Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 443 | Our Biggest Geopolitical Threat & What to Do About It | Guest: Melissa Chen

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Joining us today is Melissa Chen: a journalist, the New York editor for Spectator USA, and the managing director of Ideas Beyond Borders. Melissa is passionate about free speech and has a lot to say about China's current suppression of speech and content online and elsewhere, plus why it's a mistake to dismiss China's growing influence over our culture and media. --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers delivers 100% American steak or chicken directly to your door! It's individually wrapped, vacuum sealed and ready to grill. Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & save $20 off, plus get free express shipping! Fast Growing Trees is a better way to buy shrubs, plants, and trees for your home and yard. Now through July 31 go to FastGrowingTrees.com/ALLIE for 15% off! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I am with Melissa Chin of Spectator USA. I've had her on the podcast before. Today, we are going to talk about the threat of China. How we got here to the place to where China has influenced our culture, influenced our media, influenced the the way we think in our economics and our technological development so much and how we can possibly get out of their influence, which, as you will learn through this conversation, is so

important. And so she's got a lot of insight to give us on this. I'm excited for you to hear it. Without further ado, here is Melissa Chen. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Okay, my name is Melissa Chen, and I'm the New York editor of Spectator USA. I'm also the managing director of an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders. And what we do is we translate books in Arabic, digitize them, and make them available for free. Wow. And you talk a lot about, well, you talk about a lot of different subjects and you're a really great follow for that reason. One area that I want to focus on today is China, our relationship with China, kind of in general, and also specifically how you foresee the Biden.

an administration kind of dealing with this hostile regime. First, can you kind of tell us your expertise in this area? So I've always been interested in the China issue because I think this is the geopolitical relationship that is really going to reshape the 21st century. I came to the United States when I was about 17. I immigrated here for college and I love the values of the United States, especially the First Amendment. So I was pretty disappointed when I started seeing in college, maybe about like, when I was in grad school about 2015, how the country was changing. And it reminded me of what it's like being back home in Singapore where there were certain, you know, kind of avenues of speech where you weren't allowed to discuss. And, you know, kind of being Chinese, I knew also how important Confucian values were to shaping society.

And I felt, okay, this is a topic that I need to be a bit more vocal about. because I don't think the American, at least back then, the Americans weren't really like, we were talking about this issue. Right. It was very... And can you expound just for people who don't know Confucian values, what you mean by that? It's, it's, so Confucius was a philosopher whose philosophy really underpins a lot of Chinese culture. It's very much focused on hierarchy, on duty. And it's a very, it's a very, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

discipline, it values discipline, and of the group over the individual. Okay, yes. And so these were very important to society and to the principles that were in Singapore, in China, and you kind of saw that infiltrating in American institutions and that disturbed you? Well, it's more likely that, you know, there were certain aspects of culture that was very was increasingly getting very repressive. We were justifying actions by sort of this idea about social harmony. And you know, about when I was in school at the time, it wasn't that bad. But I continued to work in a very academic environment. And I saw that on campus you had students

that were clamoring for repression of speech. These were, you know, the people that were going to graduate and go into our newsrooms, go into tech companies, HR departments everywhere. And they had this idea that that speech needed to be clamped down upon it. It was equivalent to violence somehow. And so that was very disturbing to me because I saw what that does to, you know, how that chills culture, basically. And how do you think that happened? I mean, we had this dream, Ronald Reagan, who I really like and admire, he had a vision in the 80s. And even when he wrote a, in the 90s that if we kind of exported capitalism into China, that they would become this freedom-loving

society and they would become maybe even more like the United States. Well, that didn't really happen. They took on capitalism and they kind of exported communism and more totalitarian ideas into places like the United States to where, like you said, we've kind of become familiar with and comfortable with. Some people have, especially in academia, the repression of speech and their oppression of so-called dangerous ideas. How do you think we allowed that to happen over the past few decades? So I think it really began, you know, with Milton Friedman. His idea was that political freedoms were a necessary condition to lead to economic freedom was necessary to lead to political freedoms. And this was consensus, not just in economics, but also in terms of

politics and our foreign policy for, I don't know, ever since Richard Nixon went to China. this idea that, you know, if we just trade it with China, if we just engage with them economically, that automatically, just by default, the Chinese would clamor for more freedoms. Right. And they would want political rights. And then we also thought, I think that's another, you know, in terms of hubris, is that we thought that if China got the Internet, Bill Clinton famously said, China censoring the Internet is going to be like kneeling jello to the wall. He actually said this. And he kind of laughed, and so did the audience. And of course, you know, fast forward later.

