Top U.S. Officials Condemn the CCP for Its Threat to the Free World (Cont.)

(Minghui.org) As of September 29, the coronavirus has infected over 33 million people and killed more than one million around the world. Like many other Western countries, the United States has been awakened by the disinformation and lies from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has begun to reshape its strategy with regard to China.

Many top U.S. officials have condemned the CCP for its threat to the free world and have proposed new ways to deal with the CCP. A previous report covered statements in this regard by officials from the White House, the Department of State, and the FBI. This report presents concerns about the CCP raised by the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. 

U.S. Attorney General William Barr: The U.S. Response to the Global Ambitions of the CCP Is the Most Important Issue in the 21st Century

In a speech on China Policy at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan on July 16, 2020, U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued a warning: “the most important issue for our nation and the world in the twenty-first century — that is, the United States’ response to the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.”

AG Barr said, “The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world. It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship. How the United States responds to this challenge will have historic implications and will determine whether the United States and its liberal democratic allies will continue to shape their own destiny or whether the CCP and its autocratic tributaries will control the future.”

AG Barr explained that the CCP is no longer hiding its power or biding its time, as the CCP’s General Secretary, Xi Jinping, is speaking openly about its approach to the “center stage,” “building a socialism that is superior to capitalism” and replacing the American dream with “Chinese solutions.” 

“To tilt the playing field to its advantage, China’s communist government has perfected a wide array of predatory and often unlawful tactics: currency manipulation, tariffs, quotas, state-led strategic investment and acquisitions, theft and forced transfer of intellectual property, state subsidies, dumping, cyberattacks, and espionage. About 80% of all federal economic espionage prosecutions have alleged conduct that would benefit the Chinese state, and about 60% of all trade secret theft cases have had a nexus to China.”

AG Barr pointed out that China’s progress in key trade routes and infrastructure shows that the CCP’s predatory economic policies are succeeding. For one hundred years, the United States had the world's largest manufacturing capability, which allowed it to serve as the world’s “arsenal of democracy.” But after China surpassed the United States in manufacturing output in 2010, it quickly rose to the “arsenal of dictatorship” of the world. 

“Although Americans hoped that trade and investment would liberalize China’s political system, the fundamental character of the regime has never changed. It remains an authoritarian, one-party state in which the Communist Party wields absolute power, unchecked by popular elections, the rule of law, or an independent judiciary. The CCP surveils its own people and assigns them social credit scores, employs an army of government censors, tortures dissidents, and persecutes religious and ethnic minorities, including a million Uighurs detained in indoctrination and labor camps.”

“If what happened in China stayed in China, that would all be bad enough. But instead of America changing China, China is leveraging its economic power to change America.”

He called for a reassessment of U.S.-China relations. The United States needs the joint efforts of the entire society to resist the CCP’s challenge that threatens future generations.

U.S. Secretary of Defense: The CCP Is Challenging International Rules

Mark Esper, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, published an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Pentagon Is Prepared For China,” on August 24, 2020. The article pointed out that as CCP leader Xi Jinping was calling to use the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to advance the CCP’s global ambition, the U.S. is prepared to strengthen its network of allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, in response to the “new era of global competition between the free and open international order and an authoritarian system fostered by Beijing.”

Esper pointed out that the PLA is not a military that serves the nation or a constitution, but it “belongs to—and serves—a political entity, the Chinese Communist Party.”

He wrote, “The Communist Party’s emphasis on indoctrinating, modernizing and tightening control over the PLA shows how China’s leaders view the military as central to achieving their objectives. Prominent among these is to reshape the international order in ways that undermine globally accepted rules while normalizing authoritarianism, creating conditions to allow the Chinese Communist Party to coerce other countries and impede their sovereignty.”

Esper ended with an appeal: “Nations valuing freedom, human rights and the rule of law must stand together to counter the coercive role of the PLA in the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive attempts to undermine the sovereignty of nations.”

Senator Ted Cruz: The CCP Is a “New Evil Empire”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said in an interview with Jan Jekielek of The Epoch Times that the CCP is the “new evil empire” that is seeking to dominate the globe. The CCP has been trying to subvert all aspects of American society, from politics to economy, from intellectual property to supply chain, from Hollywood to academia, to professional sports like the NBA.

He said that in order to respond to the CCP’s serious geopolitical threat to the U.S., one needs to understand the scope of the regime’s aggression against the U.S., including intellectual property theft, espionage, propaganda, as well as its malign influence campaigns. 

The senator also compared the current situation with the U.S.’s cold war with the Soviet Union and how it should use a similar strategy to defeat the CCP.

“For the entirety of the Cold War, we didn’t get in a shooting war with the Soviet Union. Rather—and Reagan understood this the best—we engaged in a systematic, comprehensive effort to shine a light, to use the power of truth, to use economic pressures, to use diplomatic pressures, and to use the incredible power of the American free enterprise system, to defeat them and to bankrupt them.”

Senator Cruz said that the coronavirus pandemic has led to a fundamental reassessment of foreign policy between the United States, China and the world.

“The Chinese people in China, far too many of them, live in poverty and anguish. Communism is a disaster. It doesn't work. So we need to combat it on the military side. We need to combat it by shining a light. This is something I have tried to do vigorously, is (by) calling out the lies and oppression from China,” he said.

Related Report:Top U.S. Officials Condemn the CCP for Its Threat to the Free World