There’s no room left for ‘leaders’ weak on China

China, it seems, has become every American’s problem. Between the millions of manufacturing jobs stolen from our shores, unfair trade barriers against American producers, and the coronavirus plague sent around the globe, little good has come from China’s greater integration onto the world stage.

You would think by this point that getting tough on China would be a bipartisan issue. But some politicians, still clinging to the so-called “Washington consensus” that encouraged China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization, just can’t get rid of the failed thinking of the ’90s.

Most notably, Joe Biden.

It’s true that, here and there, an adviser will give a statement, or Joe himself will stumble through some prepared remarks about “global leadership,” but there seems to be a distinct lack of interest among the team of consultants and other geniuses propping up Joe to present him as someone who will commit to standing up to China.

Make no mistake: A vote for Biden is a vote for American capitulation to an exceedingly dangerous Chinese Communist Party (CCP). And if you’ve stayed away from the news lately, here’s a few examples from just the past couple weeks of the kinds of things an unchecked China could push onto the world stage.

A highly controversial “national security law” was imposed upon Hong Kong this week. Hong Kong for decades was a special place — a shining beacon of capitalism, democracy and freedom in Asia that represented the wealth and prosperity those ideas could bring. When it came under Chinese purview as a special administrative region following the British handover in 1997, everyone knew it was just a matter of time before it all would come to an end. It was supposed to be a principle of “One Country, Two Systems,” in which Hong Kong would be a part of China but could retain its democratic governance and respect for individual freedoms up through 2047.

But 2047 came early. Anything the CCP deems as an act of “subversion,” like the pro-democracy protests, is now a crime that can carry with it a sentence of life in prison. Beijing is allowed to prosecute any case it determines to be “very serious” with closed-door trials, no questions asked. Needless to say, the CCP vision for the rule of law is not something we should allow to spread around the world. It’s a cancerous ideology that needs to be stopped.

Getting even more dystopian, the New York Times reported on June 17 that “police in China are collecting blood samples from men and boys across the country to build a genetic map of its roughly 700 million males, giving the authorities a powerful new tool for their emerging high-tech surveillance state.” It continues: “It would add to a growing, sophisticated surveillance net that the police are deploying across the country, one that increasingly includes advanced cameras, facial recognition systems and artificial intelligence.”

Although abhorrent to any society that values freedom, this imposition of surveillance is just a given in anything that touches modern China. And this reason alone is why recent actions by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to rightfully designate Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE as national security threats should be applauded on both sides of the aisle as a meaningful start to ensuring American companies escape Chinese surveillance.

To top it all off, there are recent reports of a new virus with “pandemic potential” emerging in China. Some headlines are already claiming the virus is spreading to humans, which almost guarantees there’s been an outbreak for weeks already and China can no longer hide it — just as with COVID-19. But don’t worry, I’m sure the World Health Organization will soon tell us that there’s no possibility of a further outbreak because … well, because that’s what China said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo probably said it best when he commented that “it’s a different Chinese Communist Party today than it was ten years ago … this is a Chinese Communist Party that has come to view itself as intent on the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values.” There is no longer an argument to allow China under the Chinese Communist Party to grow in influence on the world stage. Any person who doesn’t understand this should be immediately disqualified for the job that carries the moniker “leader of the free world,” without even a second thought.

The American people know this. And the longer we suffer from China’s most recent viral gift to the world, even the most sheltered establishment types will be shocked at how clear this message will be.

Corey R. Lewandowski is President Trump’s former campaign manager and a senior adviser to the Trump-Pence 2020 campaign. He is a senior adviser to the Great America Committee, Vice President Mike Pence‘s political action committee. He is co-author with David Bossie of the new book, “Trump’s Enemies” and of “Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency.” Follow him on Twitter @CLewandowski_.