Chinese police officers walk in front of the gated entrance of The Palace Museum in Beijing, China, on Jan. 26, 2020. (Betsy Joles/Getty Images)
The Chinese Communist Party Must Pay
The world must make China pay in ways that the Party leadership can’t avoid
Commentary
Despite China’s ongoing propaganda campaign denying responsibility for the global CCP virus pandemic, there’s absolutely zero doubt about where the virus originated.
It came from China—from the city of Wuhan, to be precise.
What’s more, the world also knows with deadly accuracy just how long the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allowed its infected citizens to travel to Europe, North America and other places. It was almost two months of denials and lies from the time Beijing knew about the outbreak in Wuhan until travel restrictions were put in place.
In a word, China deliberately infected the world with its CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. In doing so, it has effectively de-railed—if not destroyed—the global economy. Millions of companies and small businesses are going out of business. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have lost or will lose their jobs and livelihoods.
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
If one didn’t know any better, one could conclude that the Chinese regime has declared war on the West, and particularly, on the United States. Consider, for the moment, that few other acts of war could inflict so much widespread and lasting damage than what the CCP virus has accomplished in just a few weeks.
And it has done so without having to fire a single shot.
Beijing’s Big Gamble to Weaponize the Virus
Where did the virus come from?
Did it spring from Wuhan’s wet market?
Although questions remain as to the exact origin of the virus, for the moment, that is a secondary matter. (Maybe that’s why they’re censoring research on its origins.) But regardless of how the CCP virus came into being, what is apparent is that the virus was weaponized by Beijing.
But why would the Party leadership do such a thing?
What other explanation is there for the CCP allowing it to spread to the rest of the world? Didn’t they realize that by infecting the rest of the world, that it would crush their economy as well?
Of course they did.
The open secret is that the Chinese economy was already crashing well before the virus showed up in late 2019. President Trump’s tariffs leveling the playing fields and thereby eliminating China’s competitive advantages of slave labor, massive subsidization of industries and forced technology transfers, were destroying China’s highly inefficient manufacturing processes.
But even before that, Western companies were already leaving China. As I wrote in my book, “The China Crisis,” back in 2012, China’s “cannibal capitalism” economic model was utterly unsustainable. I estimated that China would reach a crisis point within five to seven years and that the Party would tip the world into a Great Depression in order to save itself.
And here we are.
China is bringing the world economy down because its own development model is simply unsustainable.
Holding China Accountable
China is not just a “strategic competitor” or even an adversarial one. Harsh realities deserve to be expressed clearly. The CCP is a wicked, destructive and inhumane regime that poses a mortal threat to the civilized world.
The civilized world, therefore, must hold the Chinese regime accountable for its actions.
A public censure at the U.N or any other kind of diplomatic gesture is meaningless. We need to take much more serious and drastic steps. The Western world, which ultimately, are the nations that created modern China, must make the CCP literally pay for what they’ve done to the world.
The CCP is directly responsible for the destruction of economies across North America, Europe and Asia, and the suffering of literally billions of people. Many millions have lost their jobs, their savings, and quite likely, will have lost their homes before too long. We are, quite literally, on the brink of a global depression.
China must not benefit from its actions in any way against the world, nor in its efforts to pass the blame to others. On the contrary, it must pay for destroying the world as we used to know it. The CCP must pay and it is up to us—the rest of the world—to make them do so.
Make China Pay in Every Way
Some, such as Rep. Jim Banks and Sen. Martha McSally, have suggested that Trump should force China to “forgive” the $1.1 trillion they hold in U.S. Treasury bills. That’s a good start. But the damage far exceeds that amount.
An additional option would be to immediately seize China’s foreign assets. All of them. That means property and assets from Vancouver to Manhattan, from San Francisco to Boston, in London, Paris, Milan and Rome, and Tokyo, and everywhere else in the world that China felt so comfortable infecting with the virus.
