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China is an Existential Threat to this Country
Any person who follows news about China must believe that it is a significant threat to the future of the U.S. And yet it’s possible that most people don’t take that fact to heart because we don’t feel the impact of China directly in our everyday lives. After reading Senator Tom Cotton’s latest book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China
, I’m convinced that the threat is massive, dire and personal to all of us and the future of this country. We must stop talking about the threat; we must take immediate and critical action.
The points that Tom Cotton highlights are concerning, but until you read the details of what they actually mean in our lives, it’s easy to imagine that people think he’s not talking about them.
Briefly, Senator Cotton tells us that we can’t say the following about China: China is an evil empire; they are preparing for war; they are waging an economic war on the U.S. and the world; they have infiltrated every segment of our society; they fill positions in our government; they are coming for our kids; and the direst prediction—they could win this global war, and we could lose. And we can’t say these things because if China finds a person who has said them, they will likely retaliate.
You still might think that Senator Cotton is indulging in hyperbole. So let me give you some examples. To begin, you can be certain that calling China evil is accurate:
The Great Leap Forward resulted in the worst famine in history. Between 1959 and 1962, the famine killed up to forty-five million Chinese and drove some to cannibalism.
[snip]
Xi Jinping has intensified the party’s anti-Christian crusade in recent years, banning kids from attending church, eliminating Sunday schools, and requiring schoolchildren to sign pledges to remain atheist—The party is literally rewriting the Bible and hopes to publish by 2029 a new ‘translation’ that will replace the Word of God with the word of Mao.
[snip]
China’s police and security forces have rounded up hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners and leaders, throwing them in prison and forced-labor camps. In just the first decade of the party’s war against Falun Gong, it killed an estimated 65,000 practitioners for their organs.
[snip]
Though cloaked in Communist secrecy, life inside the concentration camps is hell on earth, according to accounts that have leaked out. Most sources estimate that the party has interned at least two million people, mostly Uyghurs, in these camps, though some believe the number is closer to three million.
But wait, you might say. That is happening in or near China. Why should we be concerned about the U.S.? Then again, if they are prepared to decimate their own population, why would they hesitate to destroy our citizens for not complying with the CCP?
We have evidence that China is in the process of devastating the economy of our own country. Trump’s tariffs will barely impact the control they have over our companies and industries:
The Chinese Communist Party’s economic strategy can be summed up in three words: ‘lie, cheat, and steal.’ China has stolen trillions of dollars of wealth, crippled entire industries, seized control of developing technologies, destroyed millions of American jobs, and extorted entire countries with its newfound economic power.
[snip]
According to the bipartisan Intellectual Property Commission, the United States loses between $225 and $600 billion from intellectual-property theft every single year.
[snip]
By 2023, Chinese producers accounted for 97 percent of domestic Chinese sales and dumped their products in foreign markets at prices 20 percent lower than those from Western competitors.
But it gets worse. American companies are complicit in helping China take over our companies and industries. American greed is high on their list of priorities:
But Silicon Valley isn’t the only accomplice in China’s crimes: a shocking number of American companies are complicit in the party’s use of Uyghur slave labor.
[snip]
These days, Chinese censors rarely need to suppress movies because American filmmakers do it themselves.
[snip]
To win even more business in China, many Wall Street banks hired the friends and families of senior Communist officials. The executives answered the call: in return for promises of greater access to the Chinese market, they furiously lobbied the White House and Congress on China’s behalf.
The worst part of the China “invasion,” however, is that they have penetrated every aspect of our personal lives:
Chinese Communist influence has warped, censored, or defiled something important in your life— whether it’s your entertainment, news sources, alma mater, employer, bank, or retirement fund.
[snip]
The ideological rot that besets their [Confucius Institutes on] campuses, along with cold hard Chinese cash, has turned many in the academy into accomplices and apologists for the worst human-rights abuser in the world.
[snip]
The Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated America and now has an army of puppets, allies, and useful idiots in our midst. Stay quiet about our crimes and we’ll make you rich. Speak out and we’ll destroy you.
You may want to believe that you are free from the China invasion, but if you look a little more deeply into your circumstances, you will likely find their presence. Have you bought a new appliance lately? Solar panels? Generators? Clothes? The list of their penetration of global markets is alarming.
And I haven’t even described the expansion of their military or the infiltration of our own military.
Our own legislators are accomplices of the Chinese, too. But it’s time for them to let go of their greed and fear of China’s retribution against them personally, and to stop this devastating incursion into our lives.
Those efforts are way past due. Our future is at stake.
