The Year America Began to Push Back on China
Years from now, 2022 may be remembered as the time America finally listened to the warning signs and began seriously considering confronting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The president and Congress are acting with rare vigor, implementing new policies to hold the Chinese government accountable for its genocide of the Uyghur people, cracking down on rampant CCP-backed espionage in the semiconductor sector, and taking a step toward providing the military support necessary to ensure that the democratic country of Taiwan can continue to govern itself. Each shift represents a culmination of significant effort and a growing willingness in the halls of power in Washington to see the CCP as the threat to democracy, security, and human rights that it is.
This moment is a turning point. Not long ago, members of Congress openly professed to believe that closer economic ties to China might drive its regime to liberalize and eventually democratize. In doing so, they bought into the same fatally flawed thinking that led IBM’s then-CEO, Thomas Watson Sr., to travel to Nazi Germany in 1937 and proclaim the cause of “world peace through world trade.” It seems alien now, but until not long ago that view dominated our policymakers’ approach to China, so much so that after President Clinton signed an agreement paving the way for China to join the World Trade Organization, he said confidently that it would create a China that “contributes to the stability of Asia, that is open to the world, [and] that upholds the rule of law at home and abroad.”
Today, those views are strikingly absent on Capitol Hill and in the White House. With the midterm elections in the rearview mirror and a new Congress ahead of us, however, it’s crucial to remember how we got here. Policymakers are changing their views because Americans are taking notice. The more they learn, the more the American people overwhelmingly reject the CCP’s genocidal domestic policies, chauvinist foreign policy, and hegemonic aspirations. Democrats and Republicans alike now overwhelmingly stand against the CCP. In a Pew poll this spring, 83% of Americans said they had little or no confidence in Xi Jinping to “do the right thing in world affairs.” A similar poll last year found that 70% of Americans believed that the U.S. should support human rights in China at the expense of economic ties.
Young people have been at the center of this movement. Since January, student governments at Georgetown, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the University of California-Irvine, and most recently the University of Virginia have voted for their universities to divest from the CCP and the Chinese government’s abuses. When students at George Washington University introduced a resolution calling on their university to divest and defend Chinese students from their own government’s repression, it was endorsed by both the College Republicans and the left-wing Sunrise Movement. On these and dozens of other campuses around the country, the new bipartisan consensus on China has taken hold. This growing grassroots movement has avoided the pitfalls of partisan polarization because it is genuinely organic.
This reality should not be lost on the next Congress. The era of blind engagement with China must end. The incoming Congress will face ill-considered calls for detente, many of them coming from Wall Street and big corporations still accustomed to the perks of doing business in China. But it will also encounter factional divisions that threaten to turn America’s clear-eyed resistance to the CCP into a partisan dogfight. Nothing could be more dangerous for our national resolve.
Congress must recognize that standing up to the CCP isn’t a partisan game, but a reflection of the core values of an overwhelming majority of the American population. Accordingly, our elected representatives must be willing to work across the aisle to pass laws that build on the bipartisan successes of the current Congress. Among these must be legislation to defund the CCP by depriving it of access to American capital, beginning with university endowments and pension funds which today often invest in the companies most complicit in the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, rampant espionage, and military buildup. With November 8 behind us, newly elected members of Congress – Republicans and Democrats alike – must come together to prepare for the next stage in our fight against the CCP. We cannot afford the alternative.
John Metz is the president of the Athenai Institute, a non-partisan, student-founded 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to removing the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from colleges and universities throughout the country.
