Another effort to warn U.S. citizens of the imminent and mounting threats to their sovereignty went largely unreported on Monday. A staff report from the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations entitled “Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans” should have been called “China’s plans to rule the World Through the Theft of U.S. Technology.”
The report details “not only the lengths and expense China has gone to in order to steal American intellectual property, but also the shocking fact [that] our own federal agencies have done little to stop their actions despite being aware of [them].”
Its summary is chilling:
Some countries … seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests. The most aggressive of them has been China.
China primarily does this through its more than 200 talent recruitment plans — the most prominent of which is the Thousand Talents Plan. Launched in 2008, the Thousand Talents Plan incentivizes individuals engaged in research and development in the United States to transmit the knowledge and research they gain here to China in exchange for salaries, research funding, lab space, and other incentives.
China unfairly uses the American research and expertise it obtains for its own economic and military gain. In recent years, federal agencies have discovered talent recruitment plan members who downloaded sensitive electronic research files before leaving to return to China, submitted false information when applying for grant funds, and willfully failed to disclose receiving money from the Chinese government on U.S. grant applications.
This report exposes how American taxpayer funded research has contributed to China’s global rise over the last 20 years. During that time, China openly recruited U.S.-based researchers, scientists, and experts in the public and private sector to provide China with knowledge and intellectual capital in exchange for monetary gain and other benefits.
At the same time, the federal government’s grant-making agencies did little to prevent this from happening, nor did the FBI and other federal agencies develop a coordinated response to mitigate the threat.
These failures continue to undermine the integrity of the American research enterprise and endanger our national security….
China aims to be the world’s leader in science and technology (“S&T”) by 2050.
More than that, China’s communists aim to be the world’s largest industrial power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of their takeover of the Chinese mainland in 1949.
A single example will suffice to reveal the danger. Last week, a Chinese national working for Phillips 66 pleaded guilty to charges that he stole and sent to his communist bosses the company’s next-generation technology with a potential market value exceeding $1 billion. As John Demers, assistant attorney general for the U.S. Justice Department in its National Security Division, noted, “[Hingjin Tan’s] guilty plea continues to fill in the picture of China’s theft of American intellectual property.”
Roger Robinson, a former senior director of international economic affairs under President Ronald Reagan, issued a similar warning to Hillsdale College students in September:
Since adopting the Kissinger policy of engaging with China in the 1970s, our government has operated on the assumption that economic and financial relations with China would lead Beijing to liberalize politically. And since 2001, when we backed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the pace at which we have given China access to our best technology and capital and trade markets has accelerated.
Yet China has shown no signs of embracing individual freedoms or the rule of law.
Instead, with our support, the Chinese have launched a massive campaign to become the world’s leading superpower.
We know about the “Belt and Road Initiative,” a strategic undertaking to place huge segments of the world under China’s influence or outright control. We know about “Made in China 2025,” a strategy designed to dominate key technology sectors — from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to hypersonic missiles and 5G.
We know about China’s practice of forced technology transfers: requiring American companies to share their trade secrets and R&D in order to do business in China. We know about China’s predatory trade practices.
We know many of these things only because President Trump has brought them to the forefront of national attention, for which he deserves credit. And the ongoing tariff war is a good thing in the sense that we’ve finally begun to take a stand.
But average U.S. citizens are way behind in their understanding of the existential threat posed by China. Michael Pillsbury tried to warn them back in 2015 with his book The Hundred-Year Marathon — China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. He said, “We believed that American aid to a fragile China whose leaders thought like us would help China become a democratic and peaceful power without ambitions of regional or even global dominance. Every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong — dangerously so.”
Pillsbury should know. As a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations since the Nixon administration, Pillsbury promoted the concept of a friendly China adopting Western ways if we would only help them sufficiently. In his book, he referred to himself as a former “panda hugger” — a true believer in the Kissinger strategy of helping China gain first-world status and in so doing bring them into the world community with benign intentions.
Pillsbury spent the early part of his book apologizing for his error. Now being referred to as a “panda slugger,” Pillsbury spelled out in detail the purpose and the strategy behind the theft of American technology. In his chapter “A China World Order in 2049,” Pillsbury summarizes how the world will look:
In sum, if the China dream becomes a reality in 2049, the Sinocentric world will nurture autocracies; many websites will be filled with rewritten history defaming the West and praising China; and pollution will contaminate the air in more countries, as developing nations adopt the Chinese model of “grow now, and deal with the environment later” in a race to the bottom in food safety and environmental standards.
As environmental degradation expands, species could disappear, ocean levels will rise, and cancer will spread….
Chinese state-owned monopolies and Chinese-controlled economic alliances will dominate the global marketplace, and one of the world’s mightiest military alliances [NATO] may be controlled by Beijing, which will be able to easily outspend the United States on military research, troop levels, and weapons systems.
Pillsbury repeatedly emphasizes the communists’ reliance on ancient Chinese history and proverbs when dealing with an enemy who is temporarily more powerful. If that enemy can be deceived into helping China become an overwhelming adversary, then Sun Tzu’s maxim — “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” — will have been fulfilled. This is done, wrote Tzu, by “pretend[ing] inferiority while encourag[ing] his arrogance.” Once China, with the help of its perceived mortal enemy, the United States, has assumed overwhelming military advantage, Tzu celebrates its success: “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
A The New American noted in 2015,
The regime ruling mainland China has murdered more human beings than any entity in all of recorded human history. It continues to slaughter millions of unborn children in forced abortions — part of its savage “one-child policy.”… It ruthlessly persecutes Christians and other minorities, as well as anyone and everyone who dares to challenge its tyranny. The regime even harvests body organs from political prisoners and religious dissidents.
As long as the U.S. citizenry remains in ignorance, the communists ruling China will continue to have a clear and ever-expanding advantage over their perceived mortal enemy.
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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