It's obvious now that they did actually figure out how to nail jello to the wall. The Chinese internet is completely censored and walled off. They built this great firewall. And so if you were right now, you know, growing up in Beijing and you launched your web browser, it looks very different. You can't go to Wikipedia. You can't go to Google, Twitter, any of these, you know, social media platforms that you and I can can just, you know, load up and just like talk to people that have dissenting views or even just read articles from, from different sources, like the New York Times itself. And so you can see that,

you know, this calculation was one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes, I think the United States made since about 1930. But that was good reason to think that China would open up. I don't think that that was a bad calculation. But I think that, that was a bad calculation. But I think that, we missed a lot of signs along the way that it wasn't going as planned. And many of our elites were very happy to reap the economic benefits from that trade. A lot of our jobs were shipped overseas, and middle class was hollowed out. And here we are with an economically empowered China, and they are as authoritarian as ever. They figured out how to fuse capitalism with authoritarianism. And in a very new way, they call this socialism with Chinese characteristics.

You know, something that disturbs me is the softness and even strange affection that a lot of the elites seem to have it. And not just the elites because of the economic benefits that we have been able to reap, like you said, getting cheap products that aren't made in the United States. But also I think that there is a section of progressivism that is actually, with China or doesn't want to criticize China, maybe for a variety of reasons. I think one of them is the intersectional reason that we have to just focus on America being bad, the Western world being bad, whiteness being bad. And we can't possibly criticize the Chinese regime because in the world of critical race theory, we have to see everyone that's non-Western and non-white as

part of the oppressed class. I think that's blinding a lot of people to the, the, you know, brutal reality of the regime and what people are suffering under the CCP. Would you agree? I totally agree with that. I mean, I've said often that, that, you know, woke ideology, which encompasses critical race and intersectionality, has made it very difficult to view certain global events, right? So one of the articles I wrote was about Hong Kong because you had the people of Hong Kong, you know, protesting one in seven Hong Kongers were out on the streets, protesting and clamoring for democracy. And, you know, they were pushing back against China.

And, you know, it was very, they were waving, for example, the Union Jack, they were singing the Star-Spangled banner, they were waving the American flag. And, you know, people that kind of view the world through critical race are looking at this and saying, how can a former, you know, British colony be raising the flag of their, of their former colonial master? It didn't compute. Like, because, you know, in terms of this ideology, you should be wanting to decolonize everything. And they don't, they, it's very difficult for people to see that, okay, maybe certain ideas like freedom and democracy are something that is, you know, that comes from the West and that people in some countries may actually want something like that. And it almost causes this like era 404 doesn't compute. And so I wrote a piece about this talking about how it's so limiting to look at. global issues like that. And in fact, these issues should challenge this view, that should really

challenge this view that, you know, just because a country is or a culture is not white, doesn't mean that, that, you know, they can't, that you can't criticize it or that, you know, they can be flawed. I mean, China is not, is being imperialistic. They're imposing, you know, people that really don't like imperialism should. be fighting China because they are imposing a Chinese way of life onto many regions right now. So it's not just Hong Kong. They're also doing it in Xinjiang, for example, which is where the Uyghur Muslims are living. Yeah.

Oh, there are so many questions that I want to ask you based on that. One thing that I was thinking about the way that I think intersectionalists and some people on the left did try to fit what was happening in Hong Kong into their very myopic worldview was to say, well, actually, what the people in Hong Kong are resisting, it's the same thing as what, you know, people in Portland and Seattle are doing. They try to compare, you know, the Black Lives Matter and Tifa rioters to the demonstrators in Hong Kong. Can you talk about why that's just not a good comparison? I would say they're the opposite, but what would you say?

