China is the biggest threat to our county on multiple fronts. We are likely going to be in conflict with them as soon as 2024 over Taiwan. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. China also wants to be the world power and they intend to overtake us as early as 2030. So in the meantime, China has been building up its power. According to the office of the Secretary of Defense, China is already surpassing us in some ways when it comes to its military forces. They have also been pushing their influence bypassing our federal government by investing in local governments and threatening American businesses.
“As Congress advances a set of bills to protect against Beijing’s efforts to subvert American democracy, China is using our system of government to block and tackle. On November 12, Reuters reported that Chinese officials have been pressuring American companies, executives, and trade groups to lobby against the legislation, threatening to reduce their share of the Chinese market if the bills pass. Unfortunately, such attempts to turn the U.S. system of government against itself are not new, or unusual. And they take place at the sub-national as well as national levels.
In 2015, Xi Jinping visited the United States for the first time since becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His first stop was in Seattle, where he attended the third China–U.S. Governors Forum.
The CCP has cemented a subversive influence apparatus across the United States. Xi’s visit to Seattle offers a roadmap of that apparatus: its pervasive presence, its targets, its sprawling objectives, and the cross-cutting mechanisms by which it achieves them. During his two days in Seattle, Xi prioritized three main groups: leading U.S. companies and their executives, local organizations dedicated to fostering closer U.S.–China ties, and, especially, state- and local-level government officials.
The CCP’s active-measures toolkit would make the Soviet Union drool. Beijing directs that toolkit at state and local elected officials, as well as the business, media, and nonprofit sectors. The Reuters report offered just the most recent example of the CCP’s subnational strategy, which is accelerating: Beijing has identified the vulnerable nodes through which it might defeat tough federal China legislation, and U.S. state, local, and non-governmental actors are largely blind to the threat.
Beijing is poised to subvert the subnational U.S. system, turning the country inside-out against itself. The federal government needs to step up, recognize the challenge, and do its job. In the meantime, state and local governments will have to start doing the federal government’s job for it.”
This is crafty. They are greasing wheels ensuring Chinese products are given preferential treatment and seem to have found a way to influence our country legally. So we need these bills to pass and more. We need to up our military and be ready to take on China if necessary. “If you want peace prepare for war.”