Biden’s weak approach to China aggression must end

September 5, 2023

We hear and read many things about China and its aggression against America. Who can forget the recent spy balloon incident? But they are also buying up farm land near military bases; sending students to our universities to work their way into ground-breaking research projects; and stealing intellectual property from companies in America. 

On January 28, the Chinese balloon began floating over the United States, starting over Alaska and after crossing the country until it was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina on February 4. That path took the balloon over several military bases. The route the balloon followed received attention from NBC News. 

“It was a troubling claim made by a key member of Congress with access to top secret information,” the NBC report said. “If you plotted the trajectory of the Chinese spy balloon, it’d mirror where the nation's most sensitive and powerful weapons are stored.”

“If you ask somebody to draw an X at every place where our sensitive missile defense sites, our nuclear weapons infrastructure, our nuclear weapon sites are, you would put them all along this path,” said Rep. Mike Turner, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Chinese explanation was, of course, not an admission of guilt: It was a civilian (mainly meteorological) airship that had been blown off course, they said.

A Pew Research poll shows that Americans view China as our greatest threat. When asked which nation posed the greatest threat, 50 percent named China, 17 percent named Russia, and 2 percent named North Korea.

Last year, CBS News reported that “A new report by Boston-based cybersecurity firm, Cybereason, has unearthed a malicious campaign — dubbed Operation CuckooBees — exfiltrating hundreds of gigabytes of intellectual property and sensitive data, including blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data from multiple intrusions, spanning technology and manufacturing companies in North America, Europe, and Asia.

 “’We're talking about Blueprint diagrams of fighter jets, helicopters, and missiles,’ Cybereason CEO Lior Div told CBS News. “In pharmaceuticals, ‘we saw them stealing IP of drugs around diabetes, obesity, depression.’ The campaign has not yet been stopped.”

“Alarms went off in Washington when the Fufeng Group, a Chinese agricultural company, bought 300 acres of land and set up a milling plant last spring in Grand Forks, N.D,” the Wall Street Journal reported last September.

The plant is less than a half-hour drive from an important U.S. Air Force base. U.S. Senator John Hoeven, R-N.D., said that Grand Forks Air Force Base hosts a space mission that “will form the backbone of U.S. military communications across the globe.”

“The deal shouldn’t have taken the federal government by surprise. U.S. Department of Agriculture data show that Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland leapt more than 20-fold in a decade, from $81 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2020,” the Journal report said. 

“Beijing hasn’t outlined a strategy, but large-scale state backing for these investments indicates there is one. In 2013 the government-owned Bank of China loaned $4 billion to Hong Kong-headquartered WH Group, the world’s largest pork producer, to buy Virginia’s Smithfield Foods. WH now controls much of the U.S. pork supply and revenue because of the deal.”

American Military News added to this development that before the Fufeng Group purchased the Grand Fork property, “another Chinese firm had begun efforts to buy up around 140,000 acres of land located about 70 miles from Laughlin Air Force Base. That Chinese Firm, Guanghui Energy Co. Ltd, wanted to build a massive wind farm known as the Blue Hills Wind Project.” Laughlin AFB is located in Del Rio, Texas.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made the following statement about China’s relationship with the U.S. “The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

“At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions. 

“China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.”

“U.S. and allied policymakers are facing the most important foreign-policy challenge of the 21st century,” Foreign Policy magazine reported last October. “China’s power is peaking; so is the political position of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) domestic strength. In the long term, China’s likely decline after this peak is a good thing. But right now, it creates a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals.”

The tactics implemented by the CCP against American interests are not new, and are continuing. As they continue and increase, China gets stronger while the U.S. becomes more vulnerable.

China’s post-Covid economic rebound is fizzling. The U.S. must cease activities that support its economy, reclaim Chinese land and other subversive purchases, and strongly oppose the CCP’s aggressions. The Biden administration’s weak approach to the China threat must end.

