Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) has given America a lot to think about regarding how we view China. If a foreign nation has dominating ambitions, wouldn’t it be our leaders who are duty-bound to do something about it? Communist China is that foreign nation, posing problems against America and we need to do something about that instead of cuddling up to them more.
On April 26, Sen. Tom Cotton issued an exchange with Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” program in which he explains that America has trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds. They then go back to China, compete for our jobs, take our business, and ultimately steal our property and design weapons to plot against the American people. He says we need to take a closer look at the visas we give Chinese nationals to come to the United States to study, especially at the post-graduate level in advanced scientific and technological fields.
A recent poll done by Pew shows that nine-in-10 Americans view China’s power and influence as a threat, with 62% believing they constitute a major threat.
While the idea is having some on the left side cry racism, the idea is based on nationality not race. Let me remind you too that the Chinese Communist Party is one of the world’s most discriminatory regimes.
Protecting America against a rapacious and regressive Communist Party is not self-defeating; it is just sensible. As a Senate homeland security subcommittee noted in a November 2019 report, China seeks to be the world leader in science and technology by 2050. This is engaged in a whole-of-society effort with an emphasis on military-civil fusion on achieving it.
One of the CCP’s recruitment programs, The Thousands Talents Program, uses tactics to incentivize people to export valuable research and developmental fruits to China. In the 2018-2019 American school year, a staggering 369,548 Chinese students attended U.S colleges and universities. The Obama administration allowed these numbers to mushroom from 127,628 (2009-2010) to 350,755 (2016-2017).
While the vast majority of students and researchers from China in the United States are here for legitimate academic reasons, the CCP is using some Chinese Students to operate as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property. Much of this theft concerns commercial and military application knowledge, which poses both an economic and national security threat to the United States.
The hope of innocent students traveling to America to study their academics must be weighed against the reality of China’s repression and censorship. We have to know who we are opening our campuses up to and Democrats won’t even bat an eye to that. Economic liberalization did not accomplish what it wanted from the politicians who endorsed it. Is there any part of our leftist-dominated academies that promote the American principles we carry at all?
To put a halt to China’s plans in exploiting our education systems we must impose more stringent visa restrictions. The CCP uses their ambitions against America’s openness and benevolence to capitalize and influence the business world from within their own country. Why continue a policy that serves the CCP and consistently fails us?