[Originally published in the American Thinker]
Published in Foreign Policy
Half of the influential people & influential corporations in America benefit personally from China. Even Elon Musk. There is a very powerful Pro-China lobby in the USA. It is going to be hard to find people willing to fight China.
Excellent post, Susan. If I’m right about that, you should add this to your sheaf of “examples, good” and extract even more good practices from it than you’ve already learned.
…”from my critiques”, I was gonna add.
But I’m serious.
Yes, and their products can often spy on users.
The ubiquitous ESP32 microchip made by Chinese manufacturer Espressif and used by over 1 billion units as of 2023 contains undocumented commands that could be leveraged for attacks.
US Eyes Ban On Chinese-Made TP-Link Routers Due to Security Concerns
Thanks for the review. I’m looking forward to reading the good senator’s book. Another thing we’ve run across is Chinese government ‘police stations‘ here in the US and elsewhere.
One of the sad developments in Congress is the loss of Mike Gallagher; he was on the select committee monitoring Chinese government activities. Fortunately Senator Cotton is still watching these developments.
I recommend the Economist’s podcast series from a few years ago about Xi Jinping to understand his approach to leadership and control. He’s a true believer, and he’s gone after the corruption in the country among those leaders who take advantage of the Chinese Communist Party’s control.
I think your estimate is low–I think it’s lots more than half of the influential people. And some people, as crazy as it sounds, may not even know they are benefiting!
I love your kidding, Mark, and can usually tell the difference between your critiques and good examples. At least I think I can!
Thanks, Chris! I forgot about the “police stations.” And I do miss Mike Gallagher. Besides being very smart and knowledgeable about China, he was great in Congress.
A threat to some future paths, but not an existential threat. I think the only existential threat is societal corruption.
An existential threat can be a future threat. What makes you think it’s not a threat to our very existence? Our culture, norms, values, laws, etc.
Obviously threats are about the future. China might impact our ability to exploit mineral extraction in Zimbabwe, that is a threat about our future, but it is minor and not existential. Existential means that our Constitution fails. Many of the items that you listed from Cotton (spying, technology theft, infiltration,…) are all corruption. The Democrats have just sold out. They take bribes and use ActBlue as a RICO tools. Half of Americans are OK with that. When our elite decide that it is OK to put their efforts into extracting wealth from the country instead of working to better it, we are toast. Looking at DOGE, it feels like we have $3Trillion/year in government waste, fraud, and abuse. Eight more years (according to IMF models) and we are caught in a death spiral. 75% of voters are OK with that. I think that is because of DNC propaganda instead of TikTok propaganda.
Thank you for this informative post. A couple of quotes from the report bothered me. What does the one above mean? That American manufacturers contracted with Chinese companies to have parts inexpensively made offshore? I think the situation is more complex than the way it’s phrased here. I recognize that American complicity is somewhat addressed farther down, but why throw out this accusation here? Why don’t we have more manufacturing jobs here in the States? Why are companies incentivized to manufacture things elsewhere? Could regulation and unionization be driving them out? Do we want millions of factory jobs here, or is massive factory employment a stage in a country’s development? That quoted statement feels disingenuous, designed to rile the base.
The statement below also hurts Tom Cotton’s credibility–why can’t the strongest points stand alone? He already has plenty of evidence that we need to be cautious with China. Maybe this is a reflection of where he stands on the free trade argument.
I could be missing something, but what’s wrong with that? They are looking out for China. It’s competition. Maybe there’s some kind of economic protocol I know nothing about, but I don’t care that they did this. The more they “need” us for economic gain, the more they will avoid destroying us. At least if that gain is enriching their country and citizens as a whole (although their current leader is taking them back into a horrible authoritarian direction, as described in the OP), we could trade with a clear conscience. Meanwhile, their products are certainly making our lives easier over here. Yes, we could pay dearly for short-term comfort if we’re not careful. However, if we’re trying to make that argument, the onus should be placed on Americans. Also, being undercut in the market should motivate Americans to be more savvy and innovative. American companies could work on better messaging and yes, pricing products to be more affordable.
I am nowhere near as concerned about China trying to take over our country militarily as Tom Cotton is, but he probably knows more than I do on that subject. I think China wants some sort of CCP hegemony, and I don’t want that to happen. But I don’t think they want to destroy our country physically. That’s just my guess.
However, this pricing practice of China concerns me mightily. It’s dangerously monopolistic. It’s how China came to manufacture some 90 percent of our prescription drugs a few years ago. (I don’t know what the present numbers are.) As reported in the Wall Street Journal, American insurance companies and Medicare mandated that healthcare providers buy only the cheapest medicines available. There were no other limitations except price.