The coronavirus COVID-19 is not the only threat China represents

Many years ago, there was a very popular movie, “The China Syndrome.” It was a thriller about a potential cataclysmic event that could possibly destroy China, due to a problem in an American nuclear power plant. We now face another sort of China Syndrome.

This one originated in China, and has already killed thousands, and will likely kill thousands more around the globe. It was in China where the novel coronavirus COVID-19 first appeared and eventually was made public.

It angers many people when this disease is identified by its country of origin as the “Chinese virus,” or the “China virus.” But doing so is not racist. And it is not xenophobic.

It is no more so than “Chinese food,” “Chinese Communists,” or “Chinese checkers.” Many other diseases have likewise been named after their countries of origin: German measles, Spanish flu, Japanese encephalitis, Ebola virus, West Nile virus, and MERS (the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome). These names merely accurately identify the diseases’ origin; they reflect reality. Nothing more.

Carelessly slinging around epithets, like calling the use of the term “Chinese virus” racist, and mis-labeling people as racist, xenophobes, etc., devalues those terms. Where Donald Trump is concerned, this happens often. Such usage gives credibility to the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It may be as real as the China virus.

That China is no friend of the United States is a story with a long, long history. In recent history, its tariffs on American products have worked against us for many, many years, reaching a record $375 billion in 20l7. Its penchant for intellectual property theft, stealing American technology through the work of spies acting as workers or associates, and often requiring companies to voluntarily share new technology with the Chinese Communist Party in return for being allowed to market products to China, also severely damage the U.S.

The onset of the coronavirus has thrown spotlights on the dangerous degree to which pharmaceuticals are now made in, and controlled by, China. Irresistible incentives offered to American drug companies resulted in the transfer of production of drugs from America to China.

“Multinational drug companies, many of them headquartered in the United States, began buying ingredients for critical drugs in China after the U.S.-China Fair Trade Agreement passed nearly two decades ago,” notes an article in U.S. News. “State-owned Chinese companies, buoyed by heavy government subsidies, set their prices so low that they were able to undercut established manufacturers in the U.S. and elsewhere, prompting them to shut down their plants and move their operations to China,” the article continued. 

China’s “Thousand Talents program tries to recruit experts from Western universities to work in China and ramp up its progress in science and technology,” reported NBC News in January. An FBI complaint charges that the program has “rewarded individuals for stealing proprietary information and violating export controls.”

NBC also reported on the arrest of Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Lieber is alleged to have failed to disclose his involvement in the Thousand Talents program to the Department of Defense.

Lieber was allegedly paid $50,000 monthly by China's Wuhan University of Technology, and also received $158,000 in living expenses, and a $1.74 million award to set up a research lab at the Wuhan University.

Knox News, the online presence of the Knoxville News Sentinel, reported in February that “Anming Hu, an associate professor in [the University of Tennessee’s] Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, faces three counts of wire fraud and three counts of making false statements, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

Hu allegedly neglected to make UT aware of an affiliation with a university run by the Chinese government, which then resulted in UT falsely certifying to NASA that it complied with the appropriate laws.

President Donald Trump has begun fighting back against China’s outrageous tariffs, by putting tariffs on Chinese products. As with everything Trump does, this, too, has drawn much criticism. But Trump notes that after years of sitting mildly by while China hurts American business interests and strengthens itself, it is time to fight back.

The country has been gradually coming on board with Trump’s plan. The latest ABC News/IPSOS poll shows that 55 percent of Americans now favor his actions, while 43 percent still oppose his handling of this crisis.

Addressing the threat posed by China today, historian and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich notes, “Now we face the fifth great challenge to our survival as a free country (following the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the rise of the Soviet Union).”

In his new book, “Trump vs. China: Facing America’s Greatest Threat,” in which he tracks China’s centuries-long development up to today, he describes the situation. “The Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian system is big, and getting bigger, getting richer, and becoming more sophisticated. It is the greatest competitor that America has faced in our history.”

The COVID-19 threat that originated in China will most likely be defeated in time. The greater threat posed by China, however, will still exist, and must be addressed.