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America’s Governing Elite Wants To Govern Just Like China’s.

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China envy runs strong among America’s progressive elite. The Communist Party of China’s hold on power and centralized decision-making has long appealed to progressives infuriated with their inability to mandate solutions to global warming (and other progressive priorities).

Tom Friedman, an established bellwether of elite opinion, has been voicing this exasperation for more than a decade. Last weekend he reduced the genocide in Xinjiang to “bad stuff with the Uighurs,” of less concern than Chinese excellence in high-speed rail.

Far too few Americans grasp the implications of such a view taking root among their own elite. Though more and more Americans are awakening to the challenges inherent in China’s growing economic, technological, and military capabilities, few understand the threat that China’s governing philosophy and structures pose to the US.

As David Goldman has explained, though the CPC is nominally Communist, China is what it has been for millennia: an empire run by oligarchic mandarins. The appeal to an American elite that sees itself as a worthy meritocracy enamored of governance by bureaucratic experts is obvious.

Americans need to understand that beyond mere appeal and envy, there is a growing convergence of interests between China’s entrenched communist oligarchs and America’s emerging progressive oligarchs.

Today’s China, like all imperial powers, seeks to exploit the resources of anyone and anything outside its central oligarchy to enhance the prosperity, prestige, and power of that center. As a result, the CPC doesn’t much care how foreigners organize their internal affairs as long as they remain subject to two imperial edicts: Don’t interfere with China’s exploitation of your resources, and don’t challenge the CPC’s virtue and wisdom.

Those rules frame Chinese influence in the US. As Lee Smith recently outlined, China has employed another standard imperial trick to further that influence. It has invested heavily to create a formidable oligarchy of American enforcers.

Though penetration is far deeper among Democrats than Republicans, this oligarchy is bipartisan. It also extends to leading American names in industry, banking, entertainment and sports to create a tight alliance binding America’s progressives to China.

Those enforcers understand what they’re paid to do. Unlike in earlier eras, when food and gold were the focus of imperial exploitation, the most valuable resource today is information.

China seeks to exploit American technical education, research, finance, and intellectual property. China’s payment for those public resources flows almost entirely to elite progressives and their institutions. For Americans outside the elite, China offers low-cost consumer goods and technology products.

Because the exploitation of information resources and the provision of inexpensive goods both reduce US employment opportunities, America’s elite must stifle resentment that unemployed Americans express toward China.

Potential critiques of the CPC run far beyond economic grievances, however. Numerous alleged actions are deeply offensive to traditional American sensibilities: destroying Tibetan culture, crushing freedom in Hong Kong, running genocidal concentration camps for Uighurs, brutalizing Falun Gong practitioners, suppressing Christianity, and using political prisoners for organ harvesting, to name but a few.

The American oligarchy is paid to play down these atrocities as lamentable, but of minimal consequence – as Friedman’s recent comments demonstrate quite clearly.

This imperative has never been more important than in discussions about the origins of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Unlike China’s domestic human-rights abuses, this pandemic has had a clear, negative impact on the lives of Americans. Hence the absolute need to insist that the pandemic’s origins remain unknown, and to label as racist any reference to a “Chinese virus.”

Beyond simply serving China’s imperial needs, the US oligarchy is working to build an America that looks more like China. The contours of their system are already clear: an enlightened elite broadcasts official progressive facts, beliefs, and values that none may question.

Individual rights and liberties are sacrificed in the name of the common good. Those who object are deemed unfit for polite society, then shunned or removed. Citizens inform on one another to curry favor and prestige.

Such a transformation of the US along Chinese lines is hardly without precedent. Throughout history, the structures and ethos of dominant powers have flowed throughout their spheres of influence. Since World War II, American norms like representative government, human rights, and the rule of law have held sway around the globe – at least in theory, if not always in practice.

Should the American hegemon give way to China, the governing model of a ruthless, meritocratic bureaucracy charged with defining the common good will play a comparable role.

When progressives committed to transforming America express their China envy, the pieces all come together. What they’re after is an America transformed to conform with the China model. Americans willing to pay attention to current events understand that this transformation is already under way. Those who prefer to restore a more traditional understanding of America must start by raising awareness of the threat that it poses.

The Chinese Communist Party Is Hard At Work Buying Influence In The Capitalist West And With Global Corporations.

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The Chinese Communist Party is waging information warfare to shape American public opinion and influence our economic and government policy to their benefit.

The CCP doesn’t shape public opinion by buying billboards and TV ads. That kind of persuasion is far too American for them.

Instead, they co-opt our leaders and buy entire companies.

