It's an article of faith among single-minded economic conservatives that exposure to the benefits of free markets is the best antidote to Marxist totalitarianism.
This would be plausible if Communism’s true purpose was economic betterment for the masses. But as Communist revolutionaries have demonstrated throughout the last century, their real goal is seizure and consolidation of power — and subjugation of the masses.
So it is that Communist China now engages with the west — not to embrace freedom, but to exploit our economic and cultural openings to strengthen itself, weaken the west, and emerge as the existential threat to global peace, freedom and security.
China uses a captive workforce to flood our markets with cheap goods against which American manufacturers cannot compete — except by outsourcing production to China or other low-or no-wage economies, further exploiting oppressed workers while killing American jobs.
China engages in technology theft; investments designed to gain influence in American businesses and institutions; property purchases in proximity to American defense and intelligence facilities; establishment of their own "police stations" around the U.S. to spy and to harass Chinese nationals living here.
They collaborate with Mexican drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl; and, as Rebecca Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute and Clare Morrell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center write, use TikTok as "essentially psychological warfare against America’s kids, with its aggressive algorithms sending them down rabbit holes of sex-and drug-related content."
China is attempting "espionage via America’s colleges and universities," former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos attests, "buying its way into influencing teaching, stealing our intellectual property and manipulating U.S. foreign policy" — and trying to turn Chinese students in our schools into Communist agents, according to former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
They exploit climate change policy in various ways. As a "developing" nation, this industrial giant forges ahead, exempt from the Kyoto protocol restrictions President Biden has imposed on American industry.
And, observes Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, China has turned America’s focus on "green energy" into a "cash cow" for itself, controlling three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries needed for electric vehicles, and nearly half the world’s supply of polysilicon, a key raw material in the production of solar panels, which is scavenged by Uyghur slave laborers.
Our economy and supply chains have become dangerously dependent on China.
As Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., recounts, China’s "crippling" COVID lockdown policy had "immense" repercussions "across our interconnected globe." And any similar, or worse, Chinese economic downturn "will ripple through America’s economy" with higher prices, emptier store shelves, and critical shortages.
China’s "chokehold on our medication supply chain," former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey illustrates, starkly dramatizes Beijing’s potential for weaponizing our economic dependence against us.
"The med bottles in your cabinet don’t say 'Made in China," McCaughey writes, "but nearly all are, including 97% of US antibiotics, by some estimates."
"In a tense situation," she warns, "Beijing could simply cut off shipments of antibiotics, cancer drugs, and other meds, forcing America to cede to its demands. Our survival hinges on its good will."
And essential medicines are but one of many vital resources China can cut us off from.
"Its economy can crash or soar at the drop of a hat," Rubio warns, or "the draft of a memo by General Secretary Xi Jinping.
"And that doesn’t even take into account the political and financial risk of using supply chains corrupted by slave labor."
The wealth the west is helping China accumulate is enabling its aggressive pursuit of world domination.
As Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer explains, "Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive Chinese-led global infrastructure project reaching deep into Asia, the Middle East and Europe, threatens to reshape large swaths of the inhabited earth in the Chinese Communist Party’s dystopian image."
And, while Xi Jinping has long been blustering about China being a world military power, now, writes Harry Kazianis, president and CEO of the bipartisan national security think tank Rogue States Project, Xi "finally has the economy — a gross domestic product worth more than $16 trillion — and foundational military capabilities to back up his bluster."
The results "are chilling," Kazianis writes, with a missile and nuclear arsenal now sufficient to dominate their Asian Pacific neighbors, threaten the entire world, and even potentially defeat the United States.
"And it will only get worse," he warns, as China invests billions more in armed forces, "building game-changer technology related to artificial intelligence, blockchain, cyberweapons and much more."
America’s economic openings have produced not a new flowering of freedom in Communist China, but a threat to our own economic well-being — and ultimately, to our freedom and security.
Yet major U.S. companies, including "woke" corporations critical of alleged American human rights shortcomings, enthusiastically do business in China’s controlled market, placing profits above any consideration of the Communist regime’s grotesque human rights abuses or menacing expansionism.
And major financial institutions, according to Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for a Free Hong Kong Foundation, do likewise, pursuing short term profits while ignoring the long-term dangers of "enabling this corrupt state."
"When it comes time to hang the capitalists," Lenin is said to have remarked, "they’ll sell us the rope."
Actually, corporate America, ever-solicitous of big-government favoritism, is hardly capitalist.
But in its profiteering collaboration with a totalitarian adversary bent on world subjugation, it may well be selling Communist China the tools to be used for its own, and America’s, destruction.
For three decades, Rick Hinshaw has given voice to faith values in the public square, as a columnist, then editor of The Long Island Catholic; communications director for the Catholic League and the New York State Catholic Conference; co-host of "The Catholic Forum," on cable. He is now editor of his own blog, "Reading the Signs." Visit Rick’s home page at rickhinshaw.com. Read Rick Hinshaw's Reports — More Here.
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