American Thought Leaders - The CCP’s 7 Pressure Points and How the US Can Leverage Them: Michael Sobolik

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

“The fact that America’s foremost geopolitical adversary controls an app that about 170 million Americans use regularly means that the CCP can leverage the app to influence the political debate of Americans, and ultimately … degrade the integrity of our democracy,” says Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of “Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance.”In this episode, he breaks down why TikTok is a major national security threat and how America can outmaneuver the Chinese Communist Party in the new U.S.–China Cold War.For years, America has been playing defense, he says.“To win cold wars, you have to go on the offensive to figure out: What is my adversary’s strategy? Where am I strong? Where are they weak? And how do I move the competition to that terrain?”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

You have about half of America on an app that is controlled by our greatest geopolitical adversary today. They covertly leverage the openness of true democracies to degrade and weaken us. They do it to tear us apart. Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and author of Countering China's Great Game, A Strategy for American Dominance. For years, America has been playing defense, he says. To win Cold Wars, you have to go on the offensive. Where am I strong? Where are they weak? And how do I move the competition to that terrain? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Michael Sobolec, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Michael Sobolec, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks for having me, Jan. It's great to be here. We're here to talk about your new book, Countering China's Great Game. You actually played a very significant role. I was watching you very closely on social media and some email, advocating for the TikTok bill. It was passed. There's still a lot of people that have concerns, but I know you're a big First Amendment guy, people that have concerns from that aspect. But tell me a little bit about how this may fit into China's great game. You can take the

staffer out of the hill, but you can't take the hill out of the staffer. So I was previously in the Senate for five years and wrote a whole bunch of legislation and pushed legislation through the congressional process and everything that that entails. But on the outside of the hill, in the think tank space, I found that while you can't formally lobby for a piece of legislation. You can do a whole bunch of work to educate policymakers and the public about the ideas in a bill. And the reason I leveraged basically all of my time in March and April about this TikTok legislation that was going through Congress was because in my mind, TikTok is the Chinese Communist Party's greatest asymmetric threat that targets the American people. Let me just jump in.

Usually I don't take positions. I'm very publicly known to agree with you on this. TikTok has the veneer of being an innocent social media app. For millions of Americans, when you unlock your phone, TikTok sits next to X, to Instagram, to Facebook, and all the other American social media apps that we're very familiar with. I think what's commonly understood about social media is that there are privacy concerns because your data is out in the open for anyone to exploit directly or indirectly. And that's been the case throughout the whole internet age. But the problem with TikTok is that even though it poses like a normal social media company and like a normal social media app, it's nothing of the sort.

And the reason for that goes to the parent company of TikTok, which is a company called ByteDance, is a Chinese tech company, resides in the People's Republic of China, falls under the legal demands and requirements of the PRC, and is ultimately answerable to the political whims of the Chinese Communist Party. And there's been documented instances of TikTok being leveraged to spy on American journalists because they uncovered through leaked internal audio recordings that ByteDance employees in Beijing had accessed U.S. user data. Now, that in and of itself is concerning, not only because TikTok executives promised members of Congress in congressional testimony that nothing of this sort would ever happen. And then, of course, it came to light that it was happening. But the data issue is honestly not even the most terrifying part of TikTok.

The fact that America's foremost geopolitical adversary controls an app that about 170 million Americans use regularly, means that the CCP can leverage the app to influence the political debate of Americans. And ultimately, with the way they leverage it, to degrade the integrity of our democracy. And if you look at sensitive content for the Chinese Communist Party, whether that's speech about the Uyghur genocide or the cultural genocide in Tibet, or we had the Tiananmen Square 35th anniversary not that long ago. Taiwan is another one. So on Instagram, there was a really interesting study that compared content about these topics to how prevalent these issues were on TikTok. And the discrepancy was startling. The CCP has clearly foisted its information warfare and its own insecurities about free speech onto TikTok.

It's nearly impossible to find a whole lot of information on those topics. And this is in a context, I just might add, where it's actually banned in China. Yes, that is. TikTok US does not operate inside of China. There's a sister app, Douyin, and it's time limited. Chinese people, kids can spend like, what, an hour or two a day on this app maximum. And it's meant to further their education and their patriotism towards the CCP's leadership. There aren't these cute or cringy dance videos, whatever you want to characterize them as. Like what we know as TikTok in America is nothing like the Chinese version of TikTok. The real concern is not only that the CCP can censor content and speech about

China that they deem politically threatening, they could leverage it for offensive means inside of America to mess with our own internal deliberations. If the day comes when they invade Taiwan, they could very well leverage TikTok to sow disinformation about what's happening in the Taiwan Straits and to mobilize American public opinion against supporting Taiwan. It's a huge potential problem. And we saw a mobilization like this, right, when this TikTok bill was actually going through Congress. Maybe you can speak to that a little bit. I remember very well when I was a congressional staffer, or maybe when I was taking phone calls, I guess I was an intern at the time. And I remember being on the receiving end of a lot of

these big call-in campaigns. A hallmark of our democracy is the fact that any American can call their representative and actually get through and talk to somebody. And let me tell you, like, whenever someone calls, any congressional office worth their salt tallies what all the phone calls were about and the position that each caller took. With this TikTok calling campaign, TikTok executives leveraged the app to target their users in strategic zip codes

