Commentary
Is President Joe Biden weak on China? If his administration’s new National Security Strategy is anything to go by, the answer is a resounding yes.
Compared with the 2017 strategy published during Donald Trump’s time in office, the most recent document only mentions China, which is the biggest threat to the United States. The 2017 document, on the other hand, mentioned China 33 times. Trump recognized the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and he ensured that the threat was highlighted repeatedly and unapologetically. The same cannot be said for Biden. Unfortunately, the weak-on-China examples don’t end there.
Recently, when asked if Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new Lord of Twitter, poses a threat to national security, Biden said that the question deserved serious consideration. In truth, it really doesn’t. The real threat to national security comes from China and its various Trojan horses.
In June 2021, in a piece for the National Review, I outlined the many reasons why TikTok posed a grave threat to the United States. Although the article was well-received, one prominent author speculated that I was engaging in little more than fact-free fearmongering. The author asked if TikTok’s threats were real or imagined. Almost a year and a half later, the answer is obviously real. Yet, here we are, still discussing TikTok, still dealing with the very same threats that we were dealing with last year.
The reason why nothing has changed is rather simple: Biden reversed Trump’s efforts to ban China’s Trojan horse. China has already used technology to steal the personal information of some 260 million Americans. How much damage has it done with arguably its most potent digital creation, TikTok?
All is not lost, though. Two Senate Republicans, Marco Rubio and Mike Gallagher, plan to introduce legislation to ban the app in the United States, claiming that the CCP could use TikTok to “subtly indoctrinate American citizens” and collect inordinate amounts of user information. Let’s hope the legislation does pass because, according to Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, the CCP offers an “opium version” of TikTok to American children. Considering an average user in the United States spends six hours per week on the app, that’s a lot of “opium” consumed; that’s a lot of damage done. That’s a lot of children hooked on a dangerous drug.
Speaking of danger, let’s discuss Confucius Institutes (CIs). For the uninitiated, Hanban, an organization closely affiliated with the CCP, established the CI program in 2004. Ostensibly, the program was created in an attempt to promote the Chinese language and culture around the world. Fast forward to 2022, and there are 525 of these institutes in 146 countries and regions.
Like TikTok, CIs are Trojan horses for the CCP. This is why Denmark, Finland, and Sweden have chosen to remove their presence from their respective countries. These institutes play a key role in the CCP’s “overseas propaganda set-up.” This is why the Trump administration labeled them a national security risk. During Trump’s tenure as president, the State Department and the FBI monitored CIs operating in the United States closely. Now, thankfully, the vast majority of CIs are no longer operating in the United States. But don’t celebrate just yet.
A recent report published by the National Association of Scholars discussed the fact that many of these institutes have not disappeared; similar programs have simply replaced them. In short, the only thing that has changed is the name.
In a piece for National Review, Rachelle Peterson, a contributor to the report, had this to say: “The parallels between these new programs—call them Confucius Institutes 2.0—and the original CIs are striking.” She discussed Western Michigan University, which struck a new agreement with its former CI partner, Beijing Language and Culture University, 24 hours after the WMU’s CI closed for business. Others, like Northern State University, noted Peterson, “continued funding from the Center for Language Exchange and Cooperation, the Chinese-government agency that funded Confucius Institutes.”
Why isn’t the Biden administration doing more to stop this from happening?
Some prominent politicians believe Biden isn’t strong enough to stand up to Xi, to defend the United States from Chinese aggression. To put things right, Biden must act, and he must act now. The country needs a strong leader, someone capable of showing communist China that the United States is still a country capable of defending itself. To do this, however, both TikTok and Confucius Institutes must be banished.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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