They're the total opposite. I mean, firstly, that is actually a Chinese Communist Party line. They very much love it when people conflate the two. And in fact, they were eager to blast that kind of meme and message that linking the Hong Kong protesters to what Antifa was doing, especially when Antifa was going after federal buildings. And the Hong Kong protesters were occupying the legislative council. Now, obviously, the premise of both kinds of unrest, very different in the United States, We are democracy. You can actually elect your leaders. And so you have these instruments of democracy

that you can use to affect change. I mean, we just changed our president. Is that not proof enough that we live in a world where you can actually exercise nonviolent or non-civil unrest kind of means to affect change? Now in Hong Kong, they don't even have a chance to elect their leaders. they were protesting a broad and very sweeping national security law that would allow anybody with seditious thoughts to essentially be arrested, you know, jailed in China. And we all know also that the Chinese legal system is basically a kangaroo court. It's not transparent. There's no separation of powers in the Chinese government, unlike in the U.S. government, where executive and judicial and legislative are separated. In China, they are all fused and you have no recourse once you're arrested. So they were

really fighting for their lives in a way in a very real way. It was about freedom. And, you know, in Portland, they could just not elect the mayor if they didn't like what the mayor was doing. You know, why were they burning buildings? It just didn't make sense at all. And doing so in a lot of cases with almost total impunity and not just that, but also approval in some cases by the powers that be, or at least just kind of looking at-knotting along. Yeah, they were nodding along. Right. Or not naming the groups specifically and just saying, you know, we're against violence,

but we won't actually say who is doing the violence. Now, some people listening might not actually know what happened in Hong Kong. And I want to use this as a kind of transition into the oppression that the CCP is exacting over its people. But first, can you talk about why Hong Kongers were dissenting? Why were they demonstrating what happened to the formerly British colony? So there was a treaty that basically guaranteed Hong Kong after the British had the British, British actually handed over the territory to China in 1997. There was a treaty that would guarantee Hong Kong to be autonomous for at least the next 50 years,

so until 2047. China, you know, was very happy to actually let Hong Kong exist under this one country, two systems. So officially, this is China, but Hong Kong retains the, you know, the institutions and the sort of more democratic institutions that remained, that was a vestige from the British colonial past. And also in terms of culture, Hong Kong was, you know, for a good part of like the 80s and 90s, I mean, you were probably, I mean, you were probably too young,

but there were, it was kind of the center, the cultural center of Asia. Movies were produced there. It was a center for publishing because it had this climate that was completely, that was very free in terms of, of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. So, you know, instead of allowing this to go on, this one country two systems model, the Chinese Communist Party reneged on its treaty, essentially.

They started clamoring down on Hong Kong, slowly stripping Hong Kong one by one of their freedoms and autonomy that was guaranteed by the treaty. So the thing that kind of, so the protests, pro-democracy protests have actually been going on since 2014. And again, this is because of the, you know, little things that have been chipping away at the freedoms one by one. But the thing that really set everything off last year or the year before was actually this extradition law. China basically imposed an extradition law to Hong Kong saying that anyone that's found, you know, guilty of whatever sedition or whatever crime can be extradited back to the mainland for a trial. And this was very alarming to a lot of activists, to a lot of artists, people that are critical of the, of the state. Chinese government and want to retain their right to criticize, even just policies of the Chinese

government, which really should be up for criticism. And then they blanket it, you know, this security law that was even more sweeping, broadened the definition of what sedition was, what incitement was. And they started arresting people that were in the sort of democracy, the opposition parties in Hong Kong. So they just completely overreached. And that's why people were so angry and they were on the streets. They wanted to fight for their own right to vote in the parties. They wanted to fight to abolish the security law. And they wanted the world to notice and to stand with them.

And yeah, that's what the Hong Kong protests were really about. And did the world stand with them? I mean, I know there were conservative Americans and probably progressive Americans too, who did, at least in our voices. but I mean, what about the UN? What about other world powers? Did anyone come to their aid? Not so much. The global institutions were pretty quiet on. I mean, I think you did have like human rights watch definitely release statements. But in terms of actual policy, right? I think the UK and the US was thinking about this, but the UK definitely opened the country up and saying that, okay,

if you have a Hong Kong passport, you're going to have a pathway to citizenship. You're allowing. to travel to the UK and at least try to to immigrate. But for the most part, I mean, look at what happened when we had a sitting manager of an NBA team basically espouse his support for, you know, the Hong Kongers who were fighting for their freedoms. Look what happened to him. He, well, he doesn't even manage that team anymore. But he was completely, you know, he was, he had to grovel and apologize for what was a very

benign statement of support on Twitter. Wow. Can you talk about just in case people just don't know or they just don't fully understand the depths of evil of the CCP? And we're talking not just internationally, but with their own people. Can you talk about some of the things that they're doing, for example, like with the Uighur Muslims? Yeah. My gosh, this is one of those cases that is just so tragic because it's happening right right in front of our eyes. The Uyghur population is basically a Turkic Muslim minority that lives in northwestern China in a region called Xinjiang. And they have been sort of surveilled. Their freedoms have been curtailed.

