In his deeply insightful book on China, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, Michael Pillsbury begins on a cold late-November afternoon on the National Mall in Washington, DC, where a renowned Chinese artist, Cai Guo Quaing, was the guest of honor. There, he proceeded to blow up a four-story-tall Christmas tree with 2,000 tiny explosive devices.

“I don’t know if any of the guests contemplated why they were watching a Chinese artist blow up a symbol of the Christian faith in the middle of the nation’s capital less than a month before Christmas,” Pillsbury wrote. “In that moment, I’m not sure that even I appreciated the subversion of the gesture [but] I clapped along with the rest of the audience.”

Think about the perversity of that event. Now think about this sobering fact, as relayed earlier this week by FBI Director Chris Wray: “If you took every single one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intelligence analysts and focused them exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to one.”

Fifty to one.

Wray was testifying at a congressional hearing focused on the espionage and cybersecurity threat posed by China’s government. He went on to sound the alarm over the threat of Chinese espionage, saying, “China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities.”

“The risk that poses to every American requires our attention now,” Wray said.

Here, we’ve got to hand it to the director: The guy is presiding over a corrupt and deeply politicized institution, but he’s been right on China for years now. Now if he’d only acknowledged the problems posed by the deeply compromised nature of this particular president.

The anti-American actions and operations of the Chinese Communist Party include the obvious — the lame Chinese spy balloon test of Biden’s resolve, for example — but also a lot of under-the-radar operations. One of them, as CBS News reports, is their “volt typhoon” hackers, whose goal is to infiltrate our electrical grid. Why? China wants to forcibly reunify with its “breakaway” republic of Taiwan — whose very existence is an embarrassment to the ChiComs and whose wild success is even more so — and its hackers have in their crosshairs our critical infrastructure. This includes our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our water treatment plants, and our transportation systems.

“Volt Typhoon utilizes botnets,” CBS continues, “networks of infected internet-connected devices that can be used to bring down sensitive targets. Typically, initial access is gained through unsecured home routers or modems.”

Think about what happens here in the United States, all across the country, if one or more of these infrastructural essentials is disabled. Utter chaos. Heck, let’s take a less deadly, less drastic scenario: What if the Chinese hacked into our banking system, or even just our nationwide network of ATMs? How long would folks remain calm if no one could do something as simple as pulling cash out of an ATM?

China is already experimenting with these kinds of activities. As the Fox News network reported yesterday morning, during an undetected hacking period last year from May 15 to June 16, the ChiComs broke into the emails of more than 25 organizations, including Microsoft, the State Department, and the Commerce Department. They even hacked into the email of our Chinese ambassador.

To that end, Jen Easterly, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, elaborated on the threats Wray highlighted: “It is Chinese military doctrine to attempt to induce societal panic in their adversary. The Chinese government got a taste of this in the aftermath of the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May of 2021 that shut down gas to the Eastern Seaboard for several days. [Americans] couldn’t get to work. They couldn’t take their kids to school, get folks to the hospital. It caused a bit of panic. Now imagine that on a massive scale. Imagine not one pipeline, but many pipelines disrupted and telecommunications going down so people can’t use their cell phone. People start getting sick from polluted water. Trains get derailed. Air traffic control systems, port control systems are malfunctioning. This is truly an everything, everywhere all at once scenario.”

For that matter, TikTok’s pervasive influence here in the U.S. means that tens of millions of Americans already have Chinese spyware on their phones. And yet we continue to fiddle away. As our Emmy Griffin noted earlier this month, the Biden administration is treating the ChiComs like a paper tiger.

In response to Wray’s testimony, Florida Republican Congressman Mike Waltz, himself a former Green Beret, said he had no doubt that China’s hacking efforts were purposeful. “The difference here,” he said, “is that this has crossed the line from collecting on us and using cyber to get inside of our systems to putting malware in that can take out our systems. So, we have to start thinking about this differently.”

In other testimony on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Jen Easterly, who leads the nation’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said: “It is Chinese military doctrine to induce societal panic. … The Chinese government got a little bit of a taste of this in the aftermath of the ransomware attack on the Colonial pipeline,” which stretched from New Jersey to Houston and supplied energy to more than a dozen states. “Imagine,” she continued, “not one pipeline but many pipelines disrupted. … This is likely just the tip of the iceberg.”

Indeed, it’s the tip of the iceberg. And we’re full speed ahead.

Here, we’re reminded of a podcast that former Trump CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did just over a year ago. When Pompeo was asked what he thought our nation’s next administration needs to do to confront the menace of China, this is what he said: “I’ll do it in one word: reciprocity. If the Chinese can buy land near our military facilities, we should be able to buy land near their military facilities. … If they can use propaganda on the telephones of our children, we should be able to put our propaganda on the phones of their children. … The theory of the case is, we’ve let them have one set of rules, and we’ve bent the knee and kowtowed to them and had an entirely different set of rules, and that can’t continue.”

Pompeo was right then, and he’s even more right now.