueprint for China’s collapse and its own unravelling

That is the only reasonable response to the Hudson Institute’s new 128-page report, “China After Communism.” This is no forecast or contingency plan, but a blueprint for regime collapse, occupation, asset seizure, and constitutional redesign of a sovereign nation of 1.4 billion people. Shockingly unironic, it is delivered with the moral certainty of a fading empire that still believes its hegemony is a gift to humanity. This is not strategy. It is the gospel of American exceptionalism dressed up in think tank prose.

These documents are best understood as psychological artefacts—expression of a hegemon in decline, unable to accept the limits of its own power. Like all empires at dusk, this denial gives rise to extremes: fantastical schemes to reformat the world, paranoia disguised as foresight, and narrative aggression that corrodes the global order from within.

What begins as scenario analysis quickly darkens into imperial fantasy of regime collapse, occupation, asset seizure, memory erasure, and constitutional redesign. Even the country’s name is up for debate. The Chinese people, notably, have no voice in this simulation. They are not agents of their own future, but raw material for yet another American experiment in state reassembly. This is not democracy promotion but civilisational dispossession cloaked in policy language.

This isn’t just a document about China. It’s a document about the United States—how it thinks, destabilises, and rebrands domination as freedom. It should be required reading not only for Chinese policymakers, but for any nation that has been, or could be, targeted by the same imperial choreography.

It is a rare, an almost shameless unveiling of the U.S. colour revolution playbook, packaged as post-collapse contingency planning. The report does not merely describe what they would do in China, but effectively revealing how they’ve already done it elsewhere, following the same sequence:

• Phase 0: Subversion through narrative warfare—sowing doubt, targeting ideological unity, and rupturing trust between the public, military, and leadership.

• Phase 1: “Stabilisation” via special forces—covert military presence, partnerships with “locals,” humanitarian aid as moral camouflage, and quiet power handovers.

• Phase 2: Narrative capture and regime repurposing—media control, co-opting elites, national memory revision, all branded as “healing” and “liberation.”

What’s new is the scale: they are exporting this formula to a nuclear-armed civilisation, with such casual detachment from risk that it reads like science fiction. Yet the architecture—subvert, fracture, occupy, narrate—remains deeply familiar.

Each chapter of the Hudson report follows a disturbingly consistent pattern: moral language masking strategic aggression, democratic language masking colonial design, and contingency framing masking regime-change ambition. In place of sober analysis, we find projection—a mirror of America’s own insecurities, methods, and imperial residue.

U.S. Special Forces are cast not as invaders but “stabilisers,” embedded deep within China to guide its dismemberment.

This is not just military planning but an attempt to author China’s cultural memory. The idea of a U.S.-backed “Voice of China” reprogramming the national psyche is a textbook example of psychological warfare, disguised as cultural rehabilitation.

The call for a “low visibility” and “small footprint” role is contradicted by the scale of proposed intervention: from seizing nuclear sites to rewriting history books. This is control without accountability.

While proclaiming sovereignty as the “basis of modern world order,” the authors call for its full suspension in China, so long as it is led by Washington. The contradiction is staggering.

The report accuses China of dual-use scientific deception, while itself weaponizing science as a pretext for military action. Its own proposals violate international law, including the Biological Weapons Convention, and risk triggering the very biowarfare scenarios it claims to prevent.

Many claims rest on inference, for example, that gain-of-function research equals bioweapons preparation. Yet the U.S. itself has engaged in similar work. The logic is simple: “If we did it, they must be doing it too.” Classic projection.

The report even recommends embedding operatives in supply chains, disrupting software and lab performance, and using front companies in Southeast Asia. This should alarm all countries, not just China, as it reveals how far the U.S. is willing to go to preserve biosurveillance dominance.

That the U.S. should both collapse China’s regime and then oversee its financial resurrection is absurd in its entitlement. The report presumes that America has both the moral authority and technical capacity to rebuild a civilisation it barely understands—the same hubris that failed spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The digital yuan is painted as a global Trojan horse for CCP coercion, with no mention that similar surveillance infrastructure already exists in SWIFT and dollar-clearing systems. The issue, obviously, is not surveillance—it’s control.

Meanwhile, the U.S. financial system is deeply centralised, leveraged, and crisis prone. Yet the report warns of Chinese overreach while ignoring the Fed’s bloated balance sheet, shadow banking, and dollar dependency. Again, projection masquerading as analysis.

Religious freedom is treated not as a right but as a tool to fracture identity. Surveillance and psychological manipulation of provincial officers is reframed as narrative support. Even China’s future constitution is sketched in advance: redrawn borders, reversed hierarchies, rigged quotas, and ranked-choice voting designed to dilute Han majorities.

The logic throughout is chillingly familiar: dismantle the past, install proxies, rewrite memory, auction off sovereignty and narrate it all as a new birth of freedom, even as the foundations of self-determination are hollowed out.

Behind it all lies a deeper pathology: the civilisational belief that only one system—the American system—is morally fit to structure the world. That only one empire can steward history, and that collapse is merely a prelude to remaking others in its image.

But this document is not merely delusional. It is dangerous. It reflects a mindset incapable of reciprocal recognition—one that sees pluralism as threat and world order as a function of narrative control. In an era of multipolar emergence, such a mindset is not only outdated. It is combustible.

Ironically, this is not about China. It is about a declining hegemon rehearsing its power fantasies on the page, blind to the fact that the script it writes for others may already be playing out on its own soil.

Perhaps the Hudson Institute should turn its formidable imagination inward. If regime collapse is so meticulously mapped for others, what contingency exists for a fractured United States—a country teetering between cultural civil war and institutional decay?

After decades of exporting colour revolutions, Washington now finds itself living through one. The same tools they used in Ukraine, Georgia, Venezuela, and the Arab Spring are now turned inward. Anti-Trump propaganda, driven by the corrupt military-industrial complex, combined with Capitol Hill paralysis, media fragmentation, and internal ideological warfare bear uncanny resemblance to the very “Phase 0” subversion once deployed abroad.

If America needs a collapse contingency plan, it need not look to Beijing. The mirror is much closer to home.

For the Global South, this report is not about China. It is a warning: an x-ray of soft conquest operates—regime targeting, asset capture, memory erasure. It does not reveal the future of China, but the convulsions of a fading empire still determined to remake the world in its own reflection.

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