The Washington Times’ Post

Transcript

The Chinese Communist party has an authoritarian monopoly on power in Beijing and has come in the 21st century to represent the greatest challenge to the leadership of American freedom and democracy on the world stage, formulating effective bipartisan U.S. policy to counter and. Compete with China is now among the most difficult and intense pursuits of the US government at a moment when Beijing is increasingly aligned with Russia and Iran and is engaged in a range of unsavory authoritarian pursuits, from the genocide against Uighur Muslims inside China to the threat of militarily invading the island democracy of Taiwan. I'm Guy Taylor, national security editor at The Washington Times. And for this edition of the Threat Status Influencer series, we're back on Capitol Hill. In the offices of Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who's at the center of the US policy push, he serves as the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. Congressman Krishnamoorthy, thank you for joining me. While you're also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, you're really considered one of the masterminds of this Select Committee on the CCP that was formed roughly two years ago. To create a more robust, focused, and bipartisan policy foundation for the US to counter and compete with China, your work has included deep involvement in examining every aspect of US China friction and investigating the true posture of the CCP. Let's jump right into this. You wrote in a recent commentary that the CCP is engaged in a subversive campaign aimed at influencing the 2024 US election. Help us understand the specifics of this threat. How is it being carried out? And what ultimately is Beijing's goal? Is it to sway the vote toward Biden or Trump? Or is it really something else? We don't know. But what we know is that they generally try to denigrate candidates that are anti Beijing and try to support candidates that are pro Beijing. So that's what they did in Taiwan in the recent elections. Now, fortunately, the Taiwanese were able to take certain steps to deal with that. And there are elections were largely free and fair. But that's something that we have to be on the lookout for, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has said that the CCP intends to try to influence our elections coming up. Do you think it's about stocking domestic division using social media? One of the things that you wrote about in a recent op-ed was CCP affiliated accounts spreading this information? I think they do try to sow discord, try to create confusion, and I think that. One of the good things that's happening online with some of the companies is they're spotting these fake accounts and taking them down. You know, with artificial intelligence and other kind of ways to automate disinformation along with deep fakes and the deep fake technology out there, you have to be very concerned. Yeah. Are you seeing evidence of an increase in deep fake video activity? Obviously, we're talking about manipulations of someones. Digital footprint to make a video appear as if it's a member of Congress or the president when it's actually just an AI generated bot. We've seen reports of that. I don't think anything is taken off or become viral in the way that perhaps we might see as we get closer to the election. One of the most interesting things that I saw recently is that there's actually some blockchain technology being used to prevent or to identify deep fakes and I think we're going to have to use. Those types of countermeasures increasingly online to combat disinformation. But one of the social media companies that's becoming more popular than any other is TikTok, which is owned by Bite Dance, which is based in China and really understood to have connectivity with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the Chinese Communist Party. How does that complicate the effort when TikTok is so popular in the United States? How can the United States say, hey, we're seeing this information? Spreading, disrupting sewing discord ahead of the US election, TikTok, would you please take it down? Well, you know, ahead of the 2020 and 2022 elections, branches of the federal government did work with certain big tech companies to identify problematic issues, and I suspect they would do the same going forward. With regard to Tick Tock in particular, you may be aware of my legislation that became law that requires the divestment of TikTok by Bite Dance, mainly because Bite Dance. Is essentially controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. I'm happy to say it became law and is being implemented. I expect that Bite Dance will sell TikTok and I expect that it'll probably be a better tick tock than what we have right now. But for the time being we have to be on guard. Well, China, the CCP so far has indicated that it won't tolerate a sale. Help me game this out this this legislation is I don't believe anything the CCP says OK, I don't believe anything bite dance says. I don't think I don't believe anything tick tock USA says. In fact, there's CEO came to Capitol Hill and made a bunch of misrepresentations false miss you know representations about TikTok USA. All I care about is what they do and what I know is that a recent published report came out that basically hundreds of engineers at TikTok and bite dance. Are separating thousands and thousands of lines of code to separate the two companies even at the same time that they have sued the government to prevent the implementation of this law and have said that it is quote technologically infeasible to separate the companies. Do you think that there could be an American buyer approved by Beijing and and would Elon Musk perhaps that was given that he has quite a bit of investment in China seems to be approved for things like. Automated electronic car testing. And Tesla has a footprint in China. He also owns a social media platform here in the United States. Would it be him or someone like him? I don't know. My only interest is that it's not controlled by the CCP. After that, obviously, we have regulators in this country who have to perform their antitrust checks and make sure that anticompetitive concerns are addressed. But I feel that. Tick Tock is going to be around in some form or fashion, but it won't be controlled by the CCP. Let's shift gears and look at Taiwan. We just had the inauguration of a new Taiwanese president who has a similar posture