of members that were either on the select committee on the CCP in the House or the Energy and Commerce Committee on the House, because House Select Committee, instrumental in drafting the bill, Energy and Commerce was the committee of jurisdiction. So those were the members they wanted to influence the most. And what happened was, yes, you had this huge volume of American TikTok users calling their congressional offices through the TikTok app. But what ended up happening was that a lot of these kids, in many cases, either threatened suicide if Congress took TikTok away, or in some cases

they threatened to murder the member of Congress in question if they voted in favor of the legislation. As a general rule of practice, it's a bad idea to threaten to assassinate a member of Congress if you want to influence their vote in a certain way. It tends to push them in the opposite direction of the one you want. And it passed out of Energy and Commerce 50 to 0, which rarely happens in Congress these days, but it was a huge bipartisan moment. That's not to say, though, that TikTok would make the same mistake a second time. The CCP,

like any self-respecting authoritarian regime, is highly adept at learning from its strategic mistakes. And TikTok, as a tech company, made some mistakes along the way to be sure, but I think it would be naive for American policymakers and for American users on TikTok to think, number one, that they're safe from foreign influence, and number two, to think that they would be able to spot it easily. The information domain in the world we live in today is so clouded. I think it is so perilously easy to be influenced with disinformation without you even knowing it at times. And this is why the relationship of TikTok to ByteDance is so crucial. It is not an independent American social media company. The key thing is here, we know through, you know,

films like The Social Dilemma, all sorts of congressional testimony. We know through all sorts of studies. We know through, you know, Jonathan Haidt's work. We know through all sorts of ways that the big, big social media companies are not innocent actors. You know, we know there's, you know, addiction. Why would TikTok be different? The answer might be obvious to you, but it might not be obvious to everybody. Americans are right to view social media companies with suspicion. It is in their business model to hook their users to always come back for more, to stay on the app for just one more minute,

to hopefully would turn into two more minutes or five more minutes. As a regular user of social media and someone who tries very hard to be self-aware, I see this tendency in myself with how I use social media. It is by its own nature addictive because it always asks you for more of you. It asks you for more of your opinions,

for more of your story, for more of your story, for more of your self-image. It wants you to believe that you can actualize yourself fully in the virtual space. The transaction that's actually happening is you giving these companies more information about your consumer preferences, and they leverage it for their own profit margin. So like every single reason to be suspicious of these companies. All of that happens on TikTok too, but there's another additional layer to it that takes you out of the domain of privacy and societal health and into the realm of national security. TikTok is a national security threat to the United States. If you look at it from a volume of user perspective, you have about half

of America on an app that is controlled by our greatest geopolitical adversary today. You also have an increasing number of Americans that are turning to TikTok not only as an entertainment source, but as a news source. Would that have been a reality that we would have accepted during the Cold War? Would we have allowed the Soviet Union to have control, even an ownership, over, say, like the New York Times or ABC or the other networks? Absolutely not. Under no circumstances would we. In the course of the debate on this legislation that you mentioned, this distinction turned out to be one of the key ones. Are we concerned about the content on TikTok, which is a speech issue, or are we concerned about the conduct of the company, which gets into national

security? I appreciate your characterization of me because I think the First Amendment is the bedrock of our democracy. It sets us apart from other democracies in the world today. Like you could say things and express beliefs in America that you couldn't express in other democracies in the Western world. But the Chinese Communist Party knows that. And America is an open book and has been an open book ever since 1776. To, on the one hand, that challenges the nature of the CCP, but on the other hand, it gives them an opportunity to infiltrate and exploit our democracy from the inside.

That is what TikTok is. And that's what makes it different and unique from other social media companies. Explain that to me. How is it exploiting our democracy from the inside? Often some viewers of the show will be suspicious of people claiming that things are threats to democracy because we've learned over the past years that that term is used quite liberally. Characterize that for me, please. Sure. So let's rewind to October 7th of last year. My wife and I were in India at the time with our son. There was a significant time difference, but we were seeing the same news alerts on our phones that everyone in the States and more poignantly everyone in Israel were seeing.

Hamas's pogrom targeting the Jewish people in Israel, one of the most devastating days in the history of the nation of Israel's existence. And literally the day after, on October 8th, the content on TikTok, pro-Israel versus pro-Palestinian, was so disproportionately skewed in the favor of Palestine, and in some cases openly skewed towards Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group that controls Gaza, the distortion of pro-Palestinian content at the expense of pro-Israeli content was staggering. To be sure, public opinion polling bears this out.

Gen Z tends to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to the Israeli cause on the question of two-state solution and all that stuff. We're talking about orders of magnitude that get into like well above 90% more pro-Palestinian content than pro-Israeli content. After Israeli women are raped, hostages are drug into Gaza, babies are murdered in front of their parents, parents murdered in front of their children. One of the most grisly barbaric attacks anyone could imagine. That's how TikTok's algorithm managed information the day after and in the weeks preceding October 7th. It's no accident that Republicans and Democrats in Congress noticed this. I had former Congressman Mike Gallagher on my podcast a couple of months ago, and I asked him about TikTok because he, I would argue, is the leading proponent to do something about the TikTok threat on Capitol Hill.

And what he told me is that Democrats came to him, and Gallagher during his time has always been a Republican and Democratic members were saying, this is a huge problem, not only because Israel is an ally and all that stuff, but this is clear information manipulation on TikTok. And what we're seeing are American users, not only contributing to this information skew, but receiving this information skew on their own phones. And it's impacting public opinion. It was an instance of TikTok leveraging a crisis, an international security crisis, to push a perspective that was advantageous to the Chinese Communist Party. It's no accident that Beijing has taken a position on this in the months following October 7th, and it has not been to stand with Israel.