Some Uyghur Muslims are actually put into these modern-day re-education. camps that look very reminiscent of, you know, camps past and Auschwitz. And, you know, they don't have any, there's no due process. So if you got, if you got swept up by the state security apparatus, you basically get whisked away. Your family never knows when they'll see you again. And all in the name of, you know, fighting extremism, fighting terrorism, and separatism. because, you know, the Chinese government ultimately is worried that that this minority group wants to separate and be autonomous from China. And that is no go for the Chinese government. And so based on, you know, just their characteristics, now they're actually using genetic data as well to identify who is Uyghur.

They are, they are imprisoning them up front. So, you know, with just nothing other than no information other than just what, who they are. and what they believe. And so they're also trying to sinusize their habits. They force these Muslims to basically shave their beards. They can't eat pork. And when they get, when they get sent to these re-education camps, they have to sing praises of the Chinese Communist Party.

They have to sing these patriotic songs. It's, you know, make pledges. It's kind of, it's very, very creepy. Because it's so totalitarian in terms of how they're subjugating these people. And, you know, satellite images, some reporters have done amazing work. One of the things about China is that journalists, especially foreign journalists, don't have freedom of movement in the country. So if you're a foreign journalist and you try to go to Xinjiang to even have eyes on the ground and report on this, you will probably not be allowed to, you know, actually last year during COVID,

China kicked out the New York Times, the Washington Post, all these Beijing bureaus that were there. so we don't even have offices in China anymore. They're not allowed to operate there. And journalists have been expelled for, they're honest reporting on what was going on in Xinjiang. So it's, and you know, they're also doing a forced sterilization of,

the Uyghur Muslim women. And recently, Pompeo, Secretary Pompeo actually, you know, designated what was happening there as a genocide. And actually to, Biden's secretary of state's credit, Anthony Blinken, he actually agreed that it was a genocide. Yeah. Forced sterilizations is what I've seen reported forced abortions and just some of the testimonies of women that have actually been able to speak who have somehow escaped or who have

just been able to give testimony to what's happened. What's happened really for a lot longer than I think the United States has known are these forced late-term abortions. And there was this propaganda tweet that went up not too long ago as we're recording this that said, you know, the Chinese Communist Party is, they're doing such wonders and such favors for the Uighur Muslim people to make sure that these women, you know, they're modernized. And they're not forced to have, you know, eight children. We are being so kind by performing these forced abortions and forced sterilization, forced sterilization procedures. We're basically liberating when. women because of that. I'm not sure that people understand the willingness and the brazenness of the Chinese Communist Party to just flat out lie about everything. And it really amazes me how we're not more angry at China, not just for that, but how they've lied about the coronavirus, how they've infiltrated the WHO with their lies. I don't know. I don't know if it's naivete by Americans or if it's just apathy or if it's that critical race theory coming in, but it really blows my mind.

I think coronavirus has woken a lot of Americans up to China's actions because, you know, how they dealt with COVID, how they've tried to spin the narrative after they got caught out for basically letting this spread and not alerting the world about it. And, you know, just kind of hampering the WHO investigations that one year later, more than a year later, finally a team made it there. And even though a team made it there, they were not allowed to examine one hypothesis that seems, you know, not at all to be ruled out, which is the Labyrinth hypothesis. And so you can see that, you know, China is really trying to control this narrative. And I think the American people also have woken up because of that realization in the few months after COVID really like lockdowns

kind of happen. China was hoovering up the world supply of PPE and then it kind of became pretty apparent that a lot of our supply chains were located inside a geopolitical adversary. And that became a bit of a shock because, well, what happens when you need to be militarily ready and all your supply chains are there. So I think in the last year, the public opinion has actually kind of shifted on China. And Gallup showed that like, I think 80% of Americans now view the country unfavorably. So I think we're in a, you know, we're in a situation where there is bipartisan consensus that China cannot be seen anymore as just a competitor. It is a geopolitical rival. It is a threat. And, you know, we have to see it more in that context.