pushing back at at China. We saw China react to the new Taiwanese president with some of the biggest military drills that China has done around Taiwan, essentially surrounding the island. Are you concerned that China may move to militarily invade Taiwan? And if that were to happen, do you, do you foresee a World War Three type of situation? Walk me through this. I don't foresee that right now. I don't think that the CCP would move on Taiwan now because they are overmatched in in so many different ways and they're not prepared. However, she Jinping has said that by 2027, he wants the People's Liberation Army to be ready to successfully invade Taiwan. And we need to take him at his word. That means that we have to do everything we can right now. To deter aggression, to deter conflict. And that means helping Taiwan to porcupine itself to make it a a less inviting target for She Jinping. And also we have to work with our friends, partners and allies in the region to deter conflict as well. Are we doing enough to push assets into the region to get the message across to the Chinese that an invasion wouldn't be tolerated? I think we're doing a lot enough, obviously, is a. Uh. A question that I would say I don't think we can ever do enough. We have to do more and more and more to deter conflict. That means more training, that means more armaments to make sure that they have the drones and the Taiwanese have the anti air aircraft missiles that they require, that they have their anti anti ship cruise missiles. They ask scams and so forth. Bottom line is this, which is we know there's a timeline in XI Jinping's. Find and the PLA's plans, uh, let's not pretend like it doesn't exist. Let's make sure that when we get to that 2027 time frame that Xi Jinping wakes up and says not today and he does that for years on end, OK? That is kind of what our goal has to be and we have to move with a sense of urgency right now. Which shift again and look at the issue of Chinas campaign to reeducate a minority Muslim population in Xinjiang province. The Uyghurs, the state department back in 2021 declared this a genocide inside China. Right now we've had in the last few months we've had big protests on US campuses claiming that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians. We don't hear about this other. Genocide inside China. I, I wonder if you can give us your sense of why. I don't know why it doesn't get enough attention. It needs to just so that your viewers know, and they probably already do. They're about 20 to 25,000,000 wiggers and Xinjiang province in the northwest reaches of China, and they're about two to three million of them in open air prisons, modern concentration camps. 800,000 children have been separated from their parents to be re educated, quote UN quote, 10s of thousands of women have been forcibly sterilized. And let's just be honest why that's happening, that is to reduce the population. The population of Uyghurs in that region has gone down over time because of these policies. And so that is what the government wants. And so we have to speak out about it. We have to elevate attention. For this particular issue are to reduce that population because it's a fervently religious aspect of Chinese society and the CCP doesn't have tolerance for freedom of religion is that that's among the reasons also they seek freedom. They seek autonomy. They seek to self govern. I mean, these are to me, these are basic fundamental human aspirations, freedom. You know, there's this old saying the secret to happiness is freedom and the secret to freedom is courage. Umm And those wiggers, those Tibetans, those other dissidents who have expressed their desire for freedom, those Hong Kongers who yearn for freedom, have shown great courage. Now, as you know, we are commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre from 35 years ago. We are commemorating it, remembering the victims, but also remembering those who displayed great courage, like Tank Man, the man who stood in front of the tank. Why? Because not only do we want to remember and celebrate that kind of courage, but we want to take action now to speak up for freedom today in the People's Republic of China. You. What does the ongoing struggle for human rights and democracy inside China look like today? Tough. It's really tough. I mean, She Jinping is staged, the one man power grab. His idol is Mao Zedong. And any student of Chinese history knows. That Mao had basically taken all the power, stifled dissent, launched what at that time was what what we call now the Cultural Revolution, which led to the deaths of millions of Chinese people. Now Xi Jinping has decided to take all control, stifle dissent, and my hope is that he doesn't do something in light of the flagging economy that would stir nationalist impulses and lead to more aggression toward his neighbors in the region. China is involved in the biggest military buildup of any nation really since World War Two, including the United States, outpacing the US right now in terms of military industrial production. And yet we remain economically wed or entangled with China. How can the United States continue to engage with China in a way that that doesn't lead to war? You were recently on a on a panel with Graham Allison, author of The Thucydides Trap, basically saying a war, a war could be an inevitable. But what is your opinion on this? How can we engage without leading to war? It's really interesting you said that in a recent survey of American. Voters. Uh, more than half thought that there was a greater than 5050 chance of war between the US and China. And 80% of them, I'm talking about Republicans, Democrats, independents, wanted us to do everything in our power to avert a war. How do we do this? The only way that I know how is we have to deter aggression. We have to be clear about what is OK and not OK. We have to protect our interests, and we have to work with our friends, partners and allies to send the same message and adopt kind of rules of the road, so to speak, for how you conduct yourself in this world. For instance, it's not OK to invade another country and violate its sovereignty. What Russia has done in Ukraine, for instance. Is in important for us to repel, not just to help the Ukrainians, but to send a message to Xi Jinping. Congressman Krishnamoorthy, so insightful, so informative, very interesting. Thank you very much for joining me for the Threat Status Influencers series. I'm Guy Taylor, until next time.