The bipartisan leaders of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee issued a joint statement warning that China’s Communist Party will not abandon its ambitions for world domination and that “China poses the greatest threat to the United States. The statement echoes U.S. Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe’s contention that “China is the greatest threat to the United States and the world’s democratic freedoms since World War II,” in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Acting Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a joint statement on Friday (December 4) in support of Ratcliffe’s book, which was published the day before in a media commentary by U.S. intelligence leaders.
In the article, Ratcliffe, who officially took office as U.S. intelligence director in May, warned of the threat posed by China, “Beijing intends to dominate the United States and the rest of the world economically, militarily, and technologically. The article also refers to China’s economic espionage tactics as “rob, copy and replace,” in which China steals the intellectual property of U.S. companies, copies the technology, and then replaces them in the global marketplace.
“We agree with Intelligence Director Ratcliffe that China poses the greatest national security threat to the United States. Our intelligence is clear: The Chinese Communist Party will stop at nothing to exert its influence to achieve global dominance,” Rubio and Warner said in the statement.
“Beijing’s infiltration of American society is deliberate and insidious, using every available tool of influence to accelerate its own rise at the expense of the United States.”
Rubio and Warner’s joint statement added that China’s attempts to displace U.S. leadership in the world and its desire to reshape the international stage into the image they want also threaten U.S. democratic values. “China’s authoritarian communist leaders seek to threaten our freedom of speech, our politics, our technology, our economy, our military, and even our efforts to fight the neo-coronavirus pandemic,” the statement said.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a Republican federal senator, also retweeted Ratcliffe’s write-up on Friday and strongly supported it.
“I’ve been saying this for some time: communist China is our enemy,” Scott tweeted, “and we can’t underestimate the threat China poses to America and the rest of the world who believe in freedom and democracy.”
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chief Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also tweeted in response to Ratcliffe’s article.
“The Chinese Communist Party is a generational threat, and responding to what they are doing in bad faith cannot be one of many priorities, but must be the organizing principle of the free world,” McCaul tweeted.
The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the United States will not sit idly by. In their statement, Rubio and Warner continued, “This is a critical watershed moment, and we must stand firm that the U.S. cannot and must not accept Beijing’s quest for dominance to achieve their goals in defiance of international legal norms and gross human rights abuses.”
Rubio and Werner called for international cooperation. The statement said, “The message to Beijing and the world is that China’s behavior will not be tolerated and that we, along with our allies and partners, will work closely to challenge Chinese behavior with democratic values.”
Despite the divisive political climate in Washington, a high degree of bipartisan consensus is evident in Congress on attitudes and ideas for countering the Chinese threat. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also issued a strongly worded written statement against China on Thursday. The statement called for “the intelligence community to rebalance its focus and funding to more effectively address the range of threats China poses to our national security.
In an October speech to a Washington think tank, Schiff called on the U.S. intelligence community to deepen its understanding of China by leveraging more diverse technologies and approaches, such as artificial intelligence, to address the multifaceted challenges posed by the Communist regime to global freedom and security.
Schiff said that the biggest misconception the United States has about China is the assumption that China’s economic growth and integration into the world will lead to political liberalization. He said, “It has taken us a long time to fully realize that the Chinese government has found a way to both raise the economic standard of living of its people and to control the country in a regressive way, both politically and rhetorically.”
Expectations in Washington political circles that Beijing would embark on political reform have been nearly disillusioned. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made similar remarks to Schiff. For decades, the world has hoped that economic integration would lead to political liberalization, which is our Chinese fantasy,” Pompeo tweeted in a video Friday. It didn’t happen,” Pompeo said in the video, adding, “The Chinese Communist Party has never wanted to act like a normal regime.”
Pompeo emphasized that what is going on is “not America against China, but freedom against tyranny.
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