The Chinese Communist Party Must Pay

The world must make China pay in ways that the Party leadership can’t avoid

Chinese police officers walk in front of the gated entrance of The Palace Museum in Beijing, China, on Jan. 26, 2020. Betsy Joles/Getty Images

Commentary

Despite China’s ongoing propaganda campaign denying responsibility for the global CCP virus pandemic, there’s absolutely zero doubt about where the virus originated.

It came from China—from the city of Wuhan, to be precise.

What’s more, the world also knows with deadly accuracy just how long the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allowed its infected citizens to travel to Europe, North America and other places. It was almost two months of denials and lies from the time Beijing knew about the outbreak in Wuhan until travel restrictions were put in place.

In a word, China deliberately infected the world with its CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. In doing so, it has effectively de-railed—if not destroyed—the global economy. Millions of companies and small businesses are going out of business. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have lost or will lose their jobs and livelihoods.

If one didn’t know any better, one could conclude that the Chinese regime has declared war on the West, and particularly, on the United States. Consider, for the moment, that few other acts of war could inflict so much widespread and lasting damage than what the CCP virus has accomplished in just a few weeks.

And it has done so without having to fire a single shot.

Beijing’s Big Gamble to Weaponize the Virus

Where did the virus come from?

Did it spring from Wuhan’s wet market?

Although questions remain as to the exact origin of the virus, for the moment, that is a secondary matter. (Maybe that’s why they’re censoring research on its origins.) But regardless of how the CCP virus came into being, what is apparent is that the virus was weaponized by Beijing.

But why would the Party leadership do such a thing?

What other explanation is there for the CCP allowing it to spread to the rest of the world? Didn’t they realize that by infecting the rest of the world, that it would crush their economy as well?

Of course they did.

The open secret is that the Chinese economy was already crashing well before the virus showed up in late 2019. President Trump’s tariffs leveling the playing fields and thereby eliminating China’s competitive advantages of slave labor, massive subsidization of industries and forced technology transfers, were destroying China’s highly inefficient manufacturing processes.

But even before that, Western companies were already leaving China. As I wrote in my book, “The China Crisis,” back in 2012, China’s “cannibal capitalism” economic model was utterly unsustainable. I estimated that China would reach a crisis point within five to seven years and that the Party would tip the world into a Great Depression in order to save itself.

And here we are.

China is bringing the world economy down because its own development model is simply unsustainable.

Holding China Accountable

China is not just a “strategic competitor” or even an adversarial one. Harsh realities deserve to be expressed clearly. The CCP is a wicked, destructive and inhumane regime that poses a mortal threat to the civilized world.

The civilized world, therefore, must hold the Chinese regime accountable for its actions.

A public censure at the U.N. or any other kind of diplomatic gesture is meaningless. We need to take much more serious and drastic steps. The Western world, which ultimately, are the nations that created modern China, must make the CCP literally pay for what they’ve done to the world.

The CCP is directly responsible for the destruction of economies across North America, Europe and Asia, and the suffering of literally billions of people. Many millions have lost their jobs, their savings, and quite likely, will have lost their homes before too long. We are, quite literally, on the brink of a global depression.

China must not benefit from its actions in any way against the world, nor in its efforts to pass the blame to others. On the contrary, it must pay for destroying the world as we used to know it. The CCP must pay and it is up to us—the rest of the world—to make them do so.

Make China Pay in Every Way

Some, such as Rep. Jim Banks and Sen. Martha McSally, have suggested that Trump should force China to “forgive” the $1.1 trillion they hold in U.S. Treasury bills. That’s a good start. But the damage far exceeds that amount.

An additional option would be to immediately seize China’s foreign assets. All of them. That means property and assets from Vancouver to Manhattan, from San Francisco to Boston, in London, Paris, Milan and Rome, and Tokyo, and everywhere else in the world that China felt so comfortable infecting with the virus.

Such an asset seizure would even—and especially—include the personal assets of the CCP. Every Party member should have all their off-shore bank and brokerage accounts frozen.

Furthermore, all access to capital markets should be denied. Foreign homes and investment properties could be seized, stock and bond holdings impounded, all other business interests and any all other forms of investments outside of China should be deemed illegal by the host-country and taken from them.

That would also include every technology agreement, every trade agreement, every shipment of food, of raw materials, of IP and whatever ever else is supporting the existence of the current murderous government in Beijing. We’re spending trillions to support our economies in the United States and Europe now, so what’s the difference?

Every source of value, income, leverage and political access must be stripped from the CCP. All academic appointments, scientific coordination, manufacturing and laboratories must be taken from those with ties to mainland China. When the CCP is out of power, then we discuss returning those assets.

Communist China has shown that it has no place among the family of nations. The thugs in Beijing think they can destroy the West by letting the virus spread. It’s time to deprive the CCP leadership of its financial resources and international income sources. Let them sell their slave labor products to Kazakhstan, Iran and Zanzibar, and see how well they do.

This should be done as soon as possible. Then let the CCP leadership face their people.

James Gorrie is the author of “The China Crisis” and the blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.

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