It's been to stand with Palestine. And what came was a bipartisan awareness in Congress that did not exist before October 7th, that we needed to do something about this before TikTok was leveraged by the CCP again? There's really foundational questions just when it comes to all of our, I guess, information sharing systems that this raises, right? You know, who gets to control that? We've seen all sorts of ways in which that has been leveraged. Giving that power to the CCP and saying, no problem, that is unthinkable to me. I think it should be unthinkable. I say that advisedly. There were so many Americans during that debate over the TikTok issue who I firmly believe had genuinely held concerns about free speech.

And I think two things can be true at the same time. We need to jealously guard what makes America America, while at the same time protecting the crown jewels of our democratic experiment from the theft of the people who would do us harm. Because the irony is, right, we've learned how powerful these tools are. I didn't understand it. I didn't understand how powerfully, how you can shift public opinion using these tools. It's stunning. It's truly stunning. Without people even realizing they've been influenced. That's the key. If you know you're being influenced, your guard immediately goes up and you know how to filter. Every single human has a filter with information, right? It's your biases, it's your convictions, it's your own life story, your experiences.

If you can reach somebody without them knowing you have an agenda, you can get past their filters. Again, social media in general can be very problematic. the actor behind that who has an agenda is the Chinese Communist Party and the target is Americans, it should be unthinkable that we would allow that reality to continue unaddressed and unabated. The Chinese regime is, I think it would be fair to say obsessed with America. What is the Chinese Communist Party's intention here? And this is even subject to debate. Some people believe, and quite a few it would seem, believe that China just wants to be left alone. Don't encroach on us.

We're going to leave you alone. Asia Pacific region, that's our domain. And America, you do your thing and we'll be good friends. I mean, maybe that's being a little bit glib, but that is one perspective that you hear often. Yes. What is the Chinese regime's objective? What are their intentions? Let's start with Xi Jinping and work our way backwards. When Xi Jinping assumed the mantle of paramount leader or began to assume that mantle in 2012 and certainly in 2013. He gave a speech not to foreign audiences, but to the Chinese state and to fellow members of the Chinese Communist Party.

And he laid out his roadmap for not only how he saw himself in history, but how he saw the People's Republic of China in the history of the world. So he said Mao Zedong helped China stand up. And Deng Xiaoping, the predecessor of Mao, made China wealthy. But it was Xi Jinping's goal and perhaps calling to make China strong, to return the greatness of China to the 21st century. And this is what Xi Jinping calls the China dream. It is not just this dream of material prosperity. It is singularly the re-emergence of China as what it was historically and what Xi Jinping certainly believes it should be today, which is

the paramount nation in the world, not just economically, but geopolitically, culturally, civilizationally. China has long been called the Middle Kingdom, zhangguo in Mandarin, and that identity is central, not just to Xi, not just to the party, not just to China post-1949. This is part of China's abiding strategic culture, how they see themselves and their role in the world. The layer that we have today that I think gets a lot of attention, rightly so, is the ideological nature, the threat that the CCP poses to America. It is a Leninist organization, a brutal political party that operates for total domination, total one-party control over an entire state, and anything that threatens that will receive the blunt force of political warfare. One explanation for why the Chinese Communist Party is so aggressive today,

itself an inherently unstable regime. I think this is the case of authoritarianism in general. If you have to subdue your own people to rule, then you're always looking over your shoulder, not at external threats, but at internal perceived threats from your own citizens. The CCP has been openly trying for decades to control speech about the Party globally, which suggests that they are especially sensitive to how they're perceived. I would go a step further though. The Chinese Communist Party poses an ideological threat to be sure, but the

geopolitical problem that the PRC poses to America goes beyond the realm of belief. For China to become great again, as Xi Jinping is hoping it can, that's tapping into a long strand of imperialism in China that predates Xi Jinping, that predates Mao, that predates the People's Republic of China. and Washington. A lot of folks will talk about China as if it suddenly sprung up in 1949 and just existed after the Second World War. Many will go back maybe one or two centuries further to what Beijing calls the century of humiliation in the 19th century, when the European powers at the time carved up China. But when you listen again to Xi Jinping's own speeches, to him, that isn't even the primary focus of historical reference to understand China. In that speech that I mentioned a few minutes ago, Xi Jinping, in his defense for China to become great again, referenced the dynastic era of China. Talked about the

civilizational greatness of the Middle Kingdom and how it's time to reactualize that greatness today in the 21st century. Another reference point that is indispensable to understand what that means is this idea that permeated China's dynasty, certainly from the Han dynasty on from the time of Christ all the way through, I would argue, to today, which is that the Chinese emperor and the Chinese nation was meant to rule over all under heaven, or in Mandarin, tianxia. That is theoretically without limit. Now, in the time of antiquity, what that practically was China sought dominance in its near abroad, whether economic dominance to the tribute system or actual geopolitical dominance through wars of conquest and self-defense.

That gene of we are the superior civilization, the middle kingdom, and we are meant to rule over all under heaven motivated this undeniable strategic culture of imperial expansion over 2000 years of the dynastic era. China in its imperial dynastic era never knew on average a year without war. That impacts the foreign policy strategic culture of the People's Republic of China today. I often talk about this. You just reminded me. They've been very good at trying to destroy. It's very interesting, right? The vestiges of traditional culture through the Cultural Revolution. But one thing that they didn't destroy, for example, was military doctrine. That is something that the People's Republic has leveraged.

