In response, on May 13, 2019, the PRC, through the Xinhua News Agency—which is controlled by the CCP—declared a “People’s War” against the U.S. This was specifically in response to U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, which themselves were a response to restrictions of access to Chinese markets and China’s failure to negotiate in good faith on the theft of intellectual property.
What was meant by this declaration of a People’s War? Was the phrase essentially rhetorical or did it signal a fundamental shift or escalation in Chinese thinking?
I would not go so far as to say that the COVID-19 virus that originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology was part of this People’s War. But the virus did set into motion a radical reorientation of American society that had grave economic and political consequences.
We know with certainty that after the virus began spreading in Wuhan in the fall of 2019, the Chinese government closed down flights from Wuhan, which is in Hubei province, to the rest of China. At the same time, it allowed flights from Wuhan to continue to go to Europe and to the U.S.—where the Chinese knew with certainty that the virus would spread. And when President Trump closed the U.S. to flights from China, its foreign ministry and one of the CCP’s propaganda arms, the Global Times, pushed for a reversal of this policy—again, knowing full well how contagious the virus was. Indeed, the Chinese government locked down Wuhan and released videos of men in hazmat suits welding doors shut so that people could not leave their homes.
The U.S. government and its Centers for Disease Control, which has offices in China, asked to be let into Wuhan to investigate. To this day China has denied us access. The initial gene sequencing for the virus that we received from China—evidence that led the now famous public health bureaucrat Anthony Fauci to say that China was being open and cooperative—was incorrect, a fact that made testing Americans for the virus all the more difficult. Were these decisions by the Chinese government part of the People’s War?
When challenged on its dishonesty regarding the virus’s origins, the CCP’s Xinhua News Agency threatened that China could plunge America into a “mighty sea of coronavirus,” pointing out that China controlled the supply chain for the active pharmaceutical ingredients used in the production of 90 percent of our medicines. This fact alone—the result of the loss of the U.S. manufacturing base to China and other nations, an explicit policy of our government until recently—is a scandal of immense proportions that our government is now working to correct.
Regardless of whether the COVID-19 virus was a by-product of biological weapons research or resulted from inadequate safeguards in a virology lab, it is the CCP that is to blame for its spread throughout the world, and it was criminal for the Chinese government to keep the world in the dark about the nature of the pathogen.
Nor has COVID-19 been the only line of attack in this People’s War. It should come as no surprise that the PRC uses its diplomatic missions around the world as a base for industrial espionage and to conduct political and information warfare. Thus it was that on July 24 of this year, the U.S. State Department closed down the Chinese consulate in Houston, saying that it was serving as a hub for CCP operatives who were engaging in theft of America’s research into, among other things, the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
To quote a State Department official:
Consulates are also bases of operations for Fox Hunt teams. These are teams of agents sent from China here to coerce economic fugitives—meaning political rivals of President Xi, the Communist Party critics, and refugees—coercing them, that is, to return to the PRC. Consulates enabled the activities of those teams. Consulates also enabled direct lobbying of state and local officials, as well as business people, to favor Chinese interests. And while that’s to be expected by diplomats, when it takes a turn towards the coercive or the covert, that becomes a national security problem.
It is also believed that Chinese operatives in the Houston consulate provided intelligence to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in Houston as a way of demonstrating their solidarity. Indeed, there is growing evidence that the CCP’s United Front includes these groups, and that some of the funding for BLM and Antifa is coming from CCP-sponsored or affiliated groups: Liberation Road, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the Chinese Progressive Association.
In conclusion, Americans are not looking for war with Communist China, but Communist China appears to be at war with us. As a first order of business, we must continue what we have at long last begun: building a military designed to deter Chinese aggression and pursuing trade and other policies that put our own national interests first.
Equally important—especially given the violence in our cities that our foreign enemies cheer—is defending our American way of life and teaching our countrymen why America deserves our love and devotion, now and in the days ahead.
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