During the height of the Cold War, former President Richard Nixon, in what many argue was a brilliant strategic gambit, opened relations with Communist China to bring pressure on our most feared adversary, the Soviet Union. Subsequent presidents built upon this policy by taking action to strengthen China, believing that when China opened its economic system, freedom would flourish.
It is fair to say that things haven’t turned out as planned.
Policymakers believed inserting American corporate interests in China would not only liberalize China’s economy but ultimately break the Communist Party’s grip on the country. Instead, American corporations, cowering in fear of losing the Chinese market, have worked together with the communist government to tamp down freedom and limit the ability of Chinese citizens to express themselves.
American technology companies, for example, assisted the Chinese government in creating a social credit score, which allows the government to score citizens’ behavior, and are now working on bringing the same system to the United States.
Similarly, America’s foreign policy has not adapted to the new reality of China.
The sad reality is that China is not what we had hoped it would become. China, flush with U.S. dollars, grew its economy and military for anti-American purposes, adopted an expansionist foreign policy, threatened its neighbors, ignored treaties on Hong Kong, and violated the most basic of human rights codes.
Yet despite the Chinese Communist Party’s clear and obvious threats to freedom and American interests, President Joe Biden and American corporatists continue to do China’s bidding on the world stage. During the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, the Biden administration touted the adoption of a new plan to have American taxpayers pay “climate reparations” to other countries. The plan establishes a “climate justice fund” where wealthier nations pay poorer nations for the “loss and damage” caused by climate change. Among the beneficiaries of the generous largess of the American treasury includes Communist China, as the U.N. still classifies China as a developing nation.
As world leaders cower to China, American corporations are pathetically one-upping them. Take Apple, for example. In response to China’s brutal lockdowns designed to stop the spread of COVID, Chinese citizens have taken to the streets in their first mass demonstrations since Tiananmen Square in 1989. Weeks before the protests grew, Apple limited its Airdrop feature, which allows demonstrators to share information without the eyes and ears of the Chinese politburo tracking and following. When asked whether he supported the demonstrators’ fight for greater freedom, Apple CEO Tim Cook ignored reporters’ questions.
Apple, of course, is not alone in kowtowing to the Chinese dictators. Elon Musk is another great example. He regularly works with and heaps praise on the country that he says “rocks” in ways that are complicit and unusual at best and dangerous at worst. As China dissident and Citizen Power Initiatives for China president Jianli Yang pointed out in Newsweek, “when China told Tesla to make a change to their cars, the company quickly complied, despite its reluctance to do so in similar scenarios in the U.S. And when California shut down a Tesla factory, Musk labeled them tyrants and refused; however, when China shut down a Tesla factory, Musk complied.”
Musk’s sharp disparities in the treatment of the U.S. government and the Chinese Communist Party have unsettled many Republican and Democratic members of Congress, who fear that SpaceX’s national security secrets may end up in the wrong hands and that Twitter’s censorship policies can counterintuitively take a turn for the worse (at least with respect to CCP propaganda) under Musk’s leadership.
The cowardness displayed by America’s public and private leaders is further proof that American policy, which seems to bolster Beijing at every turn, is in desperate need of a reset. The Chinese Communist government is America’s enemy, not its friend, and it’s time the U.S. elites begin acknowledging as much before it’s too late.
Thankfully, some members of Congress have already begun to lay the groundwork for a China reset by introducing legislation and calling for hearings designed to further decouple the U.S. from the CCP and better prepare America to proactively combat the country’s aggression. Hopefully, this reform coalition will continue to grow so that, in the next congressional session, true America First reforms can finally materialize. The fate of our republic may depend on it.
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Mr. Michael J. Pappas is a former U.S. representative for New Jersey.