China took advantage of that rule, and they sold prescription drugs at the cheapest prices. That ultimately drove all of the domestic suppliers out of business. Good for China, but I don’t like a critical product like that being made by someone who might not always have our best interests at heart. But the worst aspect of this was that many U.S. manufacturers went out of business.
That made us very dependent on the Chinese.
That’s not good for us. We need to protect our self-reliance for agriculture and medicine.
And we have antimonopoly laws to prevent this sole-source-supplier phenomenon. Those laws protect consumers and our country.
They are also taking tons of money from the Chinese. What will China ask for in return?
Thank you for explaining this, MarciN! So this part is something that is out of consumers’ and manufacturers hands (but was the fault of well-intentioned insurance and Medicare policies). And it did result in valuable lost jobs.
Tom Cotton doesn’t usually indulge in hyperbole, so I trust his facts. If over many years we have lost millions of jobs because they have been able to destroy our industries, I believe him. And remember, we help the Chinese do their destructive work, too. You might appreciate the book, since picking out paragraphs is limited.
His phrasing just reminds me of Trump during his first term talking about all these manufacturing jobs being lost. And it seemed like an oversimplification that was designed to get Americans’ attention, but didn’t get to the root of problems.
It seems like China’s strategies would lose influence if we did certain things. Like get our heads out of the Internet, be more conscious of what we buy, and be more aware of what’s happening.
This is what our single-minded pursuit of “free trade” has wrought. Until Trump, the US has been the one genuine ‘free trade’ practitioner on the global scene. Everybody else practices some form of of protectionism. And the Chinese economy is part subsidized part slave labor part government owned and 100% managed by the CCP. The much lauded benefits of free trade ONLY exist when BOTH trade parties are free market economies and practice free trade. That is manifestly not the case in the real world.
back in the 80’s and 90’s the idea was that the profits generated by allowing China unimpeded access to global trade would fundamentally transform China. It wasn’t a bad idea. It just didn’t work. At least not the way we thought. One party to the China trade WAS fundamentally transformed. It just wasn’t China. It was us.
That, and “the cheapest price, apparently no matter what” which I see even on Ricochet
China is getting older and poorer. I wouldn’t swap positions or economies with them. If a US company wanted to pay me big bucks to relocate to China or Russia, I wouldn’t go (if someone wants to pay me big bucks to relocate to Japan, Australia, or the UK, please PM me. )
I was in the auto industry when the Big Three pushed all their suppliers to make all their parts in China. I agree it was idiocy.
Most offshoring isn’t driven by any inherent advantage that the other country has, but rather by wage arbitrage and regulatory arbitrage. There are billons of people in the world who will eagerly work for much less that an America wage, yet historically the US has been able to maintain a wage premium. This was largely because of logistical reasons, which have been greatly reduced with the introduction of fast & low-cost transportation and communications.
I think we can do a lot to encourage US production thru the rationalization of regulations–although we’re still going to want to maintain some level of worker safety and pollution control beyond what would be acceptable in some countries–and tax reform, especially 100% expensing of capital investments and R&D…but I suspect either tariffs or domestic production tax credits, or both, are going to still be required.
See my related post Labor Day Thoughts.
Also, offshoring is not only a manufacturing issue, it is happening in services and software development as well. See Telemigration.
Bill Waddell, an experiended manufacturing practitioner and consultant, has written extensively about trade and offshoring. Several of his articles can be found here (LinkedIn)
People who pride themselves on environmental consciousness etc, shouldn’t be willing to accept depredations in other countries that they wouldn’t accept here. Even if the “price” is lower. In those areas of concern, and others (such as child labor), the “cost” can be rather high. Even if we here don’t see it.
Even “learn to code” is not safe, especially when most people aren’t very good at it, no matter how hard they may try.
I’ll have to check into that. It’s probably the type of education I need.
The CCP doesn’t care one bit if the people are older and poorer. That’s not a metric they care about.
But they better. Because older people, especially, don’t have kids, and that means a population crash, eventually.
Apparently a tfr of 1.2?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
Even worse than Russia’s.
In the middle of the book. It’s unbelievable how the CCP infiltrated the Federal/State/Local Gov, fortune 500 companies, Higher Education and Hollywood. Not a fan of Trump’s tariffs but am OK with using it to de-couple from the CCP.
The truth is those folks tied up with China will not be the ones fighting. Heck, they may not even back a confrontation with China. OTOH, if they see their fellow citizens dying at the hands of the ChiComs, they may change their tune after some soul searching . . .
I wouldn’t count on it…