Such an asset seizure would even—and especially—include the personal assets of the CCP. Every Party member should have all their off-shore bank and brokerage accounts frozen.
Furthermore, all access to capital markets should be denied. Foreign homes and investment properties could be seized, stock and bond holdings impounded, all other business interests and any all other forms of investments outside of China should be deemed illegal by the host-country and taken from them.
That would also include every technology agreement, every trade agreement, every shipment of food, of raw materials, of IP and whatever ever else is supporting the existence of the current murderous government in Beijing. We’re spending trillions to support our economies in the United States and Europe now, so what’s the difference?
Every source of value, income, leverage and political access must be stripped from the CCP. All academic appointments, scientific coordination, manufacturing and laboratories must be taken from those with ties to mainland China. When the CCP is out of power, then we discuss returning those assets.
Communist China has shown that it has no place among the family of nations. The thugs in Beijing think they can destroy the West by letting the virus spread. It’s time to deprive the CCP leadership of its financial resources and international income sources. Let them sell their slave labor products to Kazakhstan, Iran and Zanzibar, and see how well they do.
This should be done as soon as possible. Then let the CCP leadership face their people.
James Gorrie is a writer and speaker based in Southern California. He is the author of “The China Crisis.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of th
How China Can Exploit the Coronavirus to Defeat the USA
The United States and communist People's Republic of China are rivals, engaged in competition for influence and power in East Asia and throughout the world. The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus and its devastating effects should sharpen our awareness of the depth, extent, and intensity of this rivalry and of the stakes involved. If the United States is not vigilant, we risk handing China a decisive victory.
How could a virus that originated in China, killed many thousands of Chinese, provoked brutal repression and countless human rights violations by the regime against its own people, disrupted the Chinese economy, and brought the Chinese communist leadership into disrepute globally turn into a strategic victory for China? Through sophisticated information operations and propaganda combined with, relatively speaking, fiscal restraint, even at the expense of human life.
China's communist leaders wake up every morning with two thoughts on their minds. First and foremost, how does the Communist Party retain power and avoid a revolution? Second, how does the Communist Party reunify China to include Taiwan by its stated goal of 2049, the centennial of the communist revolution; establish dominance in the region; and eventually become the global hegemon without directly confronting the United States militarily?
The virus can serve each of these ends. China still has something approaching half of its population of over 1.4 billion living in poverty. From the perspective of the brutal communist leadership, so what if there were fewer people, even in an economically vibrant area like Wuhan? Not a problem, as long as the communist propaganda machine lays blame elsewhere other than the regime. Mass death creates greater economic opportunity for the many migrant workers who remain. The virus kills the weakest, who are an economic drag on the system. Domestic propaganda about the regime's success in combating the disease may reinforce popular approval of the government as nationalistic feelings are mobilized to place the blame on the United States enemy.
In ways surpassing even the communist leadership's hopes, the virus also is accelerating the communists' plans to overtake the United States and establish a new regional and global order to meet their own interests. The statistics coming out of the Wuhan region are unreliable, making it difficult to estimate the true number of deaths there. By one estimate, the number exceeds 40,000. It is even harder to determine what resources China expended to quell the virus within its own borders. But it seems safe to say China did not break its bank in trying to save lives. It closed the Wuhan region and other regions by using brutal tactics for a matter of several weeks, only to trumpet its economic reopening and announce that it is back in business.
Meanwhile, the virus, thanks in large part to China's cover-up of its origins, infectiousness, and lethality (a cover-up assisted by China's enablers in the World Health Organization), spread to the Middle East, Europe and eventually the United States and the world. What was the response of the United States government, largely on the recommendation of its public health officials? To shut down much of our economy, the largest economy in the world, just as China was beginning to reopen its own, which is the second largest.
