https://spectator.us/trump-right-china-years-uighurs/
Back in the summer of 2015, all the cleverest people made fun of Donald Trump for obsessing about China. One of them even made a video compilation of the candidate saying ‘China’ over and over again on the hustings. Ha ha ha.
It seems distinctly less funny now. There is a reason that the novel coronavirus is popularly denominated the Wuhan flu or CCP virus. As Bill Gertz observed in How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick, ‘the world does not need to prove that the communist regime in Beijing was responsible for the escape of the coronavirus from a lab’ in order to cast a jaundiced eye upon its many malefactions. ‘It is now clear,’ he writes, ‘that decades of international engagement and cooperation with communist China was a mistake that seriously undermined fundamental American values of freedom, democracy, openness, honesty, and free markets.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. In the 1970s, under Richard Nixon, America embarked on a program of ‘constructive engagement’ with communist China. The hope was that by pursuing closer ties with China, America would mount a more effective challenge to the Soviet threat. The secondary hope was that by engaging with China, we would lure the backwards communist behemoth into the modern world. That turned out to be a fond hope. China entered the modern world all right. But instead of softening its penchant for top-down totalitarian rule, economic and military modernization made its despotism more cunning.
Consider, for example, the 370,000 Chinese nationals who have come to the United States for college. They typically pay full-freight, which makes them an important economic boon to the colleges and universities they attend. And it is still not widely appreciated that all are subject to Article 7 of the 2017 National Intelligence Law of 2017, which requires that ‘any citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work’. In other words, as Brian Kennedy notes in Communist China’s War Inside America, ‘It is quite literally the law that all Chinese students in American universities are agents, or potential agents, of the Chinese Communist party and the intelligence apparatus of the P.RC.’