While many Americans pay attention to a few high-profile events involving China, such as when they sent a spy balloon across our country, we often lose focus. Even with recent reports that the balloon was equipped with U.S.-made technology, neither the media nor the American public has given it much attention, allowing Beijing’s predations to continue practically unchallenged.
In a new book titled Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Senator Tom Cotton asks America to give renewed focus to its greatest nemesis and asks the country to wake up and face some uncomfortable truths about Beijing.
First and foremost, China is an evil totalitarian empire. Consider their misrule, exploitation, and victimization of the native Chinese population. This allows great insights into the threat we face internationally as Beijing is just as determined to expand its dominance globally.
Some remember the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but few realize that China’s predations against its citizens have continued up to the present. With a population of more than 1 billion people, it should come as no surprise that its abusive rule is unpopular. As America’s founders realized in seeking independence in 1776, freedom is the natural state of people. China understands this and to counter it, Cotton argues the Chinese government “spends as much money on controlling it’s on people as it does on its military.”
But it isn’t satisfied to merely monitor its people. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses its police powers in ways that can shock the conscience and that lead the world in a macabre way. According to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, more living Chinese are killed as part of forced organ donation than anywhere in the world.
Similarly, the CCP does not tolerate dissent. According to Senator Cotton, the CCP’s laws are “intentionally vague to chill dissent and turn everyone into a criminal in waiting. And with a conviction rate over 99.9 percent, punishment isn’t in doubt.” That’s one of the many reasons why China executes more dissenters than Iran, North Korea and Syria combined.
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Setting aside political disputes, even something as seemingly benign as religious expression can likewise lead to prison or death. Take their systematic mistreatment of Uyghurs.
Cotton reveals the comprehensive attempts that China uses to control and repress this ethnic minority in a way that should alarm Americans. The CCP has pursued multiple discriminatory repressive campaigns in the Uyghur Region including labor camps. According to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, there are at least 135 detention facilities in the Uyghur Region that have on-site work camps, demonstrating the brutal measures Beijing will take against those they do not agree with.
China’s military spending has also been meteoric in its growth, underscoring the country’s global ambitions. Official figures show that their defense spending has grown five-fold over the past two decades to $309 billion. But these figures are widely believed to understate the true amount spent by the Chinese military, and the actual number is likely much higher.
In fact, the University of Texas’ National Security Review suggest that the true figure may be close to half a trillion dollars, while Bloomberg has reported that Pentagon leaders place the number in excess of $700 billion. Senator Cotton argues that “China has undertaken the largest peacetime military buildup in history” but he believes that this buildup isn’t about peace. As he spells it out, “China is preparing for war.”
The CCP’s “four-million-man military is the largest in the world, around twice the size of our military and nearly as technologically advanced,” Cotton reveals. If that isn’t alarming enough, Cotton dedicates a section to China’s “Breathtaking” Nuclear Arsenal. Today China has more than 500 warheads and “by the end of this decade, China plans to double it again to more than 1000 warheads,” Cotton explains.
But before China undertakes a global conflagration, the CCP has other tricks up their sleeve. China has pursued an economic assault on the West and the US in particular that has been wildly successful, as Cotton reveals that China’s economy has grown more than 1,200% since 2001 – “the spoils of perhaps the most successful and one-sided economic contest in history.” The CCP has similarly pushed to directly undermine the American way of life.
In two chapters China has infiltrated Our Society and China Has Infiltrated our Government, Senator Cotton uses the example of TikTok, the CCP’s wildly successful social media app, ostensibly owned by Byte Dance. Used by over 170 million Americans and over a billion people globally, TikTok collects sensitive user data accessible to Byte Dance and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party. This provides the CCP with unfettered access to millions of Americans – most of them young – at any given moment that allows them to disseminate information that can shape public opinion.
Cotton reports that once America got wise to TikTok, and discussed passing a divestment bill, the company started spreading money around like candy among DC lobbyists. When that didn’t work, Byte Dance went to the Supreme Court to claim that the First Amendment protected its rights to operate in the US unimpeded. Fortunately, TikTok lost – unanimously.
Ultimately Cotton says that the outcome of this generational threat from China is in our hands. In the chapter China Could Win, Cotton quotes Reagan’s 1964 Rendezvous With Destiny speech and says that America has another critical choice to make.
He’s right that China’s threat should be highlighted more by the media but is also right that it likewise needs be addressed by other parts of society. Our churches, neighborhood organizations and volunteer organizations should take the lead to ensure our country remains vigilant.
Cotton has rightly sounded the alarm and eloquently argues that “the dangers have gathered, and the hour has grown late but we can still prevail if we understand the stakes and the threat.” Do a favor for the next generation: read and circulate this book.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop him.
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