While we bemoan the events of the past year, the 90-million strong Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can rightfully celebrate a good half-century.  Since the Cold War, it has been a foreign policy goal of Mao Zedong and his successors to get America to lower its defenses and do the dirty work of empowering the People’s Republic.  All we got in exchange were diplomatic smiles, successive presidential courtships, and the promise of liberalism from a country that refuses to savor a drop of it. 

At age 67, China’s president and general secretary Xi Jinping is a dyed-in-the-wool communist despot who hides his connivances behind an immotile and disarming smile. Today, from aircraft carriers and ICBMs to shirts and face masks, China has stripped our government, private sector, and research institutions of its most precious intellectual property.  Much of it was simply there for the taking, surrendered in the hope of distributing and weakening Soviet military power across two fronts, or to advance an American government or corporate overseas interest.  Some of it has been expropriated slow and methodically from inside America through classic spycraft, sexspionage, and other extortionate plots for recruitment.  United States senators Eric Swalwell and Diane Feinstein, Hunter Biden, and perhaps the Biden family en masse, offer both unwitting and witting examples, respectively, of their triumphs.

The Democrat establishment and its media hacks have turned a blind’s eye to the wholesale infiltration of the CCP into our social order.  Wall Street has been long complicit in these Machiavellian intrigues, always willing to bootlick a regime that holds business opportunities and investments hostage to continued displays of friendship and the occasional ask for a White House intervention.  Years of fingerpointing at the Russians and chasing ghostly Bolshevik plots has diverted our attention and allowed China to slither in the back door and pillage our economy and security on an industrial scale.

In the first sentence of a recent article, the New York Times downplayed a Pew survey reporting the rise of American public opinion against China.  They opened by extolling Xi Jinping’s success in fighting the coronavirus and later referred to him as “proudly authoritarian.”  It is no small coincidence that Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire with one-fifth ownership of the Gray Lady, has close corporate ties to the CCP and has toiled on their behalf against Trump administration moves to prevent semiconductor sales to Huawei, a 5G communications company with strong connections to the CCP.  Huawei smartphones and China apps such as Tiktok and WeChat make American consumers vulnerable to spying and data breaches.

The CCP and Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), its military arm, operate within the United States on campuses and research companies through student and professional organizations with innocuous names such as the United Front, Thousand Talents, and Confucius institutes.  Their mission on behalf of the CCP include co-opting Chinese-Americans, suppressing anti-China activism and rhetoric, and recruiting American technologists and scientists for all-expenses-paid teaching and research fellowships to China.  Longer-term covert operations involve the infiltration of spies into political campaigns and the sexual entrapment of susceptible government officials and policy makers.

A good deal of the CCP and PLA’s campus work in America exploits Chinese student organizations and various friendship committees, such as the Confucius Institutes.  The academia watchdog National Association of Scholars has reported that 67 Institutes exist on college campuses across the United States, down from 103 in 2017.  Many are in the process of closing as President Trump recently branded them as foreign missions operating under the aegis of the CCP and revealing a soft academic power and influence in the classroom and on the curricula.

For the CCP, brainwashing begins in childhood.  The NAS found seven Confucius Institutes located in K-12 school districts in Florida, Illinois, Texas, Utah, Kentucky, and Nevada.  They represent a larger effort by the CCP, working with the scholastic testing and placement nonprofit College Board, to help design teacher-training programs, and inculcate China language and culture courses into the broader elementary and high school curricula.  

It has also been reported that there are 39 separate investigations involving criminal ties to China by university professors, students, and researchers, wherein China military and intelligence affiliations were purposely omitted from job applications or outright espionage and technology transfer has occurred.  Most China observers agree that investigations are only representative of those who have been caught.  The actual number of compromised academic faculty and students may run to the thousands.

American flagship companies operating in China must agree to Faustian bargains with the CCP.  Vintage examples involve the production and sale of smartphones.  Apple and Google’s obsession with consumer privacy protections has brought about unilateral and heavy-handed denials for encrypted phone records by American law enforcement, even when cops are presenting a judicially authorized search warrant.  Both companies operate with moral turpitude in sales to the surveillance states of Russia and China, where tapping into the cell phone conversations of their citizens is rampant.  Apple has even provided the CCP with iCloud data and encryption keys as the price of doing business in their country.

Companies such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Qualcomm, and Boeing have satellites in China that are thoroughly compromised by groups of loyal CCP members who provide the inside scoop on company goings-on and insights on technology advances.  In America, a Raytheon engineer was arrested for espionage, as well as a former CIA employee. The list goes on and on.

More recently, a federal indictment asserted that the California-based teleconferencing company, Zoom, was passing along user data and accounts on Chinese dissidents living in the United States.  The company allowed the interception of their online meetings and for calls to be shut down when conversations turned to events such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the oppression of the Uighurs.

Facebook employs China nationals in their hate speech department to help design algorithms that will recognize and censor disagreeable political content.  These algorithms comport with CCP goals to sow the seeds of racial division in America.  Recent changes to the formula to achieve thought control target anti-black comments for quick removal, while anti-white comments receive low priority.

American intelligence agencies have identified well over 250,000 Twitter accounts whose content does the bidding of the CCP.  Until warned by the government, these innumerable China propaganda bots have been allowed to propagate online.  In May 2020, Twitter was quick to dismiss a U.S. State Department report alleging that the CCP used Twitter accounts to disseminate a misinformation campaign about the pandemic.

As we put 2020 in the rear-view mirror, there isn’t much left that can shock the sensibilities of Americans.  America has polarized into two camps over statue-toppling, campus Marxism over free speech, a global pandemic, nationwide rioting and looting in the midst of state lockdowns, and a presidential election so blatantly rife with fraud that Democrats can only argue its scope and effect, not its existence.  With few exceptions, these hijinks can be pinned on a criminal bloc at work within the Democrat axis, all of whom, from party functionaries down to their gothic street urchins, have by and large acted with license and without legal consequence.  Every day, we learn more and more of China’s hidden hand in these events.

Donald Trump has been the first American president to put an end to a half-century of American appeasement and preferential trade policies with China.  For four years, he faced considerable internal opposition from bipartisan political hacks and industry leaders long duped by the CCP.

At first blush, Joe Biden’s national security picks are Obama retreads with a fond heart and a weak handshake for confronting the People’s Republic.  The excitement of the CCP at the apparent election of Joe Biden can best be summed up in this quote from the China Global Times, praising that “the new policy team is a group of elites [who are] very predictable in foreign policy with a multilateral mindset that will help restore U.S. leadership and strengthen ties with allies.”

Any good news for China portends bad news for America.  A majority of Americans didn’t vote for that.

Image: Sodacan