The Chinese Communist Party is dangerous, deceptive, and self-serving. The U.S. must counter it on all fronts.
By Marco Rubio
“The Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak.” That’s the conclusion of a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy, which now follows the FBI in affirming the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It’s what Republicans have been saying since 2020. But even though the admission is long overdue, it’s not making Beijing happy.
“The origin of the novel coronavirus is a scientific issue and should not be politicized,” retorted the Chinese Foreign Ministry. This statement comes from the regime that refused to cooperate with the World Health Organization in investigating COVID’s origin. It’s not surprising, but it is revealing. If anyone doubted the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) intentions, they should do so no longer. Beijing is dangerous, deceptive, and self-serving.
The COVID origins debate is the not the only proof of this. There is abundant evidence that the CCP has been infiltrating, and continues to infiltrate, American businesses and institutions to undermine the short-term strength and long-term power of the United States. In 2020, The Australian leaked CCP member data and confirmed that thousands of Party members are working for major Western companies, including Volkswagen, Boeing, and Pfizer, while really doing the bidding of Beijing.
Americans should be outraged, but not just at the CCP. The blame also falls on the Washington establishment and Wall Street for being so naive that they didn’t see the infiltration coming — or so negligent that they chose to do nothing about it. It shows just how broken the bipartisan post-Cold War economic consensus was that it led to such systematic vulnerability. While globalists shipped our jobs, technology, and intellectual property to China, the CCP shipped us spies, thieves, and COVID.
Meanwhile, in its own region, Beijing has become openly aggressive toward its neighbors. Over the past few years, Chinese planes and vessels have repeatedly entered foreign territories in the South and East China Seas. (They also routinely harass our own forces in the region.) Chinese troops also got into a stick-and-brick brawl at their shared border with India. Moreover, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has reportedly commanded his forces to be “ready by 2027” to invade and conquer Taiwan.
And none of this begins to touch on Beijing’s horrific human rights abuses. Most of the recent international attention in that regard has been on the CCP’s persecution of Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other ethnic and religious groups. But it is also important to remember that Beijing is propping up human rights abuses in North Korea by forcibly repatriating escapees from the hellish Kim regime.
The U.S. must pass laws to counter the CCP on all fronts. I’m reintroducing six bills to do just that. My COVID Act would sanction China for blocking good faith investigation into the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan. Other pieces of legislation would ban CCP members from obtaining tourist visas to the U.S., target Chinese aggression in the South and East China Seas, extend the provisions of the North Korean Human Rights Act, and shed light on what Chinese tech companies have been complicit in the Xinjiang genocide. I will also reintroduce my bill to eliminate a legal loophole that allows the U.S. and China to conduct joint military exercises and operations.
We need hard-nosed legislation like this if we’re going to make up for the damage wrought by the naivete of the bipartisan post-Cold War economic consensus. But we can’t turn bills into law without bipartisan support. In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said he would “make no apologies” for investing in America’s strength. More and more Democrat lawmakers are saying the same — Senators Cardin and Kaine are joining me on many initiatives. Will their colleagues join us in countering the CCP?