As you're speaking here, it's very interesting because you're talking about thousands of years of, let's call it dynastic development, for lack of a better term, and of subsumed into communist ideology, which is frankly a terrifying thought. It is. It's marrying the totalitarian ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics and Xi Jinping thought, the mouthful that it is. It's marrying that with the hard power will to dominate the world. The reason this is a problem, if China annexes Taiwan, if they invade or blockade or both, and subsume Taiwan into the People's Republic of China, I do not believe they would stop there. And this gets to your question, Jan, that you posed a few minutes ago about this notion of if we just give China a little bit of space, if we give them a little bit of room and we don't breathe down their necks and allow them to have maybe their own Monroe Doct them to act out, that their foreign policy is more defensive than it is offensive. I certainly hear that argument made in certain

corridors of Washington, D.C., as I know you do as well. If you sit yourself in the middle of China and turn around in a circle 360 degrees, China has border disputes in nearly every single direction you turn. Sino-Indian border, which was a topic of hotly contested skirmishes back in 2020 in the middle of the coronavirus. If you look down to neighboring Bhutan, they're literally establishing settlements well past the recognized border. And they're bullying the small state to accept a new reality and a new border, essentially. If you look in the South China Sea, they are literally redrawing the map, not just with new artificial land features in this huge body of water. They're claiming the entire body of water as sovereign territory of the PRC.

Vietnam and the Philippines hit hardest. Right. But much to the chagrin of people in the region or countries in the region. Absolutely. If you go north, I was recently speaking with some representatives from Central Asian nations, and one of them was from Mongolia. And this topic came up. And what she said to me in this whole group was, if Beijing gets Taiwan, we're up next. And I think that fear is merited, not only because of the power differential between the PRC and Mongolia, but the broader neighborhood that Mongolia sits in, where you have the far northeast of Russia, that used to be Chinese territory. Russia victimized China perhaps more than any other European power in the 19th century when

it comes to how much land was seized. And the Chinese have not forgotten that. And the demographics and the economic trends of far northeastern Russia are trending away from Moscow's favor and toward Beijing's favor. They're aligned today for geopolitical reasons against America, but they have a whole lot of bad blood between them. You know, going back to my sort of original question, tell me about this, their obsession with America. This is something you touch on heavily. Heavily. They're obsessed with the United States because we stand in their way. And America stands in their way sometimes without Americans even realizing we stand in their way. An American living either in Dallas or Topeka or Des Moines, you're going about your day as normal. You're going to the grocery store.

You're dropping your kids off at school. You're getting a latte at Starbucks or whatever. And you vote in November whenever there's an election. Perhaps you're getting a latte at Starbucks or whatever, and you vote in November whenever there's an election. Perhaps you're involved in local government, maybe not, but you're living your life as you normally would. And the thought that you as an American are standing in the way of the ambitions of revisionist totalitarian states probably doesn't ever cross the mind of the average American, nor would I or anyone expect it to. But from the perspective of Xi Jinping, the United States

stands in the way of China, in his mind, becoming great again. And they've been obsessed with the United States for decades. There's this really interesting document in 2013 that you and I have discussed before. Unofficial name for it is document number nine. And this was released a few months before Xi Jinping rolled out the Belt and Road Initiative, oddly enough, which I know we'll get into as the conversation goes on. And document number nine is this fascinating expression of why the Chinese Communist Party feels so threatened by the United States and by everything we stand for. If you read it, there are seven grievances that Beijing has with the West in general, but specifically with America. The very first grievance that the party mentions in this seminal document that was internally distributed from the highest levels of the

Chinese Communist Party in Beijing is that the CCP is under attack by this notion that the Chinese constitution actually means something. One of the favorite punchlines of American senators and congressmen is to talk about how the PRC actually has a constitution, but it's a farcical document because it means nothing, because the rule of the party is the only thing that matters. But the fact that they have a constitution, which in theory guarantees rights to the Chinese people, it's on paper, but it has no meaning in reality. The first thing in this document number nine, the CCP says anyone who tries to hold us account to our own constitution is threatening China, which is a pretty stark position to take. But they are offended, not only offended by the notion of the rule of law, but they recognize that anyone who calls them out for not abiding by a document that is a constitution, they see that as a threat to their own legitimacy. The second grievance they mentioned,

we could talk about this document all day, but the second grievance... It's incredibly important. Hence the discussion. Let's get it out. Yeah. Yeah. So the second grievance basically says the United States keeps talking about democracy and liberty as if it's a universal value. And the CCP takes great umbrage to the notion that freedom is a universally held value. I know that for a lot of Americans, their antenna could go up when they hear that because our own politicians have, I think, mishandled that belief. For instance, when we went into Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking that everybody wants freedom, so these wars are going to be easy to win. I think even sometimes Americans can forget what these values actually mean and what they don't mean.