China’s methods are more sophisticated and insidious than simply passing off envelopes stuffed with cash to American agents of influence. Often, the agents don’t even know they’ve been recruited.

The CCP manipulates the self-interest of its targets, making them unwitting recruits.

Rarely do you hear one of these influencers say, “That Communist Party of China sure is great—we ought to let it run the show! Everyone get on board!”

Instead, they’ll say something along the lines of “doing business with the CCP is good ol’ free market capitalism,” or “we need a peaceful and harmonious world,” or “this is what any reasonable person would advocate.”

But everything they say and do—or don’t say and don’t do—advances the aims of the CCP.

Some of these influencers have a vested interest in the status quo.

Disney, the parent company of ABC News, owns a theme park and distributes films in the People’s Republic. Ditto NBC (Universal theme park/studio), CBS (Paramount Studios), and CNN (Warner Brothers theme parks and studio). Hollywood needs permission from China’s government to distribute its movies, so it gives the Communists in Beijing the “final cut.”

For decades, American businesses in China have been declining to speak up even when the CCP hacked their computers, stole blueprints, and produced knock-offs of their own products. Not only did they not file complaints against trade law violations, but they also went further and advocated continuing the same lopsided dysfunctional relationship that has empowered Beijing. They feared offending the regime that had absolute control over their business in China. They knew China could withhold or revoke permits, impose restrictions, and even confiscate their factories.

Wall Street financiers earn billions doing business with China’s Communist government. Beijing has given billions of dollars to Bridgewater Capital, a private equity fund run by Ray Dalio. Naturally, you will often see Dalio on TV telling us all how China’s Communist system is superior to our own.

Hank Paulson headed Goldman Sachs when he wasn’t U.S. Treasury Secretary. He and his fellow Wall Street bankers have been reliable partners in advancing the Chinese Communist Party line promoting globalism-über-alles. Wall Street is in it for the money and they either don’t realize or don’t care that they’re selling out the United States. Commerce has weakened their spirit of patriotism.

Wall Street has pushed hard to invest American pension and index funds in Chinese government-controlled companies. This not only shovels money to the dictators, but it also threatens to turn millions of ordinary Americans into Chinese agents of influence as they will be loath to stand up to the CCP lest their pensions and stock portfolios be endangered.

Beijing has directly paid McKinsey & Company management consultants, and McKinsey in turn tells its clients—including top companies and politicians—what a great and responsible business partner the CCP is.

Then there’s the import lobby. Everyone from Walmart and the Footwear and Apparel Association (really the footwear and apparel importers association) to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable depend on cheap imports from China. They lobby against tariffs on China, which coincidentally, is exactly what the CCP wants them to do. Note that many newspapers depend on advertising revenue from these importers and the retailers who carry their goods.

When these vested interests say it’s in “the national interest” for us to continue down the current path with China, they mean it’s in their own business interest.

The Chinese Communist Party understands the corrupting influence of foreign business entanglements. Financial journalist and author Eamonn Fingleton explains how the Chinese empire threw itself open to foreign capital in the 19th century.

“The foreign investors formed alliances with the local elites, who in effect became lobbyists for the foreign capital. Foreign money quickly suffused government and largely disabled independent policymaking. Soon the local elites came to identify with the foreigners,” he writes.

The Chinese Communists learned from that history and now run the same play, only in reverse. They bought American elites and use them as their lobbyists in Washington. The elites have come to identify their interests with the CCP’s interests. American businesses became Beijing’s apologists and lobbyists.

The CCP uses this same tactic around the world.

Germany, France, and Great Britain also have global corporations eager to drink from the river of CCP money. The European Union and Germany have been largely silent as Beijing crushes Hong Kong. Diplomats in Brussels and Berlin took their cue from corporations that don’t want to disrupt business with Beijing.

Remember this the next time you hear “we can’t go it alone, we must work with our allies” to take on China.

The CCP is adept at peeling off allies. It exploits the weaknesses of its targets to enlist them in its cause.

Businessmen like money, so Beijing offers lucrative commercial opportunities. Politicians need money, so the CCP has campaign donors to work its will on our political leaders. Policymakers need to believe they are big thinkers and strategic masterminds, so the CCP cloaks its nationalist agenda in the language of “globalization,” “globalism,” and “a post-national future.” Reporters are susceptible to groupthink and conventional wisdom. They self-censor in their intellectual insecurity and suck up to their powerful sources on Wall Street and in Washington, so the CCP plays to these weaknesses.

The CCP corrupts everything and everyone it touches—in our culture, in our economy, and in our government.

This article first appeared at American Greatness.

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