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed,

you can watch this T-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. And I think a lot of people also don't know, even though I am glad to hear that the majority of the country do see China, does see China rightly, what they're doing in Africa, what they're doing in South America, you know, catching these poor countries and debt traps by saying, you know, we're going to create these railways or something, like in Ethiopia, and you'll be able to pay us back with all the money that you're making. The railways don't work. The construction doesn't end or whatever it is. These things don't function that they build in these countries, and then they've caught these countries in a debt trap. Or I have a friend who is from Zimbabwe, and there are places in Zimbabwe where you can get oil. You can dig for oil. And rather than the people in Zimbabwe being able to do that themselves, the Zimbabwe and government has said, no, we're going to reserve this area for China. And so I think people also don't realize just how, like you said, imperialistic and colonizing this regime is.

And it's just interesting that people who are against imperialism and colonization, they tend to not have quite as much to say when the Chinese government does it. Exactly. And actually it's even more insidious than that because when these countries cannot pay up for this debt, like this actually happened in Sri Lanka, they have to give up their ports. They have to give up strategic assets to China that's part of the contract. And then that becomes a way China is basically controlling important entry points that are strategic in an event of some sort of military operation, for example. And so this is, it's very dangerous. Yeah, it is. And obviously China going into these agreements knows how it's going to end. It concludes exactly how they want it to conclude. They know that these poor countries are not going to be able to pay them back. I don't even think we understand the depths of evil and oppression, unfortunately, that they are executing, not just on their own people, but around the world. One thing that I do want to talk to you about that we talked about before we started recording was other kinds of religious persecution in China. not just towards the Uyghur Muslims, but also towards Christians, and in particular, this rewriting of the Bible to fit more communistic standards. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so actually this was published in the National Review last year, and it came to the attention of the author that there was, in fact, a rewrite of the Christian Bible. So, you know, in the last few years, Christianity has been really suppressed in China. So, you know, churches crosses have been torn down from churches. Pastors have been arrested for no reason.

And the Xi Jinping himself has been reported to be afraid of the rising influence of Christianity in China. I think the projection is that by 2030, China will have more Christians. in the country than anywhere else around the world. And the thing about the communist country is that they're very afraid of religion kind of supplanting the state. And so that's why they keep religion under such a strong thumb. And it's not just Christianity, obviously, it's the Buddhists. I mean, as the Tibetans, they've been subjugated for a long time. Falun Gong, which is also a Taoist blend and Buddhist blend of, you know, this spiritual

group, they've been subjected reportedly to organ harvesting, for example. But yeah, in the case of Christianity in particular, it's a big threat because there's just so many. It's a lot in terms of numbers. The Catholics on one hand have a bit of a easier time, and that's because I think two years ago, the Pope actually, you know, agreed to let China be the one that oversees the appointing of the bishops, but, you know, Christianity tends to be Protestantism, at least, is more decentralized. And so it's been targeted a bit more heavily by the CCP. And so this rewrite of the Bible was actually really, it's so creepy. It was actually a story, one of the, one example of the rewrite is actually the story in, I think

it was in the gospel of John, where there was an adulteress and, and he, that, Adulchus was about to be stoned and Jesus tells the crowd, you know, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, pointing out to, you know, to the crowd about hypocrisy and about the importance of forgiveness. Eventually the crowd disperses and the woman, you know, doesn't get stoned. In the Chinese Communist Party rewrites of the Bible, this section, Jesus Christ lets the crowd disperse, but he takes a rock and he actually bashes the woman's head. So he kills for himself. And if you, you know, the reasoning for this kind of a rewrite is the moral that the story tells, that is in line with advancing the CCP's goal. And the CCP's goal is to say that the law of the land cannot be subverted. That religion, Jesus Christ's religious figure, had to conform to the law of the land because the law is the law.

And it is so disturbing. Wow. You look it up. National Review did a really good write-up about this the CCP version of the Bible. That's the kind of, you know, it tells you so much, too, about what the country fears. And I think it's a very stark reminder of the kind of, you know, lengths at which they're willing to go to either supplant, co-opt, or repress religion. Yes. And I mean, you talked to. about this so well and so thoroughly that the real enemy, I think, it seems that China sees is an ideological enemy. It's not just a military enemy. It's not just about technology,

but it's primarily ideology. And to me that, I mean, that seems to be their motivation for infiltrating so many institutions in the United States and for so effectively putting or pushing their propaganda in the United States that unfortunately we see a lot of people repeating without even really realizing it. And certainly as a Protestant Christian myself, I can see why the CCP would see Protestants as a threat. If you look at the history of Protestantism, it has been resistance to tyranny.