But even putting that aside, the CCP, when they hear talk about the universal value of democracy and freedom and this yearning to be free, that challenges the single party dictatorship of the party inside of China, because individual will has no meaning in the PRC today. The unquestioned leadership of the party is all that matters. And they want to be the arbiter of what democracy means. If you go down to other grievances and honestly threat perceptions in this document number nine, another one that they talk about is freedom of the press. It literally says in document number nine, the West will talk about the media as the fourth estate, but media needs to be tutored under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. And in the final paragraph of

this document, this to me is one of the most striking Party. And in the final paragraph of this document, this to me is one of the most striking references of document number nine, they say that public opinion needs to be purified under the direction of the CCP. Now that word purify almost has a religious overtone to it. And that's one of the great ironies of the Chinese Communist Party. It is an atheistic organization, but it has essentially put itself in the place of God, which is what tyranny is by definition, I suppose. But the document number nine goes on also to complain about America trying to hold it accountable to economic reforms, to have a free and open economy, to move away from these controlled

state-owned enterprises, and to release your regulations and to have a truly free market inside of your country. The CCP feels threatened by that because they know that economic liberalization tends to encourage political liberalization. And that's the last thing the party wants inside of China. They also talk about this term historical nihilism in document number nine. What the CCP means by that is having the temerity to question that Mao Zedong's leadership was for the better. So whenever in, if any American were to, in a meeting with a CCP official, and I've had many of these such meetings, to bring up the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang,

or to talk about the problems of the Cultural Revolution during the 60s and 70s in China, or the great leap forward with the huge famines that permeated China before the Cultural Revolution. Like these data points that should signal that perhaps the Chinese Communist Party is not governing so well, they would view that and call it historical nihilism

to deny the success and the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party and to have the gall to question the ability of Mao, Deng, Xi, and these true paramount leaders in China's history to question their wisdom. That's what they would call historical nihilism. And another piece, if I'm not mistaken, is just simply questioning the ideology at all. Absolutely. To even have the thought cross your mind of, I disagree with this and I have the agency to express that, that is what they have been trying to stamp out inside of the People's Republic of China for decades.

They do that overtly. I'll never forget, I was in China most recently in 2018. The first time I was there was 2010. Chinese Communist Party was still in control back then, but it was a most recently in 2018. The first time I was there was 2010. Chinese Communist Party was still in control back then, but it was a different China in 2010. It was far more open than it has been recently. I remember in 2010, I was on this overnight train with university students who were aspiring party members. And I had my Bible open and I was reading scripture, like on some midnight train in the middle of the Shanxi province. And they asked me what I thought about Christianity, like if I really believed the entirety of scripture

and just big existential questions like that. And then I went back to China for a second time a few years ago, 2018. And I remember being in Beijing, looking out over the city and just having this distinct impression that you can tell, you can't always see it, you don't know when it's going to strike, but there's a hammer in the sky. And that's what it's like to live in a totalitarian nation, that you lose your agency to question. You're absolutely right. That is what they're trying to stamp out, to even question the ideology of the party,

to be sure. They view us as standing in their way. And just by us standing for the values we care about, liberty, freedom, free speech, they view that as an attack on their political system. So just by being an American and believing in America, you are standing in the way of the CCP. I guess the obvious corollary is that is why they have deployed such extensive influence operations, as touches on TikTok obviously as well, to subvert that view. The trick for them is they have the luxury of overtly squashing freedom of expression inside of China. They have to do it covertly outside of their own borders. But that same motive is what drives them. And I actually think this distinction is

very important to parse out. They have a defensive motive because they, like any Leninist totalitarian organization, are fearful of their own people. They do know that their political legitimacy comes not from the consent of the governed, but from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a quote from Mao. Yes, they have their own insecure defensive reasons for leveraging projects like TikTok, but they also do it offensively because due to its covert nature, it allows them, or at least allowed them for a period of time to slip in undetected in the United States. This is the case across the board. When I was in the Senate, the topic of Confucius Institutes around 2017 was this first big realization that our universities have a CCP beachhead inside of them and done in such a way that is in compliance with U.S. laws. Like, Confucius Institutes are legal 501c3 organizations. They don't do anything illegal inside of America. TikTok, if you lie

under oath to a congressional committee, that's a problem, which perhaps maybe they have that legal exposure. But we had to pass a new law to target TikTok, which means they weren't really violating other laws that would have allowed them to go after it from a national security perspective. They covertly leverage the openness of true democracies to degrade and weaken us, to degrade our political system. They not only have defensive motives to wage this information war, they do it to tear us apart. You know, since we're talking about TikTok again, and I have to go there, there are concerns about the law that was passed. They provide too much latitude for the U.S. government to challenge, you know, the First Amendment itself and the process. And obviously,

you've thought about this quite a bit. I've certainly thought a lot about this quite a bit, because I've become more and more of a first, I won't say free speech absolutist, because the First Amendment has some very important carve outs. Yes. Right. Yes. But I've become more and more of a First Amendment absolutist as I've been watching reality play out. I could offer you some specific questions, like one of them, for example, is that it gives the president too play out, I could offer you some specific questions. Like one of them, for example, is that it gives the president too much power and the president could arbitrarily ban another app that was inconvenient. Touch on that, since we're talking about authoritarian

influence and the possibilities of it, how is this avoided in this sort of, in this bill, which clearly is designed to, you know, force divestment of TikTok from the CCP? To start that, I mean, perhaps Jeffersonian impulse to be wary of what our own government could do in the process of national security, I think that is a good gut check for every single American to have. And members of Congress, any president, should be ready and willing to have that conversation and be open to that scrutiny.

