The Chinese Communist Party’s selectively silent partners

By now, most Americans know about the Chinese Communist Party’s ambition to supplant the United States on the world stage. The CCP seeks to replace the democratic systems America has fostered with ones that are friendly towards the Chinese version of Marxism . What’s at stake for Americans could not be graver: if the CCP surpasses the United States economically and uses its military to conquer Taiwan and wrest control of the U.S.-protected free and open sea lanes, it will wield enormous power over the United States. That cannot be allowed to happen.

We can envision a world dominated by China. It will resemble its own domestic life, which is driven by Marxist opposition to fundamental institutions like religion and the family. It operates as the most sophisticated surveillance state in the world, combined with a dystopian police force, in order to persecute people of faith, enforce family size mandates, and engage in wholesale genocide. It uses the massive data collected to assign social credit scores to punish and reward select behaviors.

Examples of punishable behavior are wasting money, smoking in the wrong places, and posting forbidden memes online. Infractions can lead to the CCP restricting your travel, forbidding your child from continuing his education, or imprisonment. The Communist Party also obsesses on what can only be called “thought crimes.”

The Trump administration exposed the ways the CCP is exploiting America’s open society and capitalist market. The CCP pilfers intellectual property, manipulates currency, conducts cyber-attacks, refuses to pay royalties, and makes demands without reciprocating. The previous administration worked with Congress to take on Chinese companies and U.S. investments that fund and aid the People’s Liberation Army and the administration pulled back the curtain on the deluge of CCP spies in the private sector. The Biden administration’s record on these efforts is mixed and, in some cases, lacking.

But one glaring problem looms. In the decades following China’s integration into the global market in the 1990s, U.S. companies doing business with China have actually become more like the CCP.

Companies, notably tech companies, have been willing to comply with and assist the CCP in its attempt to snuff out pro-democracy efforts, as Apple did in Hong Kong. There is another way that companies abet the aims of the CCP, even if it is not specifically directed by Beijing. The same companies that are willing to turn a blind eye to CCP atrocities claim the moral high ground in American domestic controversies. As with CCP social credit scores, major investors provide environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores to U.S. companies. In the name of social and economic “justice,” progressive corporations throw themselves into highly politicized fights, going after conservative policy initiatives.

The CEOs of Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Apple criticized recently passed election laws in Georgia, but all three refuse to condemn CCP totalitarianism. Nike, Coca-Cola, and others have reportedly lobbied elected officials to water down legislation that would prohibit the import of goods to the United States that are made by slave labor in China’s Xinjiang region.

Some companies publicly oppose legislation meant to preserve and strengthen the American family. For example, companies like Disney, Mattel, Target, and others condemned Florida’s efforts to protect children from the pernicious ideologies of the LGBTQ+ lobby in primary schools. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, corporations have rushed to publicly condemn democratically decided laws to protect unborn babies and mothers. More than 60 companies said that they would expand abortion coverage for employees, and even cover travel expenses to blue states for pregnant employees. They pose as progressive agents of moral change, until the scene shifts to China.

How very encouraging to the Marxists. In this sense, companies with a “progressive” ideological agenda contrary to the consensus view of the American people are pitting Americans against one another, while at the very same time working hard to avoid anything that would offend Chinese communists.

It’s time American consumers and citizens took note, and time is running out for Congress to take action.