America probably would not have been founded without the Protestant Reformation. The ideas of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are built on that. And so I can see why. see why they they see it as a threat. And I think Christians here should be more aware of what they are trying to do on an ideological value system level, even more than we are looking at what they're actually doing militarily or what they're doing with our technology. And just kind of be aware of

the perversion that they're trying to be able to push on our faith in the name of kind of claiming minds and claiming belief systems. Do you think or do you have to, hope, I guess, for how the United States is going to confront the threat of China here and abroad under the Biden administration? You know, I think what you said about the ideology part is actually spot on. It's something that I think I've been trying to get people to understand that that's actually, you know, they always say culture is downstream of politics. Well, ideology is downstream of culture. And if we don't get that piece right, we're, you know, and think that, we're still in the position where where China can be engaged with. And, you know, we can use, I don't know, to get concessions, to get them to cooperate on, say, climate change, we're going to concede and appease. You know, it's been demonstrated for the last few decades that that kind of engagement,

appeasement tactic just hasn't worked at all. And that's also because that, you know, we didn't really focus on ideological differences between China and the United States and how those ideological difference actually clash. And so if you have room for only one kind of world order, which I think that's what the cases that we're looking at here because they're antagonistic in the sense that they're mutually exclusive. Like if the American world order is going to be the predominant one, the Chinese one cannot be at the same time, then then what?

we really have to push back on what's happening on every front. And, you know, you spoke about the influence operations of infiltrating these institutions. We're talking about on the economic front, you know, the theft, corporate espionage, intellectual property theft. Then the digital front, we're looking at AI. We're looking at sort of big tech issues, 5G, for example. And then you have more like covert influence operations like the Confucius institutes, you know, kind of cultural exchange kind of institutions here. And things like the Belt and Road, which is really the Bell and Roten Initiative,

the Deptrap diplomacy, is an attempt to influence other countries and sort of buy their acquiescence, right? things like the Thousand Talents program, which China uses to recruit American academics to set up shop in China and sort of share their research. Research that, by the way, like the American taxpayers are funding. So essentially you are funding, you know, the development of China's technologies. So it's been happening on all these fronts. And I think the knowledge, firstly, that this is happening has only really started to percolate upwards in the last year or so to the American public. More and more cases, the DOJ has launched this thing called the China Initiative. And the DOJ has been prosecuting more cases.

I think the FBI said that they open out of the cases that are currently open in terms of counterintelligence cases. About 50% are against Chinese nationals or people that are spying on behalf of the Chinese government. So there is growing awareness. Now the question is, how are we going to push back? Right. At the end of the day, we want to avoid a hot war at all costs. But I think the primary way is we're going to finally have to impose costs on China for very bad behavior. We need to disincentivize the kind of behavior that,

that really we've let China just run away with for the longest time. They've just never, they've not faced any costs for the things that are, you know, for unleashing the coronavirus, for example, they have not faced any cost for reneging on the treaty with Britain on Hong Kong. So we need to ramp all these costs up. And that's in part what Trump's trade tariffs was supposed to do was to punish them for, you know, for basically taking advantage of the. United States in terms of trade for the longest time and having this like huge imbalance in our trade

deficit. But that's the kind of action that we need to do for every action that the Chinese government has been taking a little inch on, you know, militarizing the South China seat. We need to push back. We need to impose a cost on them for doing that. So they know that this is just unacceptable. I think part of our responsibility here is to connect the dots for people that if this truly is primarily an ideological battle and they are pushing forward on that front, and like you said so well that the American world order and the Chinese world order are mutually exclusive. If the Chinese world order is the dominant one, then this idea of equality and inherent rights and free speech and religious liberty, those are all gone. Those are not values

that China has. And China has no priority, no desire whatsoever to say, okay, well, once we are officially in charge of everything and everyone, we'll still allow you to have some of your value systems, we'll still allow you to have some of your belief systems. They're not interested in that. They're interested in world domination. The way that America kind of affectionately and maybe naively said, you know what, we're going to kind of give some of our values to China and hope for the best for their people, the feeling is not mutual there. They don't have any sort of compassion or generosity or understanding towards other ways of life in other kinds of cultures and other kinds of people or belief systems or other

ideas of rights. They just won't allow it. Right. And how they are treating their, you know, internally, their people domestically is a very good harbinger of how they're going to act when, or, if they have control of a wider swath with the world population. And so it really behooves us to take that as a sign and act on principle rather than, you know, let them fester.

And by the way, they're going to be, they're actually perfecting this techno surveillance state, the panopticon. They're perfecting that on the Uyghurs. And you know they're going to deploy it on a much larger scale. I mean, they already have this rudimentary, actually it's not even rudimentary, it's pretty sophisticated social credit system that, the entire country is subject to. They've co-opted technology and digital technology and all-encompassing kind of apps that, you know,

determine whether or not you can buy a ticket to travel, whether or not you can make a doctor's appointment. I mean, essentially what they're going for all the way, like, you know, from denying political rights, denying speech, it's really even thought control. Because once you have a social credit system set up, you can essentially just control. what people think by, by, you know, imposing costs in terms of participation in society, which, which, you know, is necessary for life. So it's, it's very disturbing because if they're successful at this and they gain more influence and they do become a world power, there's almost no question that that's really going to be the world that we live in.

And Americans, I think, for the most part, we almost can't understand that because our limiting principles are different. We think, okay, at some point, everyone has the same basic understanding of evil, the same basic understanding of right and wrong. Everyone knows when too far is too far. But that's, it's just not true. It's just not true. They don't have any kind of limiting principle. You can bet that if there is some kind of development that actually allows real mind control, if there is actually a technological advancement that allows that, China is not going to think, you know, that's too far. The brain is a frontier that we just, we're just not going to allow because we want people to have

freedom of thought. That kind of idea is just, it's not accepted by the CCP. I think one thing, and I know we've got to wrap up, but one thing that I just see us damaging, or see damaging us so much here and weakening us so much is the kind of curriculum that we are teaching our kids and teaching in academia that encourages a hatred and a resentment and a loathing of, of the United States so that people think, well, we're no better than the CCP. Why should we fight for our principles? Why should we care about the Constitution or inherent rights? All of these things are systemically racist.

They're oppressive. They're wrong. And America is just as bad as any evil regime even worse. That kind of idea. I don't know if it's directly from the CCP, but the CCP loves it. That's exactly. They benefit from it. Yes, that's exactly what they want us to think.

I just, I see that as almost the biggest domestic threat that we have, that if you have people that hate themselves, hate their fellow countrymen, hate their country and their founding principles, why, why would anyone stand up against the totalitarian values of, you know, a regime like the CCP? Right. No, you're exactly right. So do you have any kind of encouragement for people or any just final advice in our everyday lives, how we can make ourselves aware of what's going on, how we can kind of push back against some of the threats that we're seeing. Most people listening probably aren't part of the FBI and they don't have that kind of access. Is there anything that we can do in our own lives practically?

Yeah, I think, for example, you know, being aware of products, I think, you know, made in China, for example, it's so difficult to actually boycott something like that. Everything is made in China. but but more awareness about what is what isn't you know i think decoupling as far as possible will go a long way because it will allow us to respond in a way that that is based on principle and also pressure companies that are you know basically trading in principle and ethics for market access so you know you're looking at media companies your your hollywood companies that are rewriting scripts to tailor to the Chinese Communist Party's narratives.

They don't want any reference to Tibet, for example. And so, you know, they change characters that are Tibetan monks in their movie scripts. You know, be aware of what institutions the Chinese government has infiltrated. You know, watch out for that. Boycott that personally. And, you know, if you have a representative, local representative, you know, write to them and make sure that they're aware of such issues and that, you know, Chinese investment, for example, should be viewed very skeptically.

So I would say that's probably the best thing we can do and just keep, you know, keep reading the news about the stuff. It's very important because this is going to define the next century. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And where can they, where can they follow you and how can they read all of your stuff and all of your insight into what's going on in China? So my beat is China. That's kind of what I focus on writing for Spectator USA. So you can find it on the Spectator USA website. But also you can just follow me on Twitter. It's at sign, Ms. M-S-M-S-M-S-M-E-L-Chens, C-H-E-N. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Melissa, for taking the time to talk to us.

Thank you for talking about such an important thing. I'm really glad that more people are really trying to air all this stuff out and inform the American. people. Definitely. Well, thank you. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who

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