I do think that, on balance, the TikTok legislation walked that line very carefully, deliberately, and judiciously. The law itself, I guess bill previously now law, has a number of different gates that you would have to walk through to get to the ultimate place of a president designating a social media company under the authorities inside of the statute. The first gate that you have to walk through is, are you a social media company under the authorities inside of the statute. The first gate that you have to walk through is, are you a social media company? That's pretty easy yes or no. And the law has a pretty clear-cut definition of what that means. The second gate is where the crux of things start to really come in here. Do you have a ownership or control relationship with a parent company that is domiciled in a nation that's a national security threat to the United States. And those are clearly defined. I mean,

this is one of the concerns, right? They're not defined in the bill. There's four. They're not defined in the bill. They're defined in Title 10 or somewhere else. Yeah. So I think this was a good legislating on the part of the members of Congress who wrote it. As a former staffer, it's always beneficial and better to key in to pre-existing statute whenever you can. Number one, don't reinvent the wheel. Number two, if you're pulling definitions from a law that's been on the books for years and years and years that's more stable legal standing for you to be in. The bill references a provision in Title 10 that defines foreign adversaries of the United States as four countries, the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation,

Iran, and North Korea. If a president were to want to expand that list, he or she would need to have Congress pass an entirely new law for it to expand to more countries beyond those four, which I think is a good check. It should be difficult to raise that threshold. So if I believe it's ownership, or I think it's 20% ownership. I didn't mean to distract you. Or control, this is another thing which was questioned, right? The question of what actually constitutes control? Yes. So the ownership question I think is pretty easy to dispense with. Talking to some of the staff who wrote the bill, the 20% threshold was borrowed from law that limits foreign ownership of broadcasting in the United States. So the logic was if we have limits of ownership

for our radio waves and our broadcasting waves why wouldn't we have a similar ownership threshold in the realm of social media especially as they are kind of becoming news sources in their own right. But the control element turned out to be one of the more contentious issues in this public debate that we had over the TikTok bill. And the fear that a number of Americans raised was, what does control mean? How defined or ill-defined is this concept? And could a president leverage that provision where he or she would define control however they wanted to go after a political target? And I think the case that was brought up by many was, could a Democratic president leverage

this bill to go after X, formerly Twitter, because of political beef with Elon Musk and Elon Musk's exposure to China by virtue of Tesla. At one level, I think it's understandable why a lot of Americans had that thought cross their mind, not only because it's good to have a gut check to see where are their loopholes in the law. I think that's a good gut check. But I think that there were a few analytical mistakes that were made along the way that got people to that conclusion. Control is not the same thing as influence. Undoubtedly, Elon Musk is influenced by Tesla's exposure to China.

That's one of the many China beats I've actually been watching over the past few years since he bought X or Twitter and turned it into x of would there be any any way you could trace a relationship there of influence but influence is not control like control one of the legally you mean legally yeah it's there are two distinct things so i i remember one legislation that i helped draft when I was working for Senator Cruz, got into the difference between ownership and control when it came to sovereign immunity. Control means that even if there's not an official ownership relationship, that the company in question is essentially a facade and a front for the actual organization that controls the day-to-day and strategic decision making and the market actions of that company. Nobody in the People's Republic of China has that relationship

with X. Nobody has that relationship with Elon Musk. If a president were ever to try to leverage this law to go after X or any other social media company that didn't have that official ownership or control relationship to a foreign adversary, they would run into two problems. Number one, the law mandates an interagency review that would have to pass muster from several different agencies and departments and cabinet level officials for the president to even be able to label this a national security threat. Problem number one, can you get this entire interagency bureaucracy without leaking to the press in the process that this is what's under consideration? Could you even do that?

Doubtful. Even if you could, this is the judicial review in section three of the law is keyed into the D.C. Circuit. There is no way in a snowball's chance that any court in the United States would uphold the blurring between influence and control. Not only does it go against legal precedent, it completely contradicts how the whole element of control is understood in other U.S. laws that have already been adjudicated on. It is an interesting thought experiment. I see no bearing of concern that that would actually be successful. One thing that struck me, and perhaps I'll get you, I know this struck you as well, is that in the judicial challenge that would come to the law once it was signed. Basically, the, you know, bite dance kind of revealed something. We absolutely, of course, have to talk about Belt and Road because that's a central aspect of your explanation of how the CCP has been encroaching in the world. Yes. It's amazing what happens when your government relations

lobbyists stop writing talking points and your lawyers have to write a legal brief. In this legal brief, TikTok couldn't hide behind their talking points anymore. And they admitted in this filing where they challenged the law, they say explicitly, you should strike this law down because the PRC will not allow us to divest from ByteDance, which is a huge admission to make. And the reason they say for it in this legal filing is TikTok's algorithm is under export controls by the People's Republic of China, which underscores not only how tightly interwoven ByteDance and TikTok are, it underscores that this whole time, the technology and the means that TikTok afford the Chinese Communist Party are so important that the algorithm is under a state-sanctioned export control.

Well, and as I understand it, it is a state secret in itself, not just a proprietary secret. Yes. It kind of gave away the game. But as important as this whole TikTok win was for not just the China hawk policy community, but for the United States, as important as it is, it's a defensive win. It was good housekeeping on our part to take care of our own information space. But you don't get a gold star in great power competition for doing the bare minimum. We are in a cold war with the Chinese Communist Party. And to win cold wars, you have to go on the offensive to figure out what is my adversary's strategy? Where am I strong? Where are they weak? And how do I move the competition

to that terrain? One of the biggest reasons why I wrote Countering China's Great Game, because I left the Hill seeing a lot of legislative activity countering China's malign influence inside of the United States, but I didn't really see American policymakers figuring out where are they weak? How can we exploit the CCP's vulnerabilities and force them into strategic terrain they don't want to be in? How can we make their worst nightmares in document number nine come true in the way we compete with them? We have not gotten into that strategic space. So when I wrote Counter China's Great Game, which is focused, as you say, in large part on the Belt and Road Initiative, I key in on that because it's Xi Jinping's gambit to change the world without firing a shot. That's essentially what the Belt and Road is.

