China is the single most important geopolitical competitor for the next century. Shouldn’t we give some serious thought about the costs and consequences of our interactions?
Ted Cruz lays out a list of things China does to give us reason to think twice about just how dependent we want to allow ourselves to be… and he lists a few things we can do to push back against it.
First, here’s his quick and dirty list of China’s ‘host of strategies’ they use with their dealings at home and abroad:
1) They lie.
‘They lie shamelessly, repeatedly, over and over again.’
2) They Murder and Torture.
“They have over 1 Million of their own citizens Uighurs, a religious minority in concentration camps, right now, being tortured.” When’s the last time you’ve heard our lapdog media say boo about it?
3) They Steal.
“In the scope of human history, we have never seen a nation state with trillions of dollars of resources, use intellectual property theft as a state strategy. They steal on a widespread level, on a military level, on a commercial level, on an academic level…” Fact-check, true.
4) They Censor (And that’s not just limited to people in China anymore. Just ask the NBA employee who started an international incident by tweeting about Hong Kong.)
5) They Extort.
They use access to their market. There’s a reason Hollywood, the NBA, AND Fortune 500 companies are terrified of ticking them off. They’ll lose access to China’s markets.
Propaganda…
They opened by talking about the Chinese Communist Party’s latest attempts to pour Chinese-language propaganda into American airwaves:
Phoenix TV station set up a powerful broadcast TV station in Mexico to broadcast to California in the Chinese language. Another TV station in Phoenix is owned by China. FCC is being asked by Ted Cruz to BLOCK China’s propagandistic encroachment into American airwaves. They did so, but have a license during their provisional appeal.
China has bought and paid for Hollywood. For example, in big films, China edited out references to Freddie Mercury being gay and had Maverick remove the Taiwan and Japan patches from his jacket in Top Gun. (Hollywood complied)
Ted’s Solution: Cruz has put forward legislation called the Script Act. If any Movie Maker lets the Chinese Communist Government censor or edit a film, they can’t have access to our military. To our ships, our planes, anything they use to film movies like Top Gun.
Huawei.
Huawei is a security threat because they are pushing to provide the tech that would serve as the backbone of our next-generation internet traffic. All information would thus pass through their tech, and we have already seen how little they can be trusted with sensitive information.
Pharmaceutical supply chain.
In this crisis, one CCP news outlet suggested that China withhold life-saving pharmaceuticals from American markets. That would be tantamount to an act of war. We need to diversify our supply chains if we want to maintain any semblance of maintaining sovereignty.
Military tech — China has stolen much of our military Tech (bypassing any need for spending on R&D) and is now threatening our allies in the Pacific with much of our own military technology.
in the Cold war 2.0, Hong Kong is emerging as the new Berlin.
Academia
Harvard thought that China needed them more than they needed China — until the tables were turned. Ivy leage schools are proving to be subject to things like espionage, where we have seen faculty members exposed as being literally on the Chinese Government’s payroll.
Censorship
We used to think of Communist China’s censorship in terms of human rights. But now it’s more than that. It’s national security, it’s public health. Their censorship regime covered up and punished the doctors that tried to blow the whistle locally, and sound an alarm more generally.
If China had reacted to the outbreak like any reasonable modern country, sending in medical professionals, this could have been contained. within China, possibly even within the local region. Saving embarrassment was prioritized over saving lives.
CNN regurgitated a propaganda story about the relative success of their navy versus ours in dealing with this virus directly from China’s state-owned website.
