When China was a basket case a generation ago, Hong Kong journalists quipped that the Middle Kingdom played a long game; it had had 5,000 years to screw up its economy — and hadn’t wasted a second.

But its thoroughness in achieving goals is no joking matter now that China is not systematically ruining itself with real communism but has instead metamorphosed into a nonideological tyranny advancing with ruthless pragmatism across the entire cold war battlefront to displace America as a top nation.

Napoleon is reputed to have said, “China is a sickly, sleeping giant. But when she awakes, the world will tremble.” Very late, the world has started to tremble. And America has started to wake up.

No matter where one looks — geographically, strategically, tactically, economically, militarily — Beijing is probing our weaknesses and seizing advantages. These moves are often bold, but even when they are not, they are always insidious and determined.

Back in those Hong Kong days, we noted the Chinese purchase of a Soviet aircraft carrier as a sign of Beijing’s strategic intention to school itself in warship design and build a navy capable of projecting power deep into the Western Pacific. China now has that navy, which is at least the second-most powerful in the world for conventional surface warfare. But it has much more. It has also built artificial islands on disputed reefs in the South China Sea and equipped them with landing strips and missile batteries. It has, as it were, created facts on the water.

Each move, as the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent report , stayed “below the threshold of provoking conflict” but incrementally “changed both the geography and the balance of power in the area.”

Incrementalism is key. Again and again, China perpetrates outrages that the United States fails to reverse or seriously confront. These are shocking individually, but China also calibrates them to a nicety so they will get a pass from our weak and distracted leadership in Washington. Each Chinese move is galling but is too often met by U.S. officialdom either with a muted suggestion of disquiet or a disingenuously breezy denial that it’s a big deal. What it never until recently seemed to produce was a clear denunciation or unambiguous statement that it was a challenge that we would meet.

Taken together, however, Beijing’s actions are incontestably the maneuvers of an enemy. China manufactures the fentanyl that kills more and more Americans each year — 67,000 in 2021 — and it colludes with Mexican drug runners to get the narcotics across our southern border.

China also backs President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and buys cheap Russian oil but asks to be seen as a conciliator by arranging its own talks with Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky.

China runs a popular social media app, TikTok, that collects American user data for the People’s Liberation Army and drives wedges between people, splitting the country.

China spills a virus across the world and then conceals its origins.

China floats a spy balloon over North America from Alaska to South Carolina and claims with insouciant dishonesty that it is a weather balloon that got lost.

It secures "most favored nation" trade status and then steals every scrap of its partners’ intellectual property it can get its hands on; it brokers a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia that probably won’t last but casts Beijing, rather than America, as the most effective diplomat in a volatile region; it responds to President Joe Biden’ s disgraceful rout at the hands of the Taliban by taking over Afghanistan’s rich mineral resources, which include vast lithium deposits vital to America’s transition to eco-friendly energy technology.

The task of decoupling America from China is hugely difficult if it is at all possible. Our economies seem inextricably entangled. Most manufactured goods we buy are made at least partly in China. It will be immensely hard to get the public to understand the importance of abandoning the convenience and low costs they’ve become accustomed to, let alone accept the pain it would involve.

But recognition of this vast epoch-shaping need is finally emerging — not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where the president insists that China is just another competitor, but on Capitol Hill. And it is getting the plain-spoken leadership it deserves. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the House select committee on China and a rising GOP star, recently opened a committee hearing by saying, “We must act with a sense of urgency. ... I believe our policy over the next 10 years will set the stage for the next hundred.”

This was a demand for seriousness and a call to arms. It should not be ignored.