I think a lot of folks will misunderstand it and view it primarily as a huge infrastructure project, which in part it is. If you really want to understand something, you have to understand it on your adversary's own terms. And Xi Jinping has defined the Belt and Road as a five-point policy project. Infrastructure is number three. It's not even number one. Number one is policy coordination between the PRC and the partner nations that sign up for the Belt and Road. You know what that means? It's fascinating because that's very euphemistic. Yes, it's highly euphemistic. Highly euphemistic. Tease that out a little bit. It's the Solomon Islands Belt and Road partner of Beijing in the Pacific, kind of near New Zealand and Australia. When they signed on to the Belt and Road, what followed

not that long after was law enforcement cooperation between the PRC and the Solomon Islands. Now, when we talk about law enforcement, we're not talking about the NYPD. We're talking about internal security of a Leninist regime. If it's not enforcing law and order, it's enforcing political subservience of your people. And that is what flows from keying into the Belt and Road. What also came, not just the Solomons, what's happening now in Cambodia, what could happen in the Middle East, maybe with the UAE, what happened in Djibouti in Africa and Argentina and Latin America, the militarization of the Belt and Road. This is what's really happening now that has me concerned. They are leveraging the political understanding that Beijing has with all their Belt and Road partners, which are numerous, and they are seeking at strategic choke points and at strategic locations in the world to expand the military presence and operations of the People's Liberation Army.

And this is happening under the noses of American policymakers, much like they redrew the map in the South China Sea under our own noses. And by the time we realized what they were doing, it was too late. And one of the big fears that I talk about in the book is they're scaling that up at a global scale now. And if we wait too long to counter them, we are not going to like the world we're going to be living in. Well, and I just want to mention that some of the BRI partners are like, I think Italy has been excreting itself from their BRI. So these are all sorts of countries at all sorts of levels of development. Yes. Our staunch ally, the Philippines, I don't believe they formally withdrew,

but they canceled a series of Belt and Road projects a few months ago. It also happened around the same time that Beijing was getting increasingly belligerent with Manila in the South China Sea. Not for every Belt and Road partner, but for those that are on the margin, it's a huge strategic opportunity for the United States to try to tilt them in our direction. In order to do that, though, not only do we need to have a credible alternative, which has been really tricky for us to come up with at cost, you also need to make it easy for them to say yes. One of the reasons you make it easier for them to choose America over Beijing is by targeting the weak nodes of the Belt and Road. I think one of the most important parts of the book is the final chapter. When I talk about in previous parts of the book, like sure, we can target the global

vulnerabilities of the BRI here and there, but the roots of the BRI's exposure trace back to China. If you look at the terrestrial component of the Belt and Road Initiative, crisscrossing the Eurasia landmass, half of the trade corridors run through Xinjiang, which is where the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs is happening. Xi Jinping has talked about Xinjiang as a Belt and Road hub for years, and it is no accident that the trade infrastructure in Xinjiang was being constructed at the exact same time that the re-education camps were being constructed for the Uyghurs.

It is not just an ideological genocide. It's a genocide that's tied into the geopolitical ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party. And not all, but some of that trade is denominated in U.S. dollars. One thing that we could do, and I put this forward as a policy solution in the book, is we should present Beijing with the same challenge that we presented Al-Qaeda after 9-11. You can use the U.S. dollar to fund acts of terrorism, or you can use it to engage in the global financial system, but you can't do both. You have to make a choice. What do you want to do? And that choice was really foisted at the end of

the day on American banks. You need to know who your customers are. And it's on you to make sure that none of your correspondent accounts are being opened by terrorists. And it's a highly effective, one of the most powerful financial tools we've had in the war against terrorism. I think we should have a similar approach to the Chinese Communist Party today. You can either use the U.S. dollar for legitimate commercial transactions, or you can use it to profit off of a genocide that you're committing, but you cannot do both. The trick here is to target not only the PRC entities on one side of the transaction, but the other party, whether they're in Kazakhstan, whether they're in Uzbekistan, whether they're in Berlin or Paris or anywhere in between, we have significant

leverage by virtue of the dollar still being a dominant currency today. It would be a powerful weapon, one that we couldn't really come back from if we were to leverage it, but I think we should if we want to win a Cold War. One final example that I'll bring up here. If the CCP is so focused on exporting censorship through the digital Silk Road, which is the technological component of the Belt and Road Initiative, if they are exporting the means of surveillance globally to make it easier for other governments to silence and censor their own people. It's not just enough for us to push back against that in all these different regions of the world. We need to trace it back to its source. The CCP, again, coming back to document number nine,

is so highly sensitive to this whole idea of free speech. What if we made it harder and more expensive for the party to control information inside of China. When I had Matt Pottinger on my podcast, the former deputy national security advisor. Yeah, and he's who's endorsed your book, I noticed. Yes. Yeah. Matt wrote the foreword and it is, his foreword I think is worth the whole price of the book because he, I think the world of Matt and he teases out some of these ideas so eloquently. When I asked him a couple of years back if the U.S. government was doing anything to target the great firewall inside of China, their regime of internet censorship, he said flatly and publicly, no. The U.S. government was doing next to nothing and I'm sure is still doing next to nothing at all.

