Stand Up to China’s Bullying and Defend Taiwan The island nation is a candle against the darkness of the Communist Party. By Mike Gallagher
“Mr. Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District and is chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.”
I’ve just returned from Taiwan, where I had the privilege to meet with President Tsai Ing-wen. Her message: “Today, saying ‘I am Taiwanese’ is an expression of honor.” The Taiwanese have thrived and built a democracy in defiance of the dark shadow of Chinese Communist Party aggression.
My grandmother told me that “every bully is deep down a coward.” When President Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Taipei in 1960, the Chinese Communist Party, in a fit of rage, spent a week pounding the Taiwanese island of Kinmen with more than 85,000 rounds of artillery. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi touched down in Taipei last August, the party threw another tantrum. For days after her visit, sortie after sortie of fighter jets violated Taiwan’s airspace, warships cruised into Taiwan’s territorial waters, and bombs exploded around the island.
Every day we read about the party harassing dissidents in the U.S., disappearing tech executives such as Jack Ma, coercing American companies into ideological complicity. The party locks ethnic minority populations in concentration camps for possessing religious books or the wrong smartphone app. It welds its own citizens into their apartments for “public health.” Confident nations don’t act like this. The party’s rulers are defined by a fear of their own people and operate from a place of almost crippling paranoia.
I’m chairing the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party this Congress, and when we think about how to deter the Chinese Communist Party, it’s useful to think about how you deal with a bully—by getting your friends together and standing up.
We stand up by protecting Chinese-Americans from transnational repression—and by supporting Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and minority groups suffering under the party’s repression. We stand up by rebuilding our military industrial base. We stand up by protecting our research institutions and companies from IP theft. We stand up by reclaiming control of strategic supply chains, including lifesaving pharmaceuticals.
And we stand up by aiding Taiwan in its self-defense. In our meeting, Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai used the analogy of a basketball game: One-on-one the Chinese Communist Party might win, but an American-led team of allies and partners fighting together can’t be beaten. Surging hard power to the Indo-Pacific before the shooting starts and clearing the nearly $20 billion backlog of Foreign Military Sales to Taiwan will give our friends confidence and our enemies pause.
We must also do a better job of countering the Communist Party’s malign influence operations in Taiwan, the U.S., and around the world. That means speaking the truth about the brutal, genocidal regime in Beijing.
We must also demonstrate the ability to make its worst fears come true. The Great Firewall exists because the party’s rulers are terrified of the people of China having access to the truth. The party employs millions of censors just to keep tabs on its population. We should develop the capabilities to rupture the Great Firewall and deploy them at a time and place of our choosing.
Repression is spreading outward all around the periphery of China—Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong. The darkness presses beyond China’s borders, slithering into multinational institutions, over the internet, throughout the global financial system. Against the darkness stands a candle that burns freely, fiercely, improbably in opposition: Taiwan.
We need to make sure that General Secretary Xi Jinping wakes up every morning and looks toward Taiwan, calculates the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait, calculates the risk to his party if the Chinese people were inundated with the truth, and says to himself: “Today is not the day.”
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