The economic consequences of the United States lockdown were, and are, catastrophic. Even with massive government stimulus, over 16 million people have lost their jobs. Unemployment, however brief, may peak at a staggering, depression-level 32 percent. Entire industries, include the United States' energy industry, are at risk. Many people were unable to pay rents or to meet medical expenses. Small businesses such as family-owned restaurants have been forced to close. Markets crashed, at least for a time, diminishing lifetime savings and depleting pension funds in a few weeks. Corporate debt loads threatened to become unsustainable, and many already leveraged companies veered toward bankruptcy. Private borrowers could not meet mortgage payments or student loan obligations.
To quell the panic and prevent irreversible collapse, Congress passed stimulus measures far in excess of numbers we have seen before, injecting anywhere from 2 to 6 trillion dollars into the American economy. Hopefully at least some portion of these sums used to assist businesses will be repaid. Still, these sums could equal a quarter of the annual United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and exploded the already 20-plus-trillion-dollar national debt. The national debt now has either re-approached or surpassed the size of the United States economy as measured by GDP, long considered a trip-wire in the economic health of a nation. This has happened only twice in modern history — in 1947, after World War II, and in 2011, after the Great Recession. Household and business debt has increased substantially, too.
The economic damage that has already been done to the United States is significant if not severe and will require a restoration and retooling of our economy, which will take time, perhaps years. This economic disruption combined with the huge stimulus spending risks translating into a strategic blow to the United States. The vast expansion of the national debt, which was already ominously high, may eventually threaten the United States' borrowing capacity, undermine its creditworthiness, or crowd out lending for private businesses. The higher federal, state, and local taxes needed to pay for recovery measures will be a drag on the United States economy for a protracted period. The costs of funding medical care and unemployment benefits will add to these burdens.
Economic power backstops military power and enhances cultural (so-called "soft power") influence around the world. As former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen warned nearly a decade ago, when the national debt was last similarly exploding, "the single biggest threat to our national security is debt." China's leaders know this. We can expect them to exploit other opportunities that the pandemic offers.
The tools of 21st-century warfare, with all its domains, including land; sea; air; space; cyber; intelligence; and, prominently now, bio-defense, are extremely expensive. The United States has chosen to commit trillions of dollars in an attempt to protect against a virus that appears to have low lethality rates for the vast majority of our population and that in any case may recur within a year.
Certainly, we are not a communist dictatorship and should not react brutally as the Chinese communists did to the virus in its own country. But that does not mean that we should act without heightened fiscal awareness and prudence in response to the virus or to any other threat.
The United States could take a number of cost-effective initiatives in diplomacy, trade, finance, and military affairs to counter any attempt by China to wring advantages out of the pandemic. For instance, as Professor Charles Lipson recently argued, the United States could create an alternative organization of the Chinese-dominated WHO, using its own resources and those of allied nations, to gather and disseminate reliable information about future pandemics.
Like Japan, the United States could use its stimulus funds to repatriate United States businesses operating in China, supporting American employment at a critical juncture and increasing tax revenues.
The United States could sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on China to close its wet markets, which are believed to have created the conditions for the virus to spread to humans. Let China, a permanent member of the Security Council, veto it.
The State Department could call for an independent examination into the origins of the outbreak of the virus last year in Wuhan. China's President Xi has a lot of questions answer.
The Department of Justice can and should continue its widening dragnet against Chinese espionage underway within the United States.
Though it would require a significant investment, the United States could elevate the biological defense program to form a military branch modeled on the new Space Force, to defend against potential attacks in the microbial domain, as it does in the land, sea, air, and space domains, and to assist in times of disaster.
Our task is not simply to save lives where we can, but to live in a world that respects human life, dignity, and freedom. While the virus is in all likelihood a temporary phenomenon, our competing vision for the world with China could last for most of the 21st century and even beyond. China may well be emboldened by anything it views as a show of weakness or fiscal irresponsibility, and will be ready to fill any void that our circumstances or our responses to the virus create. We can and must find ways to fight the virus without handing China a decisive victory.
Robert Delahunty is the LeJeune Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minn. Chad Bayse is a Navy judge advocate and former counselor to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and attorney at the National Security Agency. The views expressed in this article are his own.
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