And I think that is a lot of leverage we're leaving on the table. If the CCP has already telegraphed how concerned they are and how threatened they feel about the nature of speech they cannot control, that's a sensitive note I think we need to start pressing on. The virtue of doing that is not only do you maybe marginally increase the ability of the Chinese people to test the boundaries of speech, what you really end up doing strategically is turning the CCP inward. And that's what they're trying to do to Americans, honestly. Through TikTok and through all this infiltration of our own democracy, they're trying to make it impossible for us to lead globally. I think your idea is fantastic. Indeed, a lot of traffic to the Epoch Times from China actually comes through firewall busters.

And I might even add something very interesting. There is some unobstructed traffic that comes in actually hundreds of thousands of people a month. This is all to the Chinese sites, I might add, right? So there's these people that are elite enough to hop the firewall. But no, but I think it's an incredibly important thing. But my concern is, you know, we were like, we had this idea that we're going to change China, right? Through investment. This was kind of the vision. I'm not going to belabor that. You know the story. It seemed like it went a bit in the other direction. A viewer might ask themselves, well, Michael, this is a brilliant idea. We should challenge

that censorship regime. We've been growing a bit of a censorship regime here. Can we really do this? Is this realistic? Were we changing China or was the CCP changing America? I think that dichotomy is a fair one to be asking because they have so severely infiltrated different aspects of our own civil society. For us to wage a campaign like that, or even to have the national will to say, we're going to win a Cold War, that takes a certain level of belief in America to really say with that determination, we're going to win. It's that Ronald Reagan quote from, I think, before he was president, if I remember correctly. One of his advisors asked him, what's your Cold War policy? He said, it's simple. We win, they lose.

After our forays in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disastrous pullout from Afghanistan recently, our failure to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, like we've had some foreign policy failures kind of pile up over the past few years. And I think Americans could be forgiven for questioning, like, are we capable, are leaders capable of winning a Cold War today? From being on the Hill and from working very closely with members of Congress and their staff from the outside over these past few years, been in Washington for a decade, I still believe in America. I have more cynicism and just

more better understanding of how the process actually works. But that said, for all of our problems, which I do not discount at all, because like the COVID years in particular tested America in huge ways. And I think we're still reckoning with some of that. Even with that, I think we would do ourselves such a disservice if we prematurely threw in the towel and said, we're no better than they are. This goes back to our original assertion. The way I put it is that TikTok, 170 million Americans, is the most powerful influence tool known to man in the hands of the Chinese regime. What better way to demoralize? They are, they meaning the CCP, they are keying in on that sense of demoralization on both the left and the right in America. They play both sides of the

ideological information warfare. They are seeking to turn Americans against each other. Everything was so heightened during COVID. And I return to something that Matt Pottinger said in an interview with a different China scholar that I found fascinating. He was asked, where's our Sputnik moment? It's no mystery what the CCP is. And public opinion of China and America is in the tank. But there hasn't been this realization of they're out to get us. This interviewer asked Matt, where's our Sputnik moment?

Like, why don't we feel this umbrage toward everything that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do to us? And his answer was that moment should have been COVID, but Americans just turned against each other instead. Why that moment I wish would have been COVID was we all know where the virus came from. And we know that the CCP cared more about stopping information about the virus than about stopping the virus itself. And Americans died. That should be something that we take deep umbrage to. Moreover, it should have been something that mobilized America to overcome the CCP in a Cold War competition. But I don't see evidence that we're there yet. That doesn't mean we can't get there. But my fear is, can we do that

before a hot war breaks out? And that I don't know. It's been a fascinating conversation. I'd love to cover a lot more of your book because I think it's excellent. Thank you. I'll encourage people to read it. Any final thoughts as we finish? Writing this book, I became convinced that the world is getting deathly more dangerous than it has been recently. And my fear is that Americans are sleepwalking into that dangerous world. I think many of our elites, not all, but many, think we still live in the 1990s where history has ended and we have no tradeoffs between economic security and national security, which is absolutely not the case and never was, but it certainly isn't the case now. And my fear is that we won't be able to mobilize a Cold War effort

before a war breaks out. And I have such a driving motivation to push this message and to share this book, because I think we still have time to avert that if we're serious. We do not want to live in a world where Beijing subsumes Taiwan. We don't want to live in that world. We don't want to live in a world where Beijing subsumes Taiwan we don't want to live in that world we don't want to live in a world where the South China Sea moves into a de facto sovereign territory for the PRC we don't want to live in a world like that not just for economic reasons but for security reasons we don't want to live in a world where American democracy is whittled away by this death of a thousand cuts by our greatest adversary. And I see the potential for that world to happen, but there's still so much we can do,

not just to prevent it, but to weaken this regime that would do Americans harm. And my hope for anyone who's listening or watching is that they take stock and have a healthy seriousness about what it means to be an American today. It's not a free lunch. The CCP has made it clear that they're threatened by America and by Americans, which means it's going to take resolve and some sacrifice for us to win a Cold War. And I hope that we find that resolve before it's too late. Well, Michael Sobolik, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me on. This was a great conversation.

Thank you all for joining Michael Sobolik and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek.