Democracy’s Dereliction of Duty

A Chinese soldier stands guard at the main entrance door of the Bayi building in Beijing on April 23, 2013. The Chinese regime runs networks of military hackers who target U.S. businesses and government offices. Andy Wong/Getty Images

Commentary

Communist China is increasing its malign activity in Western democracies.

Hackers from China have inserted malware deep into U.S. utility grids—including electricity, water, and communications—that serve both military bases and civilian communities. According to a July 29 report, federal authorities kept it quiet for over a year and are having a hard time removing the well-hidden code.

On July 27, we learned that an illegal China-linked biolab was shut down in a Fresno, California, warehouse. The lab was allegedly engaged in illegal operations on at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including chlamydia, hepatitis, coronavirus, herpes, and AIDS. Experiments were apparently planned or conducted on almost 1,000 mice, many of which were found dead.

The warehouse was located in the city of Reedley.

“We run across unlicensed businesses all the time, a contractor who doesn’t have a license and things like that, but to walk to a door and see 30 freezers, refrigerators, lab supplies, medical equipment—just shocking,” said the Reedley city manager.

The CIA did not discover the lab. The FBI did not discover the lab. The NSA did not discover the lab. It was found by a local Reedley building code enforcement officer who noticed a suspicious-looking garden hose out of place.

“The legal action started in March of this year when the Fresno County Department of Public Health worked with the City of Reedley to get a court-issued warrant to inspect a property in Reedley,” according to a local affiliate of ABC. “Through the process, health officials say they found the company, Prestige Biotech and Universal Meditech, had refrigerators filled with chemicals, human blood, illegal Covid and pregnancy tests, and just under 1,000 mice.”

Besides NBC and ABC, the lab has gotten little mainstream press.

That means that China’s bioscientists can operate in the United States without timely reporting by our media or surveillance by our national intelligence agencies, despite Beijing’s antipathy to the United States and access to pathogens that we all now know can be engineered into more deadly and transmissible strains. Millions could die from another pandemic bioengineered on American soil while our intelligence agencies are asleep at the switch.

We know Beijing intends to kill Americans because thousands are dying from fentanyl overdose annually, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) refuses to shut down illegal deliveries of precursors to Mexico or even offer the most basic surface cooperation on counternarcotics. The Biden administration is too quietly urging Beijing to restart such cooperation but getting nowhere.

A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chemist pours 2,500 packs of confirmed fentanyl onto a counter for testing at the DEA Northeast Regional Laboratory in New York on Oct. 8, 2019. Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images

The CCP detests democracy, liberty, free markets, and everything America stands for. Beijing seeks to replace Washington as leader of the free world, which the Party wants to turn into an unfree world in its own image.

The uptick in the CCP’s malign activities is truly global, with even China’s longtime friends in Europe starting to complain publicly.

Italy, the only G7 country foolish enough to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is publicly considering pulling out. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said joining BRI was an atrocious decision, and on July 30, Italy’s defense minister said the country must exit the initiative “without creating a disaster.”

But trade still serves Beijing as a powerful lure for Rome.

“Our national interest means also having a dialog with Beijing, and one can have good trade relations independently from the Belt and Road,” Ms. Meloni said in an interview with Italian media.

Given the genocide in China, Ms. Meloni should be talking about much more than “good trade relations.” No trade is good in the context of genocide.

Over the weekend, Germany warned that China’s espionage in the country has increased. The country’s counterintelligence agency warned against interactions with the International Department of the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party.

Germany’s chancellor is working to decrease trade dependence on China by “de-risking” supply chains. However, some of the country’s largest manufacturers are still deeply involved in production in China, and dependent on the China market for large portions of their profits.

According to a July 27 report, Volkswagen invested $700 million into its rival and Chinese partner, Xpeng, in a bid to boost sales in the country. This is strategically unsound, given that Xpeng will likely steal Volkswagen’s intellectual property and outcompete the company globally in the long run. It is throwing good money after bad.

Politicians in the West are desperately trying to save relationships with China because they respond first and foremost to the preferences of our biggest corporations, which have both outsized production and markets in China, and outsized political influence in the capital cities of our democracies. These corporations help fund the political campaigns of our presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors. So our elected leaders are the last to admit problems with China that are killing our citizens, destroying our economies, and weakening our military defenses.

The answer to this disaster lies in more democracy, not less. Voters must get better educated on the China threat and demand tougher measures against the CCP